A great mind in public policy told me, just this last September, that people are really bad at judging the rate of technological change and when it’ll affect them. It’s like standing on a railway. You can see the train out there. Some people assume that the train is going to hit them very soon. They get off the tracks. Then, when the train is getting very close, others misjudge the speed and assume that it’s still a far way. And then they get hit. It’s a great analogy because it combines prediction with decision. The rate of technological change is actually quite difficult to predict. If it was easy there’d be a lot more successful startups. One Heuristic Start[…]
Category: Marketing Science
Why does it seem like all the unimportant, easy stuff gets done first? Look up The Urgency Bias. Employing simplified games and real-life consequential choices, we provide evidence for “urgency bias”, showing that people prefer working on urgent (vs. important) tasks that have shorter (vs. longer) completion window however involving smaller (vs. bigger) outcomes, even when task difficulty, goal gradient, outcome scarcity and task interdependence are held constant.- Zhu, Yeng, Hsee (2014) Even when task difficulty, goal gradient, outcome scarcity AND task interdependence is held constant, urgency wins. Even when it would be more beneficial to do something important instead of something urgent, even when you’re painfully made aware of those incentives, you still gravitate towards doing the urgent. There’s[…]
Assume that you’re a founder of a tech startup. Assume that you’ve achieved product-market-solution fit. You’ve nailed it. Time to scale. Many founders are great at sales. But not all founders are great at marketing. And that’s a bit of a problem because of three letters: CAC. The Customer Acquisition Cost CAC is the ratio between dollars spent on marketing, and new customers acquired. And it is related to valuation in a very important way. Let me explain. Take a look at the chart below. This is an output from a standard model of SaaS market penetration. Market size is 333,333 customers, the product will approach saturation at 51% of that target, with a monthly churn rate of 0.20% held[…]
Some reports have adblocking penetration at anywhere between 10% and 40%. Some publishers are blocking content from the adblockers. Others are making the ads unskippable with ad block. Broken systems are interesting, aren’t they? The system of advertising is broken. Here’s the best that I can explain it from as many perspectives as I can rally. Advertising in the early days, radio, was incredibly lucrative. The development of a consumer economy in the roaring 20’s and consumerism in general was huge. A marketer could spend $1 on advertising and got $4 back. Paid media was crazy effective. The same went for television. And then there was a sort of grand bargain, a big deal, struck between creatives, those that create[…]
A score serves as an ultimate abstraction or summary. That’s especially true in sport. “Who won?” “The Blue Jays. 11 to 5.” The Blue Jays won because they moved men more often across one specific plate more often than the other team. This is all very American. A brief period of action. Collect statistics about that brief period. ???. Profit. And it’s easy. Baseball is nice for the 1 to 1 correspondence of points to a single event. American football and basketball are spicier. Cricket, with all due respect to my antipodean friends, is ridiculous. There’s so much more to the performance of The Blue Jays or the Australian National Cricket Team. But the score is the ultimate summary. There’s[…]
A tier one MSI topic focuses on how should quantitative methods and qualitative methods be combined to understand the total consumer experience. It’s an excellent topic. The two worlds aren’t natural complements. They have radically different systems of activities, tools, and methods, which in turn affects their own experiences, and how they see the world. However, if the stance is unified, in the form of understanding the total consumer experience, the sum of the two approaches produces such more. That focus creates the cohesion. Facts, Experience, and Anecdata Have you ever been asked how many people need to be in a focus group before their statements become statistically significant? It’s a pretty neat question. What are they really asking when they ask[…]
Andrew Cherwenka and I soft launched our startup, Authintic, last week. Authintic is an analytics technology company enabling permission marketing. Andrew wrote a much more detailed piece for the Huffington Post on the topic. It’s worth a read. He’s very eloquent and accessible. I have nothing contradictory to add. Nothing really controversial to say. Being at the confluence of three mega-trends is where I’m comfortable. The first is privacy in marketing. The FTC and the EU have made their opinions known. There’s this big fear out there that consumers won’t opt-in. Why the fear? Is anybody doing anything wrong? Common’ people – let’s treat people with respect. The second are advancements in machine learning and processing power. There are more[…]
So who keeps on downvoting you on Reddit? We’ll find out. But first – three notes: You may be familiar with Reddit. If you’re not – you can read this explanation about what Reddit is. To answer that question, I downloaded a dataset that was built in early 2011 or very late 2010. The dataset is a 29MB gzip compressed and contains 7,405,561 votes from 31,927 users over 2,046,401 links. You can read about the methodology here. The file contains three columns – a vote, a userid, and a link. Only people who had their privacy settings set to open had that data read by an API. There is no meta-data about who these people are in real life (IRL)[…]
Have you seen this site, put out by Google for their “Our Mobile Planet” study? It’s an excellent way to present data in a very accessible, very explorable way. I found it inspiring. The call to action is “create your chart now”. A very good, honest, call to action. The technology adoption S-curve can be a slow beast, and expectations of growth have persistently outstripped actual adoption, at least in North America, and especially in Canada. Adoption has a few drags on it in North America and Europe. No such drags exist in Asia. The chart below compares all the countries smartphone penetration. (Click to embiggen) That chart masks underlining maturity in each country. The chart below compares m-commerce ‘at[…]
What do you think causes branding? I’ve been asking myself that, part of my series on being skeptical of root assumptions and theories, and took the opportunity to work through something in a foreign land. I spent some time in real Mexico, and couldn’t resist a first exposure. I went to a ‘Mega’, without really knowing what it was, and took in an in-store experience. The brand was unknown to me pre-exposure. A rare opportunity. So I walked in, and the first thing I notice? Banners hung throughout the store told me that everybody wanted to be Julio Regalado. I have no experience with the brand or the frontman. But everywhere, literally down every isle, there he was, with that[…]