The spectrum of goods
The type of good must play an important role in why people buy stuff. It’s undoubtedly an important jigsaw piece in Why People Buy Stuff. In Economics, there are various defined types of goods. The problem with economics is that it tends to be overly binary. It’ll say good is either utilitarian or hedonistic. That […]
The Gangnam Style Problem: Incremental belief changes
The podcast Reply All introduced me to a “problem” in the eyes of YouTube engineers, which was nicknamed the Gangnam Style Problem. It goes like this. If you visited YouTube, looked at a random video, and left your computer with autoplay on. Eventually, you’d land on Gangnam Style – the most popular video at the […]
The problem with segmentation. Let’s talk about status.
Most marketing is intuitive. But, it’s been made complex by business school professors who have overanalyzed it from the sidelines. By throwing away the jargon, we can build a better marketing method. I’m going to share a new way of thinking about segmentation. It’s something we intuitively know but rarely talk about. It’ll be obvious […]
Why People Buy: A look at ASOS
My goal for this blog is to figure out why people buy and how to market pretty much anything. ASOS – the clothing brand – holds one of those keys. How ASOS got its start In the early 2000s, ASOS was a small, niche internet upstart. Topshop was the big fashion brand for regular 15-25 […]
Learning from failed products
Product failures are a wonderful source of research about what to avoid. They are especially useful when a well-funded company that is staffed by experienced executives launches a flop of a product. It tells us money alone can’t solve all woes. Here are some favorites:
Nobody wants to be sold to. More proof.
Reactance is a psychological term. It’s not quite as simple as “not doing what we’re told.” It’s rejecting things that we feel are trying to limit our freedom. In other words, humans want to make their own choices and feel free.
The question we should be asking about Category Design
To a hammer salesman, there’s only one tool you need.
Got a nail? Use a hammer? Puddle of water? Hammer it away.
Bieber’s burrito. A lesson in how ideas spread
Hoaxes are the best case studies on how to make an idea go viral.
Fucking eye doctors.
I’m on a slow glide toward blindness, at least in one eye.