Posts Tagged marketing
It may pay to make your product less than perfect!
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior, Uncategorized on September 4, 2011
I once analyzed data from a designed experiment that quantified consumer distaste for flaws in chocolate-covered cherries. This was a very rewarding project – lots of free candy! It also produced a counter-intuitive result: People preferred boxes with a few upside-down morsels. I figure this is akin to a beauty mark adding to the enticement of a model or actor. This article on “When Blemishing Leads to Blossoming”, published online by the Journal of Consumer Research confirms that under specific circumstances, a flaw makes a product more attractive. For example, in one experiment (highlighted in the July 16 issue of Wall Street Journal) the researchers (Danit Ein-Gar, Baba Shiv, Zakary L. Tormala) offered either perfect or slightly flawed chocolate bars to several hundred relaxed (stolling around) or stressed (rushing to exams) college students. I searched out the results and reproduced them in this interaction graph from Design-Expert® software. It seems to me that this surprising effect, presuming it’s real, provides yet another devious opportunity for marketing mavens to make us buy stuff. One thing I might advise is that you never buy anything when you are in a hurry.
Management Blog Carnival, Review 3 – Seth Godin blog
Posted by mark in Uncategorized on January 3, 2010
(Note: This blog is the last of three in a carnival organized by John Hunter.
I picked the Seth Godin blog to review because his name rang a bell, but I’d never read anything by him that I specifically recall. As it turns out, I really did not see much that interested me greatly for exactly the opposite reason expressed in this comment by “ariana10” to Godin’s blog of 8/22 (bulleted below):
“I relate to this blog because I am a journalism major at the University of Kansas and I can’t do math for the life of me.”
I am an engineering major who likes math (in moderation!) and I can do it for the life of me. However, I am also keen on marketing and business (MBA, U Minn., ’80) so, even though Godin is light on stats, I must admit that he’s got much to offer for those of us trying to make a living in this high-tech world. Here are a few Seth Godin blogs of 2009 that hit my hot buttons.
- 1/24 Good guys finish… Godin suggests that under the bright light of the internet being generous and fair in business dealings pays off now more than ever. I like that idea a lot.
“When your customer service policies delight rather than enrage, word of mouth more than pays your costs.”
- 8/22 Not so good at math demonstrates the confusion creating by using miles per gallon (mpg) as the metric for fuel efficiency. As I noted in my blog on how the Inverse transformation puts mileage comparisons on track / the best measure for fuel efficiency is gallons per ten-thousand miles.
- 8/28 Spare no expense! does get somewhat quantitative (finally a graph!) in discussing the tradeoffs of giving almost no personal service to a huge number of users (Google) versus a great deal of attention to the troublesome individuals who soak it up.
- 10/26 Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law is where Godin, a people person, draws the line at 150 – the limit predicted by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar for stable social relationships. I think the number might be a lot less (a tenth?) for engineers than marketers. ; )
What sets Seth Godin’s blog apart from the others I’ve seen (admittedly a small sample) is the amount of original content laced with thought-provoking observations of how people interact and what turns them on or off. He’s a guy worth keeping an eye on, I think.
