We are all richer than we think we are and there is no need to compare ourselves to the top one per cent and remain unhappy. I think that it is important to teach our next generation to be happy with what we have and pursue a knowledge path as opposed to a monetary path. It is important to value small gestures, local innovations, and above all, integrity. We read, watch and react to the corrupt and the unruly, but for every one of these bad examples, there are thousands who stand out. But we have no opportunity to see them, celebrate them, or become ambitious about becoming heroes ourselves.

For me, looking at the future — imagining the many threads and influences coming from not just the usual suspects but also still-unknown people around the world — is what takes my breath away. Think of our world now, where the machines we work on are built in China, programmed by an east Asian teenager, and explained to us by a young woman in India. And think of the world to come — where some of the most important ideas for the next century could come from a girl living in a remote village, or a boy still in kindergarten.

We need platforms to encourage not only innovations but also informed debates. We need to centerstage not only the winners but also those who work behind the curtains.

We, the 99 percent, look forward to the Goa THINKfest from tomorrow.

Because the revolution will not be televised. But it will be tweeted.
Welcome to Goa THINKfest!

Image Courtesy: The New Yorker

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A manuscript of Rabindranath Tagore’s work

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To ‘tell complex stories in a simple way that everyone from the man-on-the-street to the corporate CEO will understand’ IBM and Ogilvy Paris teamed up with renowned illustrator Noma Bar.

Bar is famous for using a technique called ‘negative spaces’.

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They are now asking if you can take up the challenge.

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Many behavioural economists describe their discipline as a complement to the world of classical economics: an alternative framework to the centuries-old view that economic agents behave consistently and rationally, choosing the best outcome in every situation, making the right decisions in a world of perfect information.

In fact, it is a much more direct challenge to the old orthodoxy than this suggests.

To the layman at least their observation and experiment-rich brand of psychology (a worldview that accepts that humans are irrational, inconsistent and don’t always act in their best interests) explains far better the world around us: be it stock market bubbles or conspicuous consumption.

The advertising industry, of course, instinctively understands this ‘new’ economic startpoint. It has long understood that decisions are often made habitually, emotionally and on the basis of what others think or will think; at odds, in other words, with the classical economist’s predictions.

Although you will still hear the term ‘USP’ lazily bandied about, it long ago enlarged its mental model of ‘how advertising works’ from one where the unadorned statement of a product’s unique advantage would coerce the attentive and rational consumer into forming a preference for it.

A behavioural economics perspective is not, then, a bolt from the blue for advertising folk.

At its broadest, behavioural economics reminds us of the ‘status quo bias’ that keeps most markets stable (because we crave the familiar, and are adverse to the potential loss that attaches to a ‘new’ decision) and the ‘heuristics’, or rules of thumb, that we use to aid decision-making.

Brands, of course, are the ultimate heuristic: mental shortcuts that make potentially complex decisions simple for consumers. They speak to the ‘cognitive miser’ in all of us. Behavioural economics gives us also the notion of ‘anchoring’: that brand (and other) decisions are typically made in relation to other options, rather than in isolation.
This alone should provide food for thought and an obvious action plan for those advertisers and brand-owners who spend too much time staring at their own brand or campaign, and not enough understanding their competitors’. (Marketing history is littered with brands that were effectively repositioned by others while brand managers fiddled).

But whether or not the advertising fraternity has a long-lasting love affair with behavioural economoics – by its very nature, its focus on what people actually do – brings with it an overdue challenge to the implicit assumption in some corners of our industry that ‘brand’ and ‘brand image’ are the exclusive levers of marketing success.

Our impulse to understand behavioural economics, then, is a helpful corrective to lazy or narrow thinking; a reminder that attitudes to a brand will often follow rather than lead behaviour change and that an advertising campaign is one answer, not always the answer.

We would all do well to make the assumptions with which we market and advertise more explicit, a kind of ‘contract’ with our organisation and others that makes concrete our underlying beliefs. Meanwhile let’s remember that what people say about brands and what brands say about themselves is, in the end, less important than what people (and brands) actually do.

There’s always been this long-drawn debate about whether advertising is strongly persuasive or nudging?

And see how Haagen-Dazs used salience to create an all new product.

A version of this article appeared in Bangalore Mirror last month.

Image Courtesy: adverlab.blogspot.com

Wicked clever @Kindle ad in @Forbes mag: last paragraph of the article is on the Kindle screen in the ad

Hat tip: Big Evidence