Monthly Archives: August 2013

I don’t know about you but I hate clichés. I hate songs that have lyrics that reach for them as predictable solutions for rhyming couplets… ‘Tomorrow is another day’, ‘Down on my knees begging please’, pretty much any mention of a road (‘road going nowhere’), things that ‘cut like a knife’… you will, I suspect, have your own pet hates. Now, my objection to clichés is not that they are factually wrong (well, usually not, roads always go SOMEWHERE). My issue is that the hackneyed phrase concerned has appeared like a linguistic tick to fill the space where the person uttering it couldn’t conjure something original to say. Or perhaps it’s that, once the well-known phrase starts, the entirely predictable nature of its ending, means that I know the next two seconds will be a waste of my life! Often clichés end up being a mix of two psychological phenomena: […]

We’re rapidly approaching that time of year when people have sought to cheer themselves up by the giving and receiving of gifts.  Realising that many of you will be worrying about what to buy me, I thought now was probably the time to shine a light on the psychology of gift giving by means of a quiz. As with all the best quizzes (I really mean worst), there is no prize beyond the satisfaction of knowing your true gift-giving prowess. Would it be a good idea to ask me what I would like as a gift? a. Yes, you’d like it more if you got something you’d asked for b. No, you’d be more delighted by a surprise c. It doesn’t make a difference, each would be received equally. I tell you that what I would like as a present is either a CP Thornton Guitar, a Fender Custom Shop EC Tremolux Amplifier […]

Recently Unilever announced that they intended to be less enslaved to quantitative market research when innovating and would instead aim to take more risks to be innovative and to learn from experience about what works and what doesn’t. It would seem they have listened to the growing body of evidence that shows that asking consumers what they think is really not as helpful as had previously been assumed. As it happens I was talking at an event about innovation recently and, as ever, some of the questions asked percolate around my mind and push me to consider new angles and issues. In my talk I adapted an idea from Scott Berkun, who wrote the book The Myths of Innovation. He argues, quite convincingly in my view, that each stage of innovation an innovation process has a possibility of going astray. In a seven stage process, working on the generous assumption that […]

Loss aversion, the tendency we have to attach more weight to potential future loss than future gain, has been well-documented since Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler proposed it in 1990. Whilst it is hugely important in helping to explain a number of the ways in which consumers act, the simple act of reflecting on decisions of our own that turned out to be costly mistakes that could have been avoided with a little more thought, reveals that it is far from a universal determinant of our actions. Recently a very good friend of mine made two significant purchases within a matter of weeks: a luxury car and a luxury watch. The car cost him approximately £25,000 and the watch £4,500. What was interesting to me was that he negotiated hard on the price of one but not at all on the other. In fact, for one purchase he didn’t even shop […]