Walter Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test is a really enjoyable book. His is a long career and he has numerous studies to draw upon. The whole area has suffered a few attacks (written in 2021 but there are still ideas one should know. (Of course, never get too obsessive about details of out work as our understanding, hopefully,…
Rationality And The Republican Autopsy
Political marketing is about giving voters what they want so one must have some notion of how voters think. With a colleague, June Cotte, I wanted to uncover how political marketers think voters think. The specific question we looked at was: “do political marketers think voters are rational?” What can we say about rationality and the Republican autopsy? Lack Of Clarity…
Are Free Markets Discovered Or Created?
A key social science question is: Are Free Markets Discovered Or Created? This has surprisingly large political consequences. For example, what is the role of government? How much does it create the conditions for prosperity, or should it just get out of the way? Market Design Market Design is the study of what makes for…
Experimenters And Economists
Advocates for more behavioural approaches to understanding economics often use experiments. These typically show people acting in strange ways. Or at least that violate the principles of traditional economics. (Maybe the people are normal and the principles weird). A key thing is that experimenters and economists can be the same people. There is much potential uniting these…
The Last Mile: Implementing Your Wonderful Strategy
Dilip Soman’s The Last Mile is an excellent book. It reiterates fascinating points that are commonly found in behavioral (economics) books. What sets the book apart? The effective structure put to the insights. There are plenty of classifications and tables. These help us better understand the vast number of behavioral insights that the book contains. Test Your Ideas Other interesting points…
Uncovering The Message In The Mess Of Big Data
This week I’m focusing on research that I’ve co-authored with Xin Wang in Business Horizons. We called this ‘Uncovering the Message in the Mess of Big Data’. Our article aims to explain to managers how they can work out what the messages are in large amounts of data. What Data Should You Look At? The classic application…
Why Even The Best Economists Don’t Get Marketing
George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have good points, excellent stories, and a clear aim in Phishing for Phools. The aim is to convince economist colleagues that all market outcomes aren’t perfect. I applaud their aim. That said, their conceptualization assumes consumers (and others) are robots with a monkey on our backs. The monkey prevents us from being “fully rational”. I’d say, however, that we…
How Do We Determine Author Order?
Academics enjoy splitting into obscure little groups. What is more they rarely agree about what is interesting. Perhaps the only thing we can agree on is that academics, and the problems facing academics, are fascinating. A major problem for academics is determining author order on joint works. Academic Teams Most academic articles are created by teams. Given that, in marketing…
A Couple Of Word Clouds To Better Understand Marketing
I thought it’d be helpful to share a couple of word clouds to better understand marketing. Word clouds are sometimes looked down upon by academics but they can be very simple visual ways to summarize text. Are they deep analysis, no, but they are a fun place to start. Word Clouds To Better Understand Marketing:…
Word Clouds And Marketing Thought
Word clouds are a useful way of condensing large amounts of text. Obviously, they don’t perfectly describe complex ideas but they can highlight what a text is about in an easy-to-digest manner. Word clouds typically let the number of times a word is used dictate its size in the cloud. Interesting colors and exotic placement of the words allow for…
