Letters Remain

  • Sweetness and the Problem with Diet Sodas

    The link between the sweetness of a food and its caloric content may be a trait that our bodies have evolved to recognise. By disrupting what could be a “fundamental homeostatic, physiological process” by using artificial sweeteners, we could be promoting obesity.

    That’s the conclusion Jonah Lehrer draws from a study that looks at how sweet tastes may be used to regulate our caloric intake and the adverse effects of diet sodas.

    Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were given differential experience with a sweet taste that either predicted increased caloric content (glucose) or did not predict increased calories (saccharin). We found that reducing the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods using artificial sweeteners in rats resulted in increased caloric intake, increased body weight, and increased adiposity, as well as diminished caloric compensation and blunted thermic responses to sweet-tasting diets. These results suggest that consumption of products containing artificial sweeteners may lead to increased body weight and obesity by interfering with fundamental homeostatic, physiological processes.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Market Segmentation and the PRIZM NE System

    Market segmentation is a method of grouping people with similar characteristics, primarily for marketing purposes.

    A number of years ago, USA Today described in detail the information large consumer segmentation businesses track and use to group us. It’s an eye-opening read:

    The [consumer segmentation businesses] are pinpointing who lives where; what they’re most likely to read, drive and eat; how many kids they have; and where they shop. And they are doing it with unprecedented precision. They are going far beyond the characteristics of people in certain ZIP codes to details about people in specific neighborhoods — even individual households. […]

    Most of the information they gather is public: the Census and government records of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, property deeds, tax rolls and car registrations. What’s not public, people give away. They do it every time they fill out a warranty card, answer a survey, buy a car or use their frequent shopper’s cards at drugstores and supermarkets.

    The article notes that there were/are five companies that offer this service to businesses, and I decided to look further at the service offered by the oldest of these companies: the 30 year-old Nielsen Claritas PRIZM NE system.

    The system is fascinatingly crafted, splitting individual U.S. households into 66 demographically and behaviorally distinct ‘segments’. Each of these segments contain information on a member’s likely: age range, education level, race, homeownership status, employment status (and job type) and their typical lifestyle preferences (e.g. likely travel destinations, favourite shops, typical hobbies, likely reading habits, etc.). These 66 segments are then further segmented into one of 14 broader social groups by taking into consideration their affluence and location (i.e. urban, suburban, second city and town and rural).

    These two documents I managed to find are definitely worth flicking through if you’re interested:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • A/B Testing Case Studies

    Paras Chopra, founder of the fairly self-explanatory A/B testing company Visual Website Optimizer, provides an introduction to A/B testing that is as useful for newcomers as it is old-timers.

    In the article, Chopra provides a few dos and don’ts, an overview of some A/B testing tools, a fantastic list of resources and a collection of “Classic A/B Testing Case Studies”, including:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Educational Typography Ebooks

    I’ve only recently taken a look at font retailer FontShop‘s collection of educational typography ebooks despite having the site bookmarked for months. It’s a wonderful (yet small) collection, currently consisting of these five books:

    The online Typographer’s Glossary will no doubt come in handy for many, too. In fact, just click on everything they have under the heading ‘Type Resources’–it’s all great.

    via @jasonfry

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Selling Software on a Shoestring

    From the early days of development through to the release and refinement of the final product (and further), Patrick McKenzie has been chronicling his journey as a one-man Micro ISV (Micro Independent Software Vendor).

    McKenzie has recently compiled a fantastic list of his best posts and this acts as a list of practical advice for small companies on topics such as SEO, marketing and adjusting to the self-employed lifestyle.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Become Comfortable with Incompleteness: Writing Tips from Rands

    “Don’t write a book” is the first piece of advice Michael Lopp offers us in a post chronicling his writing process.

    Lopp–an engineering manager at Apple, author of Being Geek and Managing Humans, and more commonly known as Rands–details his tools and methods for writing a book and, as always, his advice is applicable to more than just the topic at hand:

    You must become comfortable with incompleteness. At one point during the latest book, I had seven chapters in various state of doneness. When I began Managing Humans, I’d get panicky if I didn’t complete one chapter before starting the next. This is your brain, once again, trying to organize where it shouldn’t.

    The reason I have simple, readily available tools is that I can never tell when I’m going to be able to write. I’m on a deadline and my editor is breathing down my neck, which means I do have a weekly writing schedule that carves off mornings three days a week. As I settle into one of these mornings, it’s just as likely that I’ll write as it is that I’ll count the number of folks in the room who’ve chosen to drink from ceramic mugs versus paper cups.

    A singular focus on finishing a chapter is just another barrier to writing. By browsing all my chapters in various states of doneness, I’m more likely to pick one that is going to tickle my writing fancy: Oh hey, I have something to say about this today. Those ceramic mugs have to wait.

    Kathy Sierra’s comment is one not to miss.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Equal Societies Good for All

    The more unequal a society’s income distribution, the more health and social problems ail both the rich and the poor.

    With this theory brought to his attention through the “quite fascinating book” The Spirit Level, Nicolas Baumard displays the evidence to support the theory that economic inequality is bad for all inhabitants of a country before considering some possible explanations, and looking at what this means in terms of poverty and climate change.

    It is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. In [The Spirit Level], [the authors] demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone – the well-off as well as the poor […]. The remarkable data the book lays out and the measures it uses are like a ‘spirit level’ which we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies. The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem – ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations – is more likely to occur in a less equal society.

    Baseball fan? Baumard also points out that “the more equal the salaries in a base-ball team are, the better its performance”.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Privacy and Tracking with Digital Coupons

    Data collection and mining can be quite lucrative pursuits for many retailers, and technological advances are providing them with more novel and extensive methods of doing just that.

    Data mining is a topic I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was introduced to it in university, and this look at how digital coupons track us and provide retailers with detailed data is a worthy addition to my virtual collection:

    Invented over a century ago as anonymous pieces of paper that could be traded for discounts, coupons have evolved into tracking devices for companies that want to learn more about the habits of their customers. […]

    Many of today’s digital versions use special bar codes that are packed with information about the life of the coupon: the dates and times it was obtained, viewed and, ultimately, redeemed; the store where it was used; perhaps even the search terms typed to find it.

    A growing number of retailers are marrying this data with information discovered online and off, such as guesses about your age, sex and income, your buying history, what Web sites you’ve visited, and your current location or geographic routine — creating profiles of customers that are more detailed than ever, according to marketing companies. […]

    Many companies have the technology — and customers’ permission, thanks to the privacy policies that users accept routinely without reading — to track minute details of people’s movements.

    I’m mostly fine with this sort of tracking as it is typically done on a large, impersonal level: complex algorithms are used to determine when to send what vouchers to who, all without direct human intervention. The piece ends with a thought that is somewhat close to my opinion on this particular privacy debate: “I would be concerned […] if they get very granular and are tracking me specifically.”

    via @Foomandoonian

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Web Marketing Lessons from Cialdini’s ‘Influence’

    No marketer should be engaging with people online without having read Robert Cialdini’s much lauded Influence, says SEOmoz co-founder Rand Fishkin. To this end, Rand presents his Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence and Persuasion.

    The six main principles illustrated:

    • Reciprocation: “The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be “in-kind,” which is to say, commensurate with the initial offering. The power is increased if the give-and-take happens in a short time frame. Reciprocity’s influence increases with closer relationships, too.”
    • Commitment and Consistency: “Commitment and consistency can’t happen without that initial action of a reponse or promise. Cialdini notes that this power increases tremendously if the agreement is written, rather than merely verbal.”
    • Social Proof: “Social proof becomes more powerful when the numbers increase and when the action-takers become more relevant and, especially more like the target.”
    • Liking: “Research confirms that things like physical attractiveness (we like good-looking people), familiarity (we trust people we know), similarity (we like people like us) and compliments (we like people who say nice things about us) all factor into to the principle of ‘liking.’”
    • Authority: “Authority only influences when the target believes in the power and authenticity of that authority. The stronger the authority association, the more powerful the impact, but not all authorities work on all people.”
    • Scarcity: “Scarcity becomes more powerful when it’s clear that the resource is finite […] and when immediacy is added to the scarcity.”

    The article doesn’t cover much that I haven’t before, but the article offers, for each of the above, excellent examples on how to leverage these through web marketing.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Issues of the Self-Publishing Future

    In 2009, 764,448 books were published outside of “traditional publishing and classification definitions”, according to Bowker. This plethora of self-published titles can be thought of as the ‘slush pile‘, says Laura Miller, and while this future offers authors better options than ever before, it’s the impact on readers themselves that we should be considering (e.g. overwhelming choice, increasingly large numbers of poorly written books, etc.).

    In discussing her worries about the “post-publishing” future, Miller looks at how we may consume and deliver books, how the role of the ‘gatekeeper’ will evolve, and ponders the future of antisocial or introverted ‘geniuses’. I liked this on considering the opportunity cost of discovering works of art in the slush pile:

    Everybody acknowledges that there have to be a few gems out in the slush pile — one manuscript in 10,000, say — buried under all the dreck. The problem lies in finding it. A diamond encased in a mountain of solid granite may be truly valuable, but at a certain point the cost of extracting it exceeds the value of the jewel. With slush, the cost is not only financial (many publishers can no longer afford to assign junior editors to read unsolicited manuscripts) but also — as is less often admitted — emotional and even moral. […]

    I recently confided my worries on this account to former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, but he was unperturbed. In the near future, he assured me, “‘publication’ will become meaningless.” […] Readers will be saved from wading through slush by amateur authorities — bloggers and other pundits specializing in particular subjects or genres — who will point their followers to the best books. “People will find new ways to decide which books merit their attention.”

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    Lloyd Morgan