“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field”
–Niels Bohr, Physicist 1885 – 1962
Bohr’s definition has a nice ring. It’s different from Gladwell’s 10,000 hour Outliers expert, but recognizes that those endless hours aren’t filled with infallible preaching.

It emphasizes the timeless beauty of trial and error.

I’m reading Jonah Lehrer’s How we Decide, a neurological adventure into the decision-making process. In the book, Lehrer writes about the science of trial and error. Trial and error is a cognitive training process, where, over time, we teach our brain cells to [...] Continue Reading…

My last post praised the glory of behavioral economics. I discussed how marketers can use behavioral economics to influence behavior. One example was a behavioral economist who manipulated the elements of a bank letter, like the interest rate, copy, and imagery. He discovered that the photo played a larger role than the interest rate in converting loan letters.

And it got me thinking: what about the bank itself? What if the same letter tested the brand, like Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One? What would we learn?

In short, what if behavioral economists took a critical eye to brands?

It’s a question [...] Continue Reading…

A fascinating story: a South African bank once desired to make more loans. Sendhil Mullainathan, a consultant, devised a direct mail campaign and developed a letter to mail to prospects.

Mullainathan ran a huge multi-cell test, varying several elements of the letter:
“In one corner there was a photo—varied by gender and race—of a bank employee. Different types of tables, some simple, others complex, showed examples of loans. Some letters offered a chance to win a cell phone in a lottery if the customer came in to inquire about a loan. Some had deadlines.” He also varied the typical element: loan [...] Continue Reading…

Back in 2006, I dreamed of an API from my former employer, American Express.  (Some background: what’s an API? It’s code for 3rd parties to access the inner-workings of a website. E.g., Facebook Connect, Tweetdeck, every Google Maps mash-up.)

Data-rich companies like AmEx are potential API gods–imagine the countless insights (i.e.,  AmEx has payment info on millions of transactions and customers) and hundreds of apps, from payment mash-ups to flowingdata-esque visualizations.

And of late, API popularity has surged. But it’s been, predictably, only from the big digital firms (Google, Amazon, Netflix, eBay) and small startups (Facebook, Flickr, Digg).

So it got me [...] Continue Reading…

A couple years ago, I worked on my first RFP for a small agency [1].

We received the request from a medium-sized packaged-goods company in need of a few marketing basics, like building awareness and re-engineering their inadequate marketing.

A bit of background: besides describing the agency’s estimated fees, a proposal is an opportunity to dazzle the client. Typically, it includes how you’re going to solve their problem differently than the competition.

For an entry-level, fresh out-of-college marketer, this is a wet dream. Finally, a chance to tell the old-world company how they’re doing it all wrong, describing their wasted investments in [...] Continue Reading…