LSSU expected blowback from pet parents when they released the 2012 list:

• Amazing
• Baby bump
• Shared sacrifice
• Occupy
• Blowback
• Man cave
• The new normal
• Pet parents
• Win the future
• Trickeration
• Ginormous
• Thank you in advance

We may need some shared sacrifice to eliminate these words but thank you in advance.

Storytelling is pervasive through life. Much information is stored, indexed, and retrieved in the form of stories. Although lectures tend to put people to sleep, stories move them to action. People relate to each other in terms of stories—products and brands often play both central and peripheral roles in their stories.

My background in cognitive science supports the idea people remember in terms of stories, while our transactive memory lives in Google. 

Being a marketer, I was intrigued to learn more about the role brands play in stories.   From what I can gather from the exhaustive exhausting article, people tell stories primarily for three reasons:

1. The act of telling a story is pleasurable to the storyteller. The storyteller enjoys the nostalgia of reliving earlier experiences over again, regardless of whether the original event was pleasurable or irritating.
2. The plotline in a story supports the teller’s need to be a Jungian archetype. Stories allow us to be a hero, outlaw, ruler, jester, magician, or some other primal form – if even for a moment.
3. Telling a story, especially repeatedly, deepens the significance of the event. Story repetition is often an attempt to get clarity or justification for the actions around the original event.

While this suggests why we tell stories, it doesn’t explain which stories we are more likely to listen to.  Books and movies have a consistent structure for what makes a good and presumably, memorable story.  The story starts when everyday life is put out of balance.  While trying to restore balance, the protagonist is met with resistance by an antagonist, natural occurrences, and/or personal limitations. We get emotionally involved in stories that describe what it’s like to overcome these opposing forces.  The more involved we are in a story, the more likely we will retell it.

The implications for consumer marketing are straightforward.  We want consumers to view themselves as protagonists in a story with the brand as a supporting actor.  Mr. Clean is not just a household cleanser; it’s a sword in the epic never-ending battle against dirt.  You are not just doing a chore; you are the hero worthy of conquering a dirty home.

Regardless of the exact number, the line of thought leads to an intriguing New Year’s day speculation:

Can you prevent or cure a hangover?

Of course, legends abound. Conventional wisdom suggests lots of water and ibuprofen either before or after drinking. I had a college friend who swore by a concoction containing a raw egg yolk and Worcester sauce as a morning-after remedy. Interestingly, ginseng appears to be an Internet favorite.

Two UK researchers decided to systematically vet all available research to determine if there are any effective hangover cures. Fifteen studies tested a wide variety of treatments, including borage, prickly pear, propranolol, and tolfenamic acid. Perhaps not surprisingly, the authors conclude:

No compelling evidence exists to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover. The most effective way to avoid the symptoms of alcohol induced hangover is to practise abstinence or moderation.

If nothing works, why do people swear by these home remedies?

One newbie was a little more experienced than the rest and, when bestowing his opinion on us, would invariably exclaim:

In regione caecorum rex est luscus

If you’re not classically trained in Latin, this phrase roughly translates to “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  While he barely knew more than we did, the knowledge made him king.

The quote comes from the Adagia (III, IV, 96), an annotated collection of proverbs compiled by Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus during the Renaissance.  By his death in 1536, Erasmus had documented nearly 5,000 proverbs including many colorful ones that are still used in English today:

• Never look a gift horse in the mouth
• The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence
• Can’t teach an old dog new tricks
• Between a rock and a hard place
• To call a spade a spade
• There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip

Erasmus was a prolific writer, even though most of his output didn’t happen until he mastered Latin late in life.  Beyond the Adagia, his best-known work is “The Praise of Folly”, a satire of popular superstitions and the Catholic Church.  Erasmus is also responsible for the first published Greek translation of the New Testament which was later used as the primary source material for the Church of England’s authoritative King James Version of the Bible.  Neither endeared him to the Catholic Church but his writings were extraordinary popular.  According to some accounts, Erasmus accounted for 10-20% of all book sales in the 1530’s.

It’s unlikely that any modern day author could ever reach that level but, for all of you struggling writers out there, don’t worry.  As Erasmus himself might have said, every dog has its day.

The term nocebo, which is Latin for “I will harm”, was allegedly chosen by Walter Kennedy in 1961 as a reaction to the then recently-coined term placebo.  According to Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, “nocebos often cause a physical effect, but it’s not a physically produced effect.  In many cases [the cause] is an unanswered question.”  For obvious reasons, the nocebo effect has not been well-studied: it’s unethical to encourage illness in patients who are not sick. 

Science might now be closer to an answer of how to treat the nocebo effect.  A recent Oxford University study demonstrates that nocebo pain is detectable in an MRI scanner. This suggests patients are responding to actual pain at a neurological level.  A University of Turin study goes one step further by identifying a neurochemical called cholecystokinin which appears to be responsible for this effect.  When scientists use drugs to block cholecystokinin, patients do not feel the nocebo pain. 

The realness of the nocebo effect makes me to wonder about its impact on doctor-patient relationships.  To avoid being sued, doctors might be tempted to emphasize drug side effects to their patients but the mere act of highlighting these side effects might make them more likely to happen.  On the other hand, patients who do not completely trust their doctor’s prescriptions might reduce the efficacy of their own treatments.  This is the ultimate Catch-22.

While it might seem easy to laugh off, the nocebo effect is clearly real and important to consider in treating patient health.  The nocebo effect could even explain how anxiety can cause patients to become worried sick or literally scared to death.

The question bothered me after a recent trip to Whole Foods Market, an upscale market near my home.  The containers of hummus I bought hadn’t been refrigerated; they were displayed in a large barrel of ice.

In fact, lots of other food and drinks items were stored in ice barrels all around the store.  The items needed to be kept cold but it certainly would have used less space if they had been placed on normal cooled shelves.  What was Whole Foods thinking?

I found a plausible – and fascinating – answer in a Fast Company article entitled “How Whole Foods Primes You To Shop”.  The author suggests that ice is a symbol of freshness; it provides the unconscious suggestion what you’re looking at is ready-made or straight from the farm.  It doesn’t matter whether the ice is strictly needed as long as it reinforces Whole Foods’ brand promise.

Using ice to denote freshness is only a more sophisticated version of a subliminal tactic supermarkets have been using for years:

…supermarkets have been sprinkling vegetables with regular drops of water – a trend that began in Denmark. Why? Like ice displays, those sprinkled drops serve as a symbol, albeit a bogus one, of freshness and purity. Ironically, that same dewy mist makes the vegetables rot more quickly than they would otherwise. So much for perception versus reality.

Lindstrom claims that Whole Foods is a master at the art of consumer seduction. Most grocery stores have non-perishable items at their entrances: cash registers, snacks, and movie rentals. In contrast, Whole Foods places fresh flowers at the front entrances to prime us into thinking of freshness from the moment we enter the store.  We carry that subliminal message around with us for the rest of our visit.

This brand promise is reinforced everywhere in the store, from the fruit spilling out of cardboard boxes to the hand-drawn prices in chalk on slate.  The boxes and slate evoke the image of a traditional outdoor European market.

It’s as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm.

The chalk scrawl also suggests the prices are set locally and change daily depending on supply.  In fact, the prices are fixed at the Texas corporate headquarters and the signs are mass-produced in a factory.  Even the multiple randomly-stacked boxes are actually a single-sided display case designed to look like individual boxes.

News flash: Whole Foods isn’t a country store.  We’ve been Brandwashed.

Both are commonly held beliefs which seemingly contradict each other.  Which is it?  Do we always choose our favorite food/toy/song or do we opt for less-desirable alternatives so we don’t get bored?

The answer is yes.

When faced with multiple simultaneous options, people diversify their choices, even if they end up with less-desirable alternatives.  However, if the same options are presented sequentially over time, people will stick with their preferred choice.  Carnegie Mellon University researchers used a Halloween-night experiment to vividly depict this so-called diversification bias.

In the experiment two sets of trick-or-treaters visited two houses. The first set of children had to choose between taking either a single Three Musketeers or a Milky Way bar. The other set of kids were told to ‘choose whichever two candy bars you like’.   There were large piles of both candies available to ensure the kids didn’t think it was rude to take two of the same.

More than half of the kids in the first set (the sequential choice condition) picked the identical candy at both houses, presumably the one they preferred.  However, nearly every child in the second set selected one of each candy at both houses, demonstrating the diversification bias. Since the candy is typically consumed much later, this result is even more striking. It is end-of-the-evening portfolio that matters, not the portfolio selected at each house.

It’s not just kids and candy that are susceptable to the diversification bias. When employees are simultaneously offered n funds to choose from when signing up for a retirement plan, researchers found they are likely to divide the money evenly among the funds offered.  If the fund options are presented over time, employees concentrate their money into a smaller number of funds.  The researchers use the term 1/n heuristic to describe this extreme version of the diversification bias.

A plan administrator can greatly influence investments by the number and order of funds that are presented.  In a plan with one stock fund and one bond fund, the average allocation would be 50% stocks. However, if another stock fund were added, the stock allocation would be 66%.  In fact, the  researchers analyzed a large  sample of pension plans and found strong evidence to support this prediction. 

I have no way of knowing if plan administrators are  using this knowledge to influence investments but it certainly would be the ultimate trick-or-treat.

This is a difficult question to answer accurately. Surveys are unreliable because people are not likely to be truthful about behavior that is considered socially unacceptable.  Surveys underreport the true percentage.

Even if it is difficult, estimating the percentage of people who engage in a specific illegal or frowned-upon behavior is critical as it has important uses in policy-making and enforcement.  Research studies have shown some improvement in accuracy by asking participants to estimate the percentage themselves. People are more likely to be open about what others are doing than they are about themselves. Obviously this works best for populations that are well-known by the participants, such as employees in a company.

Survey researchers have come up with a randomized response technique (RRT) that encourages participants to be more open. The experimental design is as follows:

• Before answering a question, the participant throws a single dice which the researcher cannot see.
• The participants answers ‘yes’ if a 1 comes up and ‘no’ if it is a 6, regardless of the actual answer to the question. 
• For all other numbers, the participant answers the question truthfully.

Because a ‘yes’ response does not necessarily mean the person actually engaged in the undesirable behavior, people are more honest.  Admittedly, the forced yes and no means at least of 1/6 of the answers are incorrect but, despite introducing this statistical noise, the overall results give better answers.

Introducing error to increase accuracy seems counterintuitive but it works in multiple domains.   As an example, comparing RRT results to drug screening on hair samples shows that it is 30% better than traditional techniques.

Now go wash your hands.  I bet you forgot.

John Sculley also describes the situation that led to his firing:

There was one contingent that wanted Apple to be more of a business computer company. They wanted to open up the architecture and license it. There was another contingent, which I was a part of, that wanted to take the Apple methodology — the user experience and stuff like that — and move into the next generation of products, like the Newton. But the Newton failed. [...] The result was I got fired.

In 1993, with revenue and the stock down, the Board asked him to sell Apple but Sculley couldn’t find any takers.  Apparently, potential buyers like IBM and AT&T thought that Intel and Microsoft had brighter futures.  To put this in perspective, Apple has increased its market capitalization by nearly 50X since then.  By contrast, Microsoft has increased less than 10X and AT&T is essentially flat.

The interview points out that Steve Jobs practiced management by walking around. Engineers were more important than managers, and designers were at the top of the hierarchy.  Sculley provides an anecdotal story to reinforce how different Apple was in this regard:

… a friend of mine [went] into the Apple meeting and, as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design.

Sculley concludes that this is a recipe for disaster.

The interview has lots of great insights but my favorite line is as follows:

This goes back to Steve’s philosophy that the most important decisions are the things you decide NOT to do, not what you decide to do.

Focus and simplicity.  Steve, we will miss you.

It’s a classic expression which is both a play on words and recognition that it’s very hard for us to admit we’ve made a mistake. 

Kathryn Schulz, author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” claims you can’t just admit your mistakes but you must fully embrace them.  Kathryn is a self-described wrongologist (@wrongologist) and writes a Slate series called the “The Wrong Stuff” that profiles how famous people feel about being wrong.  According to Schulz, if you want to improve your odds of being right, you have to embrace your fallibility, consistently look for your mistakes, and systematically determine what caused you to make them.  Only in failure do we become smarter.

In this engaging video, Kathryn explores the mental process we go through when someone disagrees with us when we know we are right.  She posits three separate stages:

Ignorance Assumption
First, we believe we have information that the other person does not have and, once we “generously share that information with them”, they will change their viewpoint. We need to enlighten the ignorant.

Idiocy Assumption
When we discover the other person has the same facts that we have and still doesn’t agree with us, we decide they must be idiots. Even though they have the right information, they are too stupid to draw the correct conclusion.

Evil Assumption
Finally, when we find out that the person who disagrees with us has the same facts we do and is perfectly competent, we decide they are deliberately distorting the truth for their own evil purposes. How else could they know the truth and not agree with us?

This should be a wakeup call to all of us.  During an argument, the more certain we are that we are right, the more dangerous the situation might be. Fixated on our view of the truth, our inherent bias against being wrong increases the likelihood that we might make a mistake. Essentially we become blind to alternative possibilities.  What’s more, it can cause us to treat each other poorly.

So, embrace your wrongness.  It might make you right.