One of the central challenges of marketing is that people differ. Marketers would love to create marketing communications that work for everyone. While some communications do pretty well nothing has universal appeal. Some images work fantastically for some people but turn others off. How can we predict who will like what? What helps us in…
Category: Management Theory
The Growth Rate Of Modern Science
How has modern science progressed? This is a tough question to answer for the last few generations. It is even harder if you have aspirations to go back a lot further. Lutz Bornmann and Rudiger Mutz certainly don’t lack for ambition. They look at the growth of science since the 17th Century. The growth rate…
Comparing Canadian And US Consumers
Comparing consumers in different countries can be challenging. I must confess to having doubts about a lot of cross-cultural research, see here for lots of grouchy comments on cross cultural measurement. I worry it is what nice middle class people do when they want to stereotype while still seeing themselves as free of prejudice. Suffice…
The Problem with Lay Rationality
I haven’t written about rationality for a while but I’ll return to note a recent paper by Xilin Li and Christopher Hsee. In it they look at the impact of lay views of rationality and raise a problem with such lay rationality. It is a fun paper and, broadly speaking, I agree that their conclusion…
Experimental Philosophy
Ruwen Ogien’s book — Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants –lays out a number of approaches to experimental philosophy. Much of the text involves descriptions of classic moral problems. These put to normal people and are often challenging by their nature. The most famous probably being trolley problems. These investigate what people think…
Pareto Efficiency In Markets
A key idea when analyzing markets is Pareto efficiency. This is also called Pareto optimality. Despite the name it is a simple idea. We see Pareto efficiency in markets whenever you can’t make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. There is thus a number of optimal points. Each point involves a different…
Surviving In The Misinformation Age
David Helfand has written a book designed to illuminate thinking that will help spot problems in the public discourse. He gives a guide to surviving in the misinformation age. Big Issues Around Scientific Understanding He is aiming for a popular book, but not too much. He doesn’t dumb it down. At times I felt he…
Stereotyping And Market Entry Strategy
I have a paper just published in Customer Needs and Solutions on stereotyping and market entry strategy. This paper has quite a history, with early versions arising from my dissertation (13 years ago). It was quite a journey. The final paper looks nothing like where it started. (For example, it contains a minor nod to…
Governing The Commons
Elinor Ostrom had a profound impact on research about institutions. She got the Nobel Prize in Economics. This was for her work thinking about how social affairs could be governed: Governing The Commons. Common Pool Resoruces This goes much wider than corporate governance. It speaks to how communities deal with the control of their valuable…
“Rational” Decision Making in Practice
Behavioural Economics (and related marketing research) has great potential for practical application. There are a number of things that people reliably do that cause them problems. So advice can help improve this. Presh Talwalkar has a book on improving decision making — The Irrationality Illusion — that offers some tips for making decisions more rational….
