carlosblogbr-blog

[carlosblogbr-blog]

Cognitive illusions are inevitable

So you might as well understand how to communicate in situations where they arise.

Pitches of ideas have become so important these days. Ideas cannot get off the ground without capital, and while the occurrence of ideas is fairly democratic (doesn’t the simplest person sometimes have the best idea?), the availability of capital is becoming more and more concentrated. This creates a drastic situation where relatively very few good ideas get implemented in a very great way, whereas a large amount get very little attention.

But how are ideas chosen? How can the holder of the resources know objectively which idea is going to work best? Well what if being the best idea objectively matters less than being the one most liked by the investor?

Research shows that many choices deemed correct ex post are more self-fulfilling because the team felt confident about them then because they were necessarily the best objective choices. Furthermore research also shows that cognitive biases related to coherence and cognitive ease, heavily enhance the sense of confidence in judgments.

Therefore, if you idea is indeed the best you will be doing yourself and your judge a big favor if you communicate you idea that raises your audience’s confidence in their decision if they are to chose your proposal. You might even be worried about the fate of your idea if it was selected in a close tie with lots of doubts and little  confidence in the chooser’s minds.

That is, pitching your idea is actually an integral part of implementing your idea in the first place.

[carlosblogbr-blog]

Love you Claire

So authentic, so grateful, so inspired! It is not only about knowing what you have to do, but having the courage to do it! Thank you Claire!

[carlosblogbr-blog]

Burberry

I have to admit that I am not a fashion customer, and I did not know much about Burberry before a branding class assignment. But, I have to admit I learned about a lot of useful aspects of the Burberry brand while at it.

First and foremost, I was blown away to find out the Burberry is such an old brand built on adding real value to humanity’s clothing. in the late 1800s Thomas Burberry (he was in his his late 20s) invented the gabardine, the first impermeable breathable fabric. And goes on to dress the most mission-critical applications of clothing for the next 40 years.

From being the official clothing to the British army in the first world war:

To dressing polar expeditions:

And all kinds of extreme explorations across half a century:

The very functional Trench Coat, as it was called, went on to be the product of choice for stylish functional. Worn by famous actors in movies:

Onto Royalty and everyone interested in facing rain with style.

The lining checker is so iconic you can hardly think of any stronger associations can be created in people’s minds:

When you have such strong legacy and and real-world mythology to build from, you just know that this company has huge value in brand equity and that has to be a great place to start from when building a company for the future. It is certainly not a sure recipe for success,  but it reminds me how people need imagery and mythology that goes beyond the product itself. How one’s experience is so much enhanced when there are strong associations created, and how our society should thrive to build such associations around products that actually add value to people’s lives!

[carlosblogbr-blog]

Managing “Halo Effect”at Singapore Airlines

Halo effect refers to a cognitive bias in which one tends to associate unobserved qualities to a brand or person based on observed cues. An example in Wikipedia goes like “someone who is perceived as attractive, due in part to physical traits, may be more likely to be perceived as kind or intelligent.”. Though probably unfair, this may sound obvious to some, but this effect has strong consequences to how service companies manage their brands, because customer’s first impressions will have a disproportionate impact on their future impressions to a point that perception of subsequent experience will be highly modified by the “halo effect” lens.

In such case a company like Singapore Airlines that manages to create an exceptionally good impression of their service the first time someone flies with them, will benefit from condescension from these customers about all aspects of flying with Singapore Airlines.

Once this preconception of excellence is created, the company build its entire business model around it, because it will attract a disproportionate amount of customers looking for exceptional service, which in turn are probably the least price sensitive customers. Finally, having the ability to charge a unique premium will the allow the airline to re-invest in ways that will be very hard to reproduce by competition thus creating a virtuous cycle of excellence that competition will find very hard to break.

However, this has some consequences because they always have to be heavily investing in improvements assuming a “normal” market for air travel and if there are prolonged downturns in the air travel market they would be pressed hard to stay liquid and continue investing.

[carlosblogbr-blog]

Technology evolution matters

The internet is full of references to iSmell as one of the biggest product flops of all time. The product synthesized smells to users as they visited websites, but as much as users are annoyed to get anything more than just text when visiting web pages, the product tried to assume what any random e-mail or web page would smell like, and that must have led to completely wrong sensory associations and the obvious failure of the product.

However, the ability of stimulating olfactory feedback is not completely out of sense when it comes to virtual reality, imagine been able to smell the subtle scent of edelweiss on a sunny day in the alps during the sound of music?

Or imagine a immersive Virtual Reality gaming experience in which smells matter to achieve the goal of the game.

Finally imagine how a scent synthesizer allowed consumers to know how their products smelled? Maybe you would like to know how a dish or a perfume smells like before heading to the restaurant on buying online? Maybe the taste packaged of food could be improved obviating the need to add flavorants? Maybe smelling capability can be used to enhance man-machine interaction by associating different smells to different notification events. Like if you are running down on fuel or your car has some mechanical malfunctioning, you could get distinctive smells for that. The point is that you may be visually and auditively absorbed on a task but a smell feedback might draw your attention in an interesting way.

In any useful case the point here is that the technology would need to evolve a lot before it was applicable. The parallel here is the iPhone, similar products had been envisioned decades earlier, but it was only when processing power, materials, and software reached a certain maturity and the greatest team in the world dedicated substantial resources to its development that the end result ended up being useful.

[carlosblogbr-blog]

Branding to one’s customers customers

Interesting discussion when looking at the branding challenges of Back and Decker at the beginning of the nineties. Though they were one of the best known brands globally next to the likes of Coca Cola and Walt-Disney, and were practically the inventors of the power tool market in the US, Black & Decker was faced with a tough challenge in one of the fastest growing power tool market segments. Called the tradesman segment it comprised of individual contractors that win a living as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, framers, roofers, and general remodelers working in residential construction. In this tradesman market, a market for professional tools, Black and Decker enjoyed a mere 9% share whereas Makita, a relatively much smaller player in the us market, held 50% market share. The interesting reason turned out to be that, individual contractors were hired by homeowners, who, by definition, knew relatively little about home improvement. Therefore they relied on very subtle “signals” to identify whether a contractor knew what they were doing or not. In this sense, given the impressiveness of power tools, if compared to home-use tools, these stuck out in homeowner’s perception and the look of the contractor’s power tools ended up becoming very important. The issue then turned out to be that B&D was already very well known by homeowners but it was strongly associated with daily products that did not give the impression of any differentiation. Therefore, if contractors showed up with B&D-branded tools, the home owners got the association that the contractors were not differentiated from themselves and therefore probably not worth hiring. When reading up to this point I had the immediate reaction that homeowners were making System 1 associations to infer the quality of the contractor, based on the appearance of the power tool that they used. My reasoning then concluded that B&D would have to have built a completely new brand, something free of any associations, decisively changing the look of the product, including its predominant color. At a later moment, once the new brand (and color) were very well known, and recognized, they could potentially even add back the “by Black and Decker” logo to strengthen the B&B brand itself. To go about choosing the new brand name, look and color, I would start by surveying the market of homeowners, as their opinion is what matters the most to the contractors which are the B&Ds customers.