As all of you must know by now, I like to keep it simple and make it fun (KISMIF) when explaining how use statistical tools. That made me a natural fit for joining up with our founding principal Pat Whitcomb in 1988. After all, he named the company Stat-Ease and made its slogan “Statistics Made Easy” – leaving me the “fun” part (him having already made things easy!). 🙂
Every now and then this KISMIF approach hits the spot, such as it did with Lara Marlin Hull, a Marketing and Social Media Consultant at Red Funnel Consulting. Before becoming a communications specialist, Lara worked for a number of years as a research scientist in the pharmaceutical industry – just the sort of person that we aim to please. As you can see in her January 19 blog for How to Sell Scientists (Does Your Newsletter Grab Scientists’ Attention? Here’s One that Does ), Lara and her scientist friend really liked my latest article for our newsletter, which details a fun kitchen experiment* by my son Hank. She passes along this interesting insight: “People forget that scientists are people too.”
I am reminded of a time early in the days of Stat-Ease when I put together a survey of our software users. Wanting to incent responses, I suggested to Pat and our programmer Tryg that we consider offering a free pen. They both scoffed at the idea of a technical professional being swayed by “swag” (that is, a bribe!), going so far as to say that such a gift would create insult and cause less of a return! My reaction was that “experimenters are people too!” Putting our own tools to practice, I then split up our user list at random and sent only half the offer for the free pen. Believe it or not, these lucky ones responded at a significantly higher rate with completed surveys.
If people don’t have a good sense of humor, they are not very good scientists either.
– Nobel prize-winning physicist Andre Geim
PS. Ms. Hull followed up her initial accolade for the Stat-Ease “Statistics Made Easy” approach with further praise (The Secret Product Your Customers Want) for the way our Stat-Ease home page invites browsers needing immediate help. It is wonderful to receive unsolicited third-party endorsements like this, even though it’s not for our products and services per se, but, rather, how we go about doing our business.
*”Tumbler Rumbles with a Mugger,” December 2010 Stat-Teaser