This post from 2013 is a hopeful one about declining overt bias found in polling. While we have had reasons to worry in the intervening years I still stand by the idea that declining overt bias is a good thing. We may not be perfect. I think this is pretty obvious to all, but, at…
Winning and Political Marketing
Winning Matters As a former political party Finance Director I would have cried if someone had suggested deliberately not using the best techniques we could to win. (More robust staff would probably have washed the person’s mouth out with soap and water). Winning in political marketing is critical. Trying To Win Is A Moral Obligation…
Nostalgia
“If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget just how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence.” (Pinker 2012) This opens Steven Pinker’s excellent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. (I have minor gripes but surprising…
Net Promoter
One of the most interesting discussions about marketing metrics in recent years concerns the Net Promoter System/Score, (NPS). Net Promoter is very simple. It compares % of customers who give high scores on “would you recommend to a friend?” with % of customers who give low scores. The Net Promoter is just the high score…
Kahneman’s Gripe
Marketing draws heavily on psychology and economics and I feel that both disciplines have much to offer (as well as weaknesses). So it without any specific agenda that I agree with Daniel Kahneman’s “gripe” (see below). This might not seem brave; Kahneman is a Nobel prize winner and a good rule of thumb is “agree with…
Overfitting
Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise has much to recommend it. It is about prediction generally, rather than being focused specifically on baseball or politics where he built his reputation. A problem he addresses is the overfitting of mathematical models. Overfitting is when we have a model that is great at explaining the data we…
Surviving Paranoia
I don’t like Paranoia. Excessive fear of other people is a major social problem and encouraging it is just plain wrong. Thus I’m not a fan of Andy Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive” (Grove 1996). It is not that there aren’t decent stories in his book. Grove had a fascinating career and there are useful…
Are We Good Decision Makers?
An interesting debate in the decision making field is: Are we good decision makers? The debate occurs most contentiously between supporters of Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman and those in Gerd Gigerenzer’s camp. Supporters of Tversky and Kahneman argue that in the 1970’s the core assumption in social science was that people were excellent decision…
Nudging
One of the most popular ideas in the behavioural sciences at the moment is “nudging”. This is applying a light touch to encourage people towards certain actions. “Rather than placing restrictions or changing economic incentives, nudges influence behaviour by changing the way choices are presented in the environment.” (Ly, Mazar, Zhao and Soman 2013). You…
Marketing And The Republican Autopsy
The Republican’s recently issued an interesting competitive analysis of how the party’s marketing operations stack up. The Growth and Opportunity Project has been dubbed the “Republican Autopsy” for accepting that the 2012 national elections were a disaster for the party. The major criticism of the report is that it excludes policy consideration. To critics the report is…