Perhaps the most famous is Sheena Iyengar’s 1995 “jam jar study“, which showed a 4x increase in options decreased purchases by 85%.
Iyengar’s study is not alone. Barry Schwartz’s excellent book The Paradox of Choice covers the problem in detail. Of particular interest is his discussion of how choice affects buyer’s remorse. The more choices you consider, the more likely you’ll be to regret your decision, and the less satisfied you’ll be.
Category Archives: Marketing
Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful
What happens, though, if sellers try to reduce the load that advertising carries, by “efficiently” targeting some users and not others? As a member of the audience, the more likely it is that the ad you’re seeing is custom-targeted to you, the less information the advertiser is able to convey. With good enough targeting, you could be the one poor loser who they’re trying to stick with the last obsolete unit in the warehouse.
via Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful.
Today, though, we have different norms and technologies around security. A .EXE in email will get quarantined, filtered, or buried under layers of warnings.
The same thing is happening with privacy problems. Browser developers are steadily closing the bugs that make creepy tracking possible. And yes, that makes some advertising techniques obsolete, the same way that corporate virus checkers killed off the animated .EXE Christmas card business.
But if you want to send customers a holiday greeting, you still can. And after the web fixes its privacy bugs, you’ll still be able to advertise. It will just work better.
Ciena Packs New 10-Gig Punch
The 5160 and 5142 Service Aggregation Switches are aimed at making it more economical for service providers to offer 10-Gig Ethernet services, a rapidly growing category of Ethernet today, says Mike Adams, VP of Product & Technical Marketing at Ciena. The new boxes also target the internal bandwidth needs of large enterprises in datacenters, and they are designed for outdoor deployment so service providers can push more bandwidth closer to their customers and use these switches as aggregation points.
via Ciena Packs New 10-Gig Punch | Light Reading.
By deploying pairs of 5160s in core network locations such as Central Offices, Ritter has been able to have carrier-grade redundancy with dual homing for fiber-optic rings while achieving the same throughput as a much more expensive 10 Gig core switch, he says.
All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
On one level, of course, this world of aspirational business affiliation is nothing new. LinkedIn merely digitizes the core, and frequently cruel, paradox of networking events and conferences. You show up at such gatherings because you want to know more important people in your line of work—but the only people mingling are those who, like you, don’t seem to know anyone important. You just end up talking to the sad sacks you already know. From this crushing realization, the paradoxes multiply on up through the social food chain: those who are at the top of the field are at this event only to entice paying attendees, soak up the speaking fees, and slip out the back door after politely declining the modest swag bag. They’re not standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.
via All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go | Ann Friedman | The Baffler.
In the same vein, actual business acumen and leadership skills usually take a back seat in the LinkedIn system to simple digital renown. Some of the best-known gurus on the site have had the most success in the realm of . . . thinking about stuff.
Apple Underwhelms in China, Too
At 4,488 Yuan Renminbi (US$734) for the 16GB version, the iPhone might be within reach of well-heeled consumers in Beijing and Shanghai but is unlikely to win over punters in so-called third-tier cities and beyond, who have never owned a smartphone.
via Apple Underwhelms in China, Too | Light Reading.
In another online poll (again in Chinese, naturally), more than 80 percent said the price was too high.
Chic marketing may be wearing off the Apple brand.
Instagram “likes” worth more than stolen credit cards
In the latest twist, a computer virus widely used to steal credit card data, known as Zeus, has been modified to create bogus Instagram “likes” that can be used to generate buzz for a company or individual, according to cyber experts at RSA, the security division of EMC.
These fake “likes” are sold in batches of 1,000 on hacker forums, where cybercriminals also flog credit card numbers and other information stolen from PCs. According to RSA, 1,000 Instagram “followers” can be bought for $15 and 1,000 Instagram “likes” go for $30, whereas 1,000 credit card numbers cost as little as $6.
via Instagram “likes” worth more than stolen credit cards | News | PC Pro.
What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online?
Sometimes, that will mean exploiting people who are not of a particular class, say upcharging men for flowers if a computer recognizes that that he’s looking for flowers the day after his anniversary. But other times there could be troubling equity concerns. For example, Calo points to the work of NYU professor Oren Bar-Gill who has shown how companies can use complexity in credit-card contracts, mortgages, and cell-phone contracts to “hinder or distort competition and impose outsized burden on the least sophisticated consumers.” Calo says such price-discrimination tactics, applied en masse online, could “lead to regressive distribution effects,” also known as preying on the vulnerable.
via What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online? – Rebecca J. Rosen – The Atlantic.
From the paper, Digital Market Manipulation
A new theory of digital market manipulation reveals the limits of consumer protection law and exposes concrete economic and privacy harms that regulators will be hard-pressed to ignore. This Article thus both meaningfully advances the behavioral law and economics literature and harnesses that literature to explore and address an impending sea change in the way firms use data to persuade.
The Locust Economy
Once locusts acquire an informed kind of market mobility through better discovery mechanisms, they can range over a much larger area of wheat fields or restaurants. You can continuously derive savings at the expense of other economic actors wheat farmers or restaurant owners.
via The Locust Economy.
To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up.
Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business.
Microsoft is cutting the price of its Surface RT tablets, base model to cost $349
The new Surface RT prices are detailed below.
- Surface RT 32GB – $349.99
- Surface RT 64GB – $449.99
- Surface RT 32GB with Touch Cover – $449.99
- Surface RT 64GB with Touch Cover – $549.99
via Microsoft is cutting the price of its Surface RT tablets, base model to cost $349 | The Verge.
Still too high. I can get a decent laptop at Microcenter for $350 and if I want to go small there are plenty of under $200 tablets. The Surface looks and feels like what they used to call a netbook. Those didn’t do so well in the market. I can’t imagine doing real work on one of those. It’s hard enough with a laptop. The size of the QWERTY keyboard is a big factor in productivity IMHO.
The hot new technology in Big Data is decades old: SQL
Over the past six months, vendors have responded to the demand for more corporate-friendly analytics by announcing a slew of systems that offer full SQL query capabilities with significant performance improvements over existing Hive/Hadoop systems. These systems are designed to allow full SQL queries over warehouse-size data sets, and in most cases they bypass Hadoop entirely (although some are hybrid approaches). Allowing much faster SQL queries at scale makes big data analytics accessible by many more people in the enterprise and fits in with existing workflows.
via The hot new technology in Big Data is decades old: SQL | Ars Technica.