Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 14, 2012 · 10:13 am

Na Na Na Na

We do food on Friday here on the screed and I’m starting to think we ought to do golf on Mondays since now that it’s golf season I seem to find golf themes to start the week. I’m not sure if any of you watched The Players over the weekend but it contained a fascinating study in psychology. We talk a lot in golf about it being a mental game. Bob Jones, a golfing icon, summed it up perfectly:

MARANA, AZ - FEBRUARY 22: Kevin Na watches pl...

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course…the space between your ears.

There was no better example of this than Kevin Na during The Players.  It’s a great business lesson too.  For the uninitiated, The Players is often referred to as the fifth major.  Whether it is or not, it’s a big deal in the golf world and it draws a top field.  Kevin Na is a young (28) golfer who turned pro out of high school and won for the first time not long ago.  He was probably best known for carding a 16 on a hole last year (which he did with great grace and a smile, by the way).  What is unusual about him is that he struggles to start his golf swing.  There’s no way to describe it so I’ll show you:

It’s painful, and what’s even weirder is that once he did manage to swing he was playing well enough to be leading the tournament into the final round.  It’s a great example of how often our worst enemies lie within us, both on the golf course and in the office.  How many of us spend time negotiating against ourselves rather than the other party in a deal and deliver worse deal terms than we might otherwise have got?  How many of us operate without a plan or without regard to data that might prove useful?  How many of us let our fears of failure undermine our abilities to function, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence (like Na’s scorecard) that says we’re doing well?

Part of our ability as businesspeople is our mental capacity, which includes the ability to shut off our brains when we need to and just let our other skills take over.  To a certain extent, we need to get outside of our heads in order to let our brains function.  I’ve had the experience of feeling as if I’m watching myself give a presentation to a few hundred people, one for which I’ve prepared diligently.  My head got out of my brain’s way.  Hopefully Na, who seems like a good guy, can use this experience to do the same.  How about you?

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May 11, 2012 · 11:51 am

Eating With Our Eyes

Let’s end the week on this Foodie Friday with some scientific evidence that support the notion that we eat with our eyes.  I know you’re all up for spending the weekend reading a scientific paper.  I’ve got one with the lightweight title of Visual-Gustatory Interaction: Orbitofrontal and Insular Cortices Mediate the Effect of High-Calorie Visual Food Cues on Taste Pleasantness which we can sum up pretty simply:

There is evidence that the mere viewing of food images activates taste-related brain areas and elicits expectations about the taste and hedonic aspects of the food .  This is not surprising because visual cues constitute a primary sensory input indicating the pre-ingestive availability and palatability of food.

Then again:

Notwithstanding, the sense of taste provides a major input for food perception.

So you can dazzle them with your presentation, but ultimately you need to deliver on the promise.  Which is pretty much the business point too.  To a certain extent, we can create anticipation through the careful use of visual presentation and we might even be able to get some folks to ignore the actual quality of what we deliver.  Over time, however, substance matters.

I suppose there is an analogy to be drawn between the food study (when we see delicious food, the part of the brain responsible for providing the feedback we interpret as yummy taste kicks in) and good-looking job candidates.  The study food study found that regardless of the actual quality of the food you eat afterward, your brain interprets it as tastier, more delicious food than you would if you didn’t see those images.  I wonder if attractive people get a break in hiring and performance evaluations?

Maybe, actually:

Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women.

That’s from a study last year.  I think we all like to believe that looks don’t matter when we judge an employee’s or vendor’s performance on the job but maybe the food study hints at the contrary?   Funny what we learn from food…

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May 10, 2012 · 8:58 am

More News From The Digital Divide

Another week, another study on how marketers are trying to keep pace with the changes in consumer media behavior.  This one comes from PulsePoint, a digital ad tech company, and finds that the same issues others have discovered over the last few years remain unsolved for the most part.  You can download a copy of the study here.  I think this quote sums up the key finding:

According to PulsePoint CMO Rose Ann Haran, “Consumers are moving freely across channels and devices, interacting with brands and content in real-time.  The digital industry is not flowing as easily with this liquid audience. Channel-centric technologies and processes are causing a divide between our marketing capabilities and our ability to truly engage the consumer in a real-time interactive manner.”

In other words, consumers are “fluid” and “channel-agnostic,” while the current state of digital marketing practices designed to reach them can be best described as being too “channel-centric.” It goes on to cite “overwhelming complexity” and a “lack of unified measurement” as key challenges in preventing the industry from being properly aligned with the consumer, and those challenges make it difficult to track consumers across channels.

My first reaction was “oh, boo hoo.”  Yes, those pesky consumers keep changing their habits and the ongoing game of attention hide-and-seek can be really frustrating.  But look at the opportunities that game has fostered, both in terms of new businesses that have emerged as well as new ways to engage consumers.  What this is really about is marketers’ inability to change their own business methods and models as rapidly as required.  Planning and buying are “silo-ed” in the words of the study.  There is a whiff of turf wars throughout, in my opinion – departments within agencies, agencies vs. one another, creative v. media – you know the drill.  Maybe you even live it!

Then there’s this: “Other factors driving the divide include a misalignment of priorities the industry sees as important to improving their digital marketing practices.”  It’s nice that research such as this is conducted regularly.  It’s an excellent mirror to those of us who are charged with staying in touch with and engaging consumers.  Now, let’s commit to doing something about it so the divide between marketing and those it’s meant to reach closes a lot more rapidly.

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