You need to know these 6 useful concepts
6 Marketing Tips + a personal update
Wanted to ship this yesterday but as I kept fleshing it out, I wasn’t able to ship in time. So hope you’ll enjoy this two for the price of one essay :)
Friend!
How’s life?
I’m writing to you from the kitchen table at my in-laws. We’re staying here for a bit since my FIL passed away a while ago if you recall.
Look at my MIL’s green fingers haha. She grows her own Vietnamese veggies & herbs.
Been eating Viet food on the daily so gained approx. 157 Kg :)
Anywho, I’m back from the dead so we’re kicking off this week with a few useful concepts.
Let’s start this off with a “bonus” tip before I get into the meat.
I wrote this post for Reddit originally.
Whenever you’re doing something like this for a cold crowd (e.g. a presentation or keynote speech), always include a few things people already know.
There’s a reason why Survivorship bias and Dunning-Kruger always go viral on Twitter etc.
People like that feeling of “Hey, the fact that I know this means I’m smart.”
So that’s why I opened this with Social Proof. A behavioral economic heuristic I knew would cause folks to upvote.
Remember that the overwhelming majority of people do NOT seek to be educated.
They seek to be entertained.
That’s why it’s not just pointless but actually counterproductive (in terms of audience growth) to talk about how Dunning-Kruger may be a data artifact. See Nuhfer et al. (2017):
Much of the current consensus about peoples' inability to self-assess accurately comes from interpreting normative data presented in the Kruger-Dunning type graphical format or closely related (y - x) vs. (x) graphical conventions. Our data show that peoples' self-assessments of competence, in general, reflect a genuine competence that they can demonstrate. That finding contradicts the current consensus about the nature of self-assessment. Our results further confirm that experts are more proficient in self-assessing their abilities than novices and that women, in general, self-assess more accurately than men.
And Nuhfer et al. (2016):
In this study, we use random number simulations to explore how random noise affects critical aspects of self-assessment investigations: reliability, correlation, critical sample size, and the graphical representations of self-assessment data. We show that graphical conventions common in the self-assessment literature introduce artifacts that invite misinterpretation. Troublesome conventions include: (y minus x) vs. (x) scatterplots; (y minus x) vs. (x) column graphs aggregated as quantiles; line charts that display data aggregated as quantiles; and some histograms.
Or the statistics behind Survivorship Bias.
Also remember that exceedingly few actual scientists understand statistics. That stuff just isn’t taught. It’s usually the job of the student to figure it out. So what ends up happening is that many scientists learn enough to get by but don’t really understand what they’re doing. (Honestly, it’s a mystery that science, as broken as it is, works at all.)
So what do you think happens when you talk about this stuff with the general population? That’s right negative Tree(3) engagement.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
1/ Social Proof
When people face uncertainty, they often look to others and just do what they're doing.
In 1937, Sylvan Goldman invented the shopping cart.
But consumers didn't want to use them. (Customers felt they looked like effeminate little strollers.) Goldman paid some models to push the carts around his stores and pretty soon consumers started using them too.
There have been several behavioral economics studies where they found, the biggest motivator of people's behavior, was pointing out what others did. ¹
E.g. Hotels tend to see more success with "98% of our guests reuse their towels" instead of "Help the planet & reuse your towel".
Or see how de Groot et al. (2013) were able to influence shoppers to use fewer plastic bags by telling them that that’s what other shoppers in this store do.
Might be worth writing about another day.
2/ The Fisher Protocol
When people (esp. leaders) don't have to deal with the consequences of their decisions they tend to become more callous. Roger Fisher, an esteemed scholar in the field of negotiation and conflict resolution, proposed a thought-provoking concept regarding the country's nuclear codes.
His suggestion involved implanting the nuclear launch codes inside a volunteer, requiring the President to personally take the life of the volunteer in order to initiate a nuclear strike. By confronting the grim reality and ethical implications of their decision, it aimed to make leaders more accountable for their actions and potentially deter unnecessary or impulsive use of nuclear weapons. While Fisher's idea sparked discussion, it did not gain widespread implementation.
3/ The nocebo effect
Our expectation of negative outcomes can influence their occurrence.
For instance, if someone strongly believes that a particular medication will cause drowsiness, they may experience heightened feelings of fatigue, even if the medication itself does not possess any sedative properties.
You’re already familiar with placebos.
But did you know that we tend to believe surgery works because it's such a drastic undertaking? Well, in some instances, fake surgery produces the same outcome precisely because of that “believing” element.
The mind’s a powerful piece of wet machinery.
3b/ Non-linear relationship between input and output
To add on point 3, we expect inputs and outputs to have a linear relationship.
I.e. If I did a lot and you did very little, I'm responsible for the good outcome. In reality, this often isn't true because tiny changes can actually have a big impact.
E.g. Think about how the infinite scroll, a small tweak, increased engagement so effectively, there's not a social media platform that hasn't implemented it.
4/ Problem solving vs. Selling the problem
When it comes to addressing problems, those who aim to find solutions take a complex problem and break it down into manageable, solvable parts.
On the other hand, problem-sellers, such as politicians and the press, adopt the opposite approach. They tend to combine multiple small issues into a single, daunting problem, creating an impression that it is insurmountable and instilling fear.
5/ Burying the lede vs. leading with the lede
When people seek to diminish the significance of an event, they will bury it inside their content piece or briefly mention it.
When they want to frame the situation more favorably, they'll lead with it, pick a headline that highlights it, and spend more time on it.
This is useful to consider when you analyze your own content and or landing page(s).
Is the most interesting thing about your business buried somewhere or are you leading with it?
This is in part why positioning is so critical. Positioning means leading with the lede. One of the things I’ve told you before is that if you simply put your positioning statement at the top of your landing page (the hero copy), you’ll do better than 90% of people out there.
6/ Twyman's Law
This maxim states that "Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong", following the principle that "the more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another".
It is named after the media and market researcher Tony Twyman and has been described as one of the most important laws of data analysis.
Boring data (or expected data) is more trustworthy for that reason.
Notes
¹ Actually, let me not be so lazy and cite some research. In 1990, Cialdini et al. ran a study on littering. They found that when an environment was clean (anti-littering) people would litter less than in an environment that wasn’t (pro-littering). People subconsciously take cues about social norms.
This graph might confuse you because the black bar is smaller in the anti-litter situation and larger in the pro-litter. This is because there’s a certain amount of littering in a clean environment (in this case 14%) and a certain amount in a non-clean environment (in this case 32%).
When an actor (confederate) litters, the subject’s attention is drawn to the environment. In the anti situation, they notice the environment is clean which makes them less likely to litter. So counterintuitively, perhaps the best way to minimize littering is to draw people’s attention to it by having one piece of litter.
More on norms and human action in this Twitter thread:
References
Cialdini, R. B., Reno, R. R., & Kallgren, C. A. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(6), 1015–1026. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.58.6.1015
de Groot, J. I. M., Abrahamse, W., & Jones, K. (2013). Persuasive normative messages: The influence of injunctive and personal norms on using free plastic bags. Sustainability, 5(5), 1829-1844. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5051829
Nuhfer, Edward, Christopher Cogan, Steven Fleisher, Eric Gaze, and Karl Wirth. "Random Number Simulations Reveal How Random Noise Affects the Measurements and Graphical Portrayals of Self-Assessed Competency." Numeracy 9, Iss. 1 (2016): Article 4. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.9.1.4
Nuhfer, Edward, Steven Fleisher, Christopher Cogan, Karl Wirth, and Eric Gaze. "How Random Noise and a Graphical Convention Subverted Behavioral Scientists' Explanations of Self-Assessment Data: Numeracy Underlies Better Alternatives." Numeracy 10, Iss. 1 (2017): Article 4. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.10.1.4
Sihvonen, R., Paavola, M., Malmivaara, A., Itälä, A., Joukainen, A., Nurmi, H., Kalske, J., & Järvinen, T. L. N. (2013). Arthroscopic partial meniscectomy versus sham surgery for a degenerative meniscal tear. New England Journal of Medicine, 369(26), 2515–2524. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa1305189