Tag Archives: Marketing

Want a Pair of Google Glasses: Just Write a Convincing Essay

One of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin, was on stage at TED2013 talking about Google Glasses. It’s like a smartphone, but in a pair of glasses. If you haven’t yet seen Google’s latest promotional video, you’re probably going to want to check it out:

Cool, eh?

One would have to imagine that the possibilities for use are endless. Can you imagine putting these on athletes, say baseball players, and watching the gameplay from their perspective. Obviously, we’re a long way off from that (or are we?), but it’s fun to think about the potential uses. Anyway, in this post, I wanted to talk about something I read in an article about Google Glasses:

The company will sell the glasses for $1,500 each to people who write a convincing essay on what they will use the glasses for.

This is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Google is getting its customers to evangelize about its product and then ‘rewarding’ them by letting them pay $1,500 to buy the product. More than that, Google is crowdsourcing its customers for ways to market its product. By aggregating the best essays (and the themes of the essays), Google will see best how to market its product to other customers.

New Perspective on Healthiness: When You Get Unhealthy, Your Spouse or Your Kids Pay For It

I’m certainly a fan of behavioral economics, behavioral finance, and especially the ideas in Richard Thaler‘s book, Nudge. After reading Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human earlier this winter, I was thinking about how to combine some of the principles of those books in tackling what is a self-inflicted crisis: obesity.

Last month, I wrote about the importance of considering neuromarketing in the discussion of obesity, but I think there’s another way to frame this discussion. More importantly, at first blush, when framing it this way, I think it could motivate some people to take better care of themselves (at a minimum, it helped to motivate me to do so). I don’t remember how I came to this idea, but I know that it combines some of the things that I’ve read in the books I mentioned above (and was why I made note of them).

The idea: a marketing campaign in which we tell people that, when they get unhealthy, their spouse or their kids will have to pay for it.

Most people don’t want to burden their spouses (or their children), so I thought that by drawing to their attention that their spouse/kids will be the ones who’ll have to take care of them (and maybe pay for the cost of their care?), it might sway people away from making those choices that negatively affect their health.

When I had a conversation with someone about this, they raised the important point that many people don’t have spouses and many people don’t have kids, so this campaign might not be as successful as I first thought. Those are very valid points, but don’t we think that many people will — eventually — have spouses? If we can agree to that we then could add “future” spouse or “future” children to the campaign. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the underlying principle of the idea. Do you think that people care that their spouses/kids will be left to take care of them?

Communication: Do They Hear What You Say?

Earlier this morning, I spent some time trying to unclog the toilet (note: if you live in an old building, be sure to get a high-quality plunger!) and I was reminded of my time living in a residence hall. At first, I did a double-take because that was almost 10 years ago. In thinking about my time as a resident of a residence hall, I remembered my roommate and his accidental slip up.

This story’s not about anything scandalous — in fact, it could happen to anyone. We were coming up on the winter checkouts and I was planning on leaving the residence hall after he was. As a result, my roommate had taken care of his share of the cleaning duties and was about to leave. Simultaneously, our RA (Resident Assistant) was knocking on the door — he was about to tell us about the events coming up that week and probably remind us to sign-up for a time to checkout.

The RA noticed that my roommate was about to leave and asked him why he didn’t sign-up for a time to checkout. My roommate explained that I was leaving in a couple of days and that I’d “checkout” our room. The RA then explained that we each checkout — individually.

~

The RA thought that his communication materials (flyers, bulletin boards, etc.) had clearly stated that each resident needed to check-out, but my roommate (and to some extent, me) thought that just the room needed to be checked out.

So, what’s the lesson here?

No matter how clear you think your marketing materials are, always, always, always have multiple sets of eyes look them over. If it’s possible, it’s even better to have someone outside of your area of expertise look it over. Meaning, if our RA had asked one (or more) of his colleague(s) to look over the materials, there’s a better chance than not that none of them would have interpreted it like my roommate and I did. It would have been better for the RA to ask one of the residents (or someone maybe even someone outside of the residence hall) to look over the materials to make sure that the message the RA wanted to convey… was being conveyed.

Consider the last important bit of communication you were involved in sending. Are you certain that your recipient understood what you were trying to communicate?

The Obesity Crisis: How Come No One’s Talking About Neuromarketing?

The Economist did a fantastic special report on obesity a few issues back. I highly recommend reading it. You may see the obesity debate in a whole new light. However, I was a bit disappointed in the closing paragraph of one of their opening articles in that issue:

There is a limit, however, to what the state can or should do. In the end, the responsibility and power to change lie primarily with individuals. Whether people go on eating till they pop, or whether they opt for the healthier, slimmer life, will have a bigger effect on the future of the species than most of the weighty decisions that governments make.

I can totally understand where this perspective is coming from, but I don’t think that this perspective accounts for neuromarketing.

The technical definition:

In recent times, ‘neuromarketing’ has come to mean the application of neuroimaging techniques to sell products.

Meaning, marketers hook you up to a machine while you watch images/video of  product and then notice when certain areas of your brain light up. With this information, they’re able to tell when your brain is active and — theoretically — determine that it’s because of what you’re watching. [Is that frightening to anyone?] So, as the title of this post asks, with regard to the obesity crisis, why isn’t anyone talking about neuromarketing? Let me make the connection a little clearer.

We know that through neuromarketing, it’s possible to determine how our brains react to certain advertisements and products. With this information, companies can then use the advertisements that are most successful in getting consumers to buy their products. If we apply what we know from this abstract scenario to the food industry (is it weird to anyone else that it’s called the food industry?) we can posit that there are probably companies out there who use neuromarketing techniques to convince consumers to buy their product. Isn’t it possible (probable?) that companies who are in the business of selling us over-the-top sugary drinks or unnecessarily sweet-tooth-inducing treats also in the business of using neuromarketing techniques to convince us that we need to be drinking these drinks or eating these treats?

Getting back to the opening quote from The Economist, my response would have to be — in part — no. While I agree that personal responsibility is important, sometimes, the environment is too compelling. In this case, the environment is neuromarketing. How can a consumer make an informed choice if her/his brain is being manipulated?

I’m not sure of the solution to the obesity epidemic (though I have an idea that I’ll talk about in the coming days!), but I know that we most certainly need to include neuromarketing in that discussion.