Letters Remain

Tag: marketing

  • Price Reductions and Cognitive Fluency

    If the mental calculation required to determine the discount given on a product is difficult then we often misjudge the magnitude of the reduction. This “ease-of-computation” effect for judging price reductions is obviously related to other recent studies looking at ‘cognitive fluency‘ and is another way to manipulate and be manipulated through product pricing. Consumers’…

  • The Influence of Sold-Out Products

    Sold-out products create “information cascades” where we infer that the next-best item must also be of a similar high quality and value for money: sold-out items ‘validate’ similar products, persuading us to purchase more readily. “Sold-out products create a sense of immediacy for customers; they feel that if one product is gone, the next item…

  • Making Applications Viral, Without Spam

    Virality isn’t an indispensable feature of all successful applications, but for those where it can be hugely beneficial there are four core principles that help the virality of an application, says Daniel Tanner: Invitation should be a core process, that is essential to using the application – this will maximise the chances that your users do invite new users.…

  • Selling Premium Goods

    In a short profile of ‘luxury sales consultant’ Jean-Marie BrĂźcker, we discover a few psychological techniques he teaches to his clients on how to sell high-end luxury goods: Describe an item in terms of its ‘value’ rather than it’s ‘price’ or ‘cost’. Sell a story (‘romance’ and ’emotions’) rather than ‘products’. The macaroon technique: sandwiching the…

  • The Entrepreneur’s Ignored Demographic

    Andrew Warner of Mixergy recently interviewed Alex Algard: the entrepreneur who founded the $57m a year (revenue) business WhitePages. One exchange in the interview I particularly enjoyed is when Warner ponders WhitePages’ target demographic. Realising that he, his colleagues and his friends don’t use the site, don’t talk about the site or even hear about the…

  • De Beers and the Diamond Market

    I’ve previously mentioned, in passing, how the concept of the diamond wedding ring was manufactured. I’ve now been reminded of this upon rediscovering Edward Jay Epstein‘s comprehensive 1982 article in The Atlantic charting the story of how De Beers created the entire market for diamonds through supply/demand manipulation and PR. De Beers proved to be the most…

  • Buying Linen: Thread Count Marketing

    Remember that numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience? The same goes for thread count, it seems: Textiles expert Mark Scheuer calls it a “marketing ploy” and tells you to forget about it when purchasing, while Linenplace says it is a metric we should consider–just not the most…

  • Resources for Community Building

    Richard Millington—online community builder for the UNHCR and one of Seth Godin’s 2008 interns—has compiled over 100 of his best posts from the previous two years. There’s a wealth of valuable information at FeverBee and this list is a great introduction to the topic of community building. A few of the twelve categories Millington has used in…

  • The Transformative Power of a Narrative

    Can a narrative attached to an everyday object increase its objective value? That was the question posed by Rob Walker (author of The New York Times‘ Consumed column) and Joshua Glenn (author of Taking Things Seriously) when they started the Significant Objects Project—an experiment designed to test whether a series of stories created about an object…

  • Marketing and Spreading Online

    Bud Caddell, strategist at Undercurrent, talks with the author of Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken, on Bud’s experience of marketing online and how it really should be done–by the small and large companies. This on making something ‘spreadable’: Trying to design a program that reaches mass first, isn’t going to spread at all. It’s not remarkable, there’s…