Creatures of Habit

I tend to reflect on the idea of habits pretty often.

Last week, I came across a tweet by Chris Ciovacco, Founder & CEO Ciovacco Capital Management, that touched on the idea of bad habits. With behavioral economics becoming an increasingly popular topic of discussion in the finance world, I’ve found the social chatter on behavioral finance to be quite constructive. Habits are pretty powerful and in most cases a subconscious process in people. Just think, this is why companies want to have consumers form habits with their products/services (increased retention).

We, as humans, have a tendency to use habits as mental shortcuts. While habits can start off as deliberate behavior, through repetition they become automatic. In understanding the power of habits through my interest in consumer psychology, I’ve come to consciously form some good ones - whether that’s going to the gym, tracking my personal expenses, and taking time out of my week to write on here. That’s not to say I don’t have bad habits. At the end of the day, I’m aware that I’m a creature of habits - both good and bad.

How Do Habits Work?

According to Britannica.com, a habit is “any regularly repeated behaviour that requires little or no thought and is learned rather than innate”.

The habit loop is a cyclical process in which behaviors become automatic. In the first step of the habit loop, we have a trigger that serves as a reminder of our routine. Triggers can be external, in which the information for what to do next is within the trigger itself, or internal, in which we decide what do to next through internally stored information formed through associations in our memory. For example, some internal triggers could be associating 6pm with dinner time or your personal office as a productive work space.

Following the trigger is the physical, mental, emotional behavior that’s part of the routine. Finally, the reward is the feedback that tells you whether the routine is good or bad. Through the associative learning and repetition (conditioning), we create direct links in our memory between a trigger and response and make an association between a particular behavior and a consequence. The more we repeat the process, the stronger the association and more automative the behavior becomes.

A lot of our purchase decisions are based on habits. Heck, just last night I purchased my usual pre-workout supplement off of Amazon because 1) I didn’t want to invest the time to research a new and potentially better supplement and 2) it was after a long day of work and I felt mentally drained. One of the main focuses for a business is to have potential customers try their product/service to have them become repeat buyers. Having customers form habits with your product/service should be the ultimate goal, as it has the potential to benefit the businesses bottom line. Again, pretty power stuff.

The Sunk Cost Effect

Credit: The Center for Advanced Hindsight

This cartoon’s pretty brilliant.

According to WhatIs.com, the sunk cost effect is the tendency for humans to continue investing in something that clearly isn’t working. This tendency is due to time/effort/money already invested in the endeavor at hand. In the cartoon to the right, the sunk cost effect is shown by the dog’s irrational behavior to follow through with further digging even after not finding his bone after digging a bit.

This behavioral quirk is quite popular in the investing field. Instead of cutting losses, investors have an inclination to hold onto shares of a company after the shares fall in value, in hopes that the value would increase. These investors are reluctant to admit that they’ve made a bad investment and would prefer to hold onto those shares instead of reinvesting in another company.

To provide another example: I’ve recently been debating about switching my paid music streaming subscription service from Spotify Premium to Amazon Music Unlimited. Being that I’m an Amazon Prime member, my Amazon Music Unlimited subscription would cost $7.99 per month. In my current Spotify Premium plan, I’m dishing out $9.99 per month. If following rational economic theory, I would switch my subscription over to Amazon because… well, it just makes sense financially! However, in being the “irrational” consumer that I am, I haven’t switched over due to the fact that I keep thinking about all the time I’ve invested in creating my Spotify playlists - a clear case of the sunk cost effect.

Poker Face

The game of poker provides a great framework for understanding not only the problems in decision-making, but also how we can solve for them. In poker, you don't know your opponents cards and you don't know what they're thinking. In settings in which only partial information is provided, decision-making becomes difficult, tricky, and often contaminated by bias. Essentially, the decisions we encounter in our every day lives are similar to making bets in poker games in that we don’t necessarily have all the information when making decisions. Every decision is a bet.

Renowned professional poker player turned professional speaker and decision strategist, Annie Duke merges her experience in poker with her cognitive psychology graduate work at UPenn to examine decision-making. In her most recent book “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts”, Annie explains how to best manage having less than perfect information when making decisions - situations we likely find ourselves encountering on a daily basis.

I came across the above Google Talk recently. Some key take-aways from the discussion include:

• What prevents people from making good decisions? “I think it's a collision of a couple of problems. I think that the first piece is uncertainty, and uncertainty comes from two places. It comes from hidden information. So this is where we can see how poker might be a really good way to look at decision making (cards are face down).... But, even if we did have perfect information - say for example, about a coin, and we know that heads or tails it's going to flip 50% of the time, we also have the intervention of luck, which is the other form of uncertainty... The second problem is that nature, the way that our brains are built has given us a lot of rope to sort of hang ourselves with the uncertainty...”

• It would be impractical to wait to have all the necessary data to make a decision in many cases.

• There are type 1 errors and type 2 errors. Type 1 errors are false positives and type 2 errors are false negatives. As humans, we're built for false positives. We connect occurrences together and believe that there’s causality. Being that we think that things are falsely connected together, a problem arises.

• We're inherently built for tribes, which causes problems for decision-making. These “echo chambers” we live in stress the fact that people outside of our tribe are not trusted sources of information, leading to a lack of outside perspectives.

• "Motivated reasoning" is a large problem. While confirmation bias is based on a prior belief we might have, motivated reasoning is when we’re motivated to confirm the belief we have and that motivation drives our information processing. When confronted with information that disconfirms us, we’ll work hard to discredit it, and on the opposite side the coin, when confront we’re confronted with information that confirms us, we don't put any effort into discrediting it.

• After receiving the results from an unsuccessful bet, your ability to go back and analyze the decision process is distorted - aka “resulting”.

• How can we separate outcomes from decision quality? When possible, deconstruct decision before outcomes have occurred.

Ultimately, what I extracted from the Google Talk, is that approaching decisions in a probabilistic way, making sure to include the opinions of people who offer different viewpoints, and learning the right lessons from outcomes are all habits that’ll improve decision quality. If you’re a little bit better at making good decisions, that’s going to compound over time since better overall decision quality will lead to better quality outcomes.

Super-Size It

In customary, almost religious fashion, the new generation of iPhones were unveiled this last Wednesday at the annual Apple “Special Event”.

Source: Reuters

Data from social media chatter showed a lack of consumer purchase interest (and, in turn, investor sentiment) for the new models (dubbed the iPhone Xs, iPhone Xs MAX, and iPhone Xr) in comparison to previous iPhone products. While the new models don’t really offer any major breakthrough features, it caught me a little off guard when I heard one of the phones was going to be bigger than the iPhone X.

Yup. Bigger.

For someone who has a 5.5-inch sized iPhone 6 Plus that can barely fit it into the front pocket of my slacks, it was difficult to comprehend why someone would need, much less want a huge phone (the iPhone Xs Max’s 26% larger than the previous largest iPhone display, diagonally measuring 6.5 inches).

The ginormous screen size will play a pivotal role in the Chinese market. Apple has been losing market share to Samsung and their series of Galaxy Note 9 products, and hopes to tap into the larger screen size trend.

Moreover, according to a Wall Street Journal podcast episode, Apple decided to supersize the iPhone to drive profits. When it comes to consumer behavior, bigger screens means more time on the phone and more time on the phone equates to an increase in the likelihood you’ll end up downloading applications to stream media or play games. The more apps purchased, of course, means more money in Apple’s already sizable pockets.

Source: Reuters

Smart move by Apple. While the company makes the majority of their revenue from the sale of the iPhones (about two-thirds of sales comes from iPhone sales), the company is undoubtedly taking certain steps to relay less on the sales of their hardware products and make their ecosystem even sticker. With Apple making further in roads into film industry with recent film acquisitions and even eyeing a subscription offering for a bundled entertainment service package, it’s clear why analysts are forecasting continued double-digital growth for Apple’s services business arm.

Bullish sentiment much? Yeah. Like most of you guys, I’m not sure what the future holds, but my fundamental analysis of Apple puts them at the center of the consumer tech space. Could this also be why Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway decided to increase their holdings of Apple shares 5%, making them the 2nd biggest shareholder, earlier this year? Perhaps…

How Does Spotify Tap Into Consumer Psychology?

Like some media platforms nowadays (think YouTube or Pandora for example), Spotify has two principle revenue drivers within their music-as-a-service, business model: an ad-based, free streaming service and a paid premium subscription tier.

... and, in similar fashion to most platform-based tech companies, the goal of the business is to have consumers open up the app and keep them there for as long as possible. The more time we spend in the Spotify app, the more music we consume, the more the artists get paid, and Spotify takes a cut of that profit. It's a beneficial situation for us as consumers (we get to jam out to the music we like), and lucrative for the artists and Spotify.

For the last few weeks, I've been reflecting on the ways in which Spotify utilizes nudge theory on consumers to use the music platform and keep them there. One thing I came to notice between Spotify and other apps I currently have installed on my phone is the lack of Spotify mobile phone push notifications.

Push notifications serve as a great way for brands to stay top of mind and I've been wondering why Spotify doesn't send more notifications. The default notifications setting allows Spotify to send mobile phone notifications so unless you change it, you should be receiving push notifications. But, since having the the app installed on my phone for several years now, I can't recall ever receiving a push notification. Wouldn't it be useful for Spotify, if say, when one of the artists I'm following releases a new album, I'd receive a heads up from the mobile phone app so I can open the app and give the album a listen? I receive "New Release" emails from Spotify, but being how tied we are to our phones nowadays, I would think that push notifications would be a way to reach and nudge consumers into using the app.

Since push notifications aren't a major part of their strategy, how does Spotify draw you and keep you listening in the app? While I've noticed the usage of the default effect and social proof (both behavioral economics nudges) within the app, it's the familiarity heuristic that struck me as most prevalent as I conducted my user testing. More on the familiarity heuristic coming up...

Part of the value proposition of Spotify is their hyper personalization. The usage of big data provides a variety of personalized flavors of recommendations - whether it be their Discover Weekly feature or the Daily Mix playlists - and machine learning algorithms brining it all together.

That being said, we should also note the emotional connection we have with music. As humans, we have the tendency to form associations in our memory with different songs. As a result of these associations, songs becomes stimuli that have the ability set off internal triggers within ourselves, whether it be a sense of joy from the memory of a night out with friends after hearing a song played that night or a sense of depression after listening to a song that reminded you of a deceased relative.

At times we want to relive those moments. We dig up these events from our memory through associated songs, providing a sense of nostalgia and experiencing those emotions again. This is where the familiarity heuristic comes into play.

Understood to be a cognitive "rule of thumb", the familiarity heuristic is our tendency to form decisions favoring what we know (the "familiar") instead of what we don't. We understand what songs impact our moods and in what ways. There are songs that cheers us up, chill us out, and so on. Being that we have a massive selection of music to choose from on music streaming platforms, we can feel overwhelmed with the vast catalogue available. Unless you're specifically searching for new music to listen to, as music consumers we rely on the familiarity heuristic to help us decide what we end up listening to. 

When it comes to our consumption, we rely on those associated emotions to help us make that decision. Once we make a song selection, Spotify's recommended-songs feature kicks in and plays a suggested track based on the original one. In using context- and content-based data to make their suggestion, Spotify is pretty accurate in pinning down your mood and, as a result, will keep the songs aligned with your mood.

Spotify clearly has a deep understanding of not only the psychology of their consumers and the link between music and emotion (which could be one of the many reasons why Mood Playlists were made available on the Spotify platform), but also an awareness of our mobile phone usage. With users spending increasingly more time within the Spotify app, Spotify's doing something right in terms of keeping consumers engaged within the app. Instead of potentially irritating people with push notifications from another mobile phone app, Spotify's usage of machine learning is undoubtedly a strategic way to implement nudge theory on a media platform like their own.

How Moneyball Led To Understanding Behavioral Economics

Remember Moneyball? You know, the movie with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill that came out a few years ago? If you haven't seen it or don't remember what movie I'm referring to, the film was centered on the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team and their General Manager (now Executive Vice President) Billy Beane, who used an evidence-based, statistical approach to recruit undervalued baseball players and take the financially strapped team on a stellar winning streak.

What does Moneyball have to do with behavioral economics?

Well, the film's based on a book written by American Author Michael Lewis, which was published in 2003. Unbeknownst to Lewis, behavioral economics was at the core of Billy Beane analytical method, showing that statistics can do a lot better than intuitions. According to The New Yorker, Lewis read The New Yorker's book review, began to take an interest in the whole topic of human rationality, and, improbably, decided to write a book about Kahneman and Tversky. Lewis kindly even gave them credit for setting him down that path.

At this point, it'd be safe to assume that readers/behavioral economics aficionados are familiar with the names Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Unexpectedly, writing Moneyball eventually led Lewis to write his latest publication, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, the story behind the two Israeli psychologists who eventually shifted the world view from the economic theory of homo economicus to "homer economicus", aka what Dan Ariely describes as the human tendency to be predictably irrational.

Discover & share this Homer Simpson GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

I recently came across an interview featuring Lewis in which he dives into the process of writing the story of the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky. Some of the key take-aways from the interview include:

• Moneyball was about misjudging assets (in this case, baseball players). Players that looked like they were "players" or good-looking players had a tendency to be overvalued.
• "What people do together can get very interesting if the right people collaborate".
• Kahneman was "immune to social embarrassment".
• No one could see how the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky worked - "Amos had no time for difficult people. He thought life was pretty simple and he thought people were basically pretty simple and the complexity they added was mostly bullshit. But every now and then, a complicated person entered his life, because this person was complicated in an interesting way."
• Kahneman brought an artistic imagination to the work of the two scientists.
• What Amos did was take the ideas of Kahneman and try to turn it into math and logical to frame them into a way to publish them in a academic papers.
• The backdrop of Israel, being part of the Israeli army and what they saw in the war played into their insight into Prospect Theory.
• As a young Jewish boy, Kahneman and his family hid from the Nazi's in France, having decided not to go back to Israel due to his father misjudgment of the intention of the Germans.
• The unpublished study on "rules of human imagination" - People have a tendency to create alternative realities, involving "if only" statements.
• People don't decide between things. People decide between description of things. If you change the description, you change the decision.
• The ultimate point of Kahneman and Tversky's work was that "fallibility is human".
• While you can't see your mistakes, sometimes other people can. Does that mean we're condemned to a cycle where we need someone else to check our biases? Yes.

I quite enjoyed the interview and would suggest it to anyone looking for a little context behind what led to the findings of behavioral economics. Here's another book to add to my summer reading list.

UMG & Marketing in the Music Industry

I've been completely infatuated by the business of entertainment for some years now. As I reflect on my interest in this industry, I can boil it down to a couple points:

• The growth of media streaming platforms, their business models, and how the different players within the streaming ecosystems capture value

• Connected devices causing a shift in consumer behavior as it pertains to media consumption

• Monetizing intellectual properties as a form of passive income

The entertainment industry is undergoing major changes and it's all pretty exciting. 

In the back of my mind, I knew I was going to end up working in the industry soon or later. Guess it looks like it'll be sooner than later.

I'm proud to announce that I'll be working as an Artist Brand & Insights Strategist at Universal Music Group starting next month.

As I wrap up my grad program and gear up for my new role, I've been studying up on the industry. In doing so, I came across Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle music podcast - a highly recommended podcast series for anyone interested in the music industry. In the episode below, industry veteran & Music Executive Ted Joseph talks about radio promotion, retail store co-op advertising, and more during his time as Head of Marketing at Warner Music.

Social Noise: Cacophony or Symphony?

Imagine the powerful business insights you could gain from an organic form of market research where the focus group was made up entirely of people already engaging with your brand or your industry...

Is social listening the answer?

"Satisficers"

It's quite fascinating to reflect on how irrational people can be.

And it's perfectly normal to be irrational. We can't be completely rational all the time right? 

This irrationality is part of our bounded rationality. According to Herbert Simon, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1975, people have cognitive limitations and because of that, we go about making sub-optimal decisions in our everyday lives. Through this lens, people unconsciously act as "satisficers" in their decision-making, seeking to make a satisfactory decision instead than an optimal one. In order to facilitate the decision-making process, we act on instincts, habits, heuristics, cognitive illusions, and biases - leading us to "satisficing" decisions.

This is innate within all people. During this unconscious part of the decision-making process, we formulate stories - stories that support our beliefs.

Thomas Gilovich, Author and Professor of Psychology at Cornell University who has contributed to the behavioral economics field, describes these stories as a result of "Patternicity", the tendency to create meaning from events. While this evolved trait (think hunter-gatherers hearing rustling in the grass and believing it might be a predator) greatly served our ancestors, "patternicity" leads to irrationality, poor decision-making & bias.

While the topic of ethics relating to behavioral economics makes for another blog post, marketers have been using the underlying biases in "satisficers" to create effective marketing campaigns advantages for decades. From loss aversion to anchoring, there are plenty of biases for marketers to utilize. With that being said, potential consumers can offset this targeting by being "intuitive scientists" - a nice little secret from Thomas in the video above.

Image Credit: Behavioral Scientist

Driving Innovation and Brand Through Design

It's been super hectic since landing in Madrid (with having to set up a bank account, getting a Spanish cellphone, and what not before the school semester started), but I was lucky enough to catch an event put on by the IE Marketing Club on last Wednesday.

The PepsiCo: Driving Innovation and Brand Through Design event featured Mauro Porcini, SVP and Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo. During the event, Mauro explained how design creates relevant brand experience and drives innovation in today's crowded digital business environment.

People don't buy products anymore... They search holistic solutions, meaningful experiences and authentic stories.

Coming from a visual arts background, I have a pretty good grasp of how impactful design can be. In his presentation, Mauro made the point that when designing a product, brands should not only produce something aesthetically "pretty", but the brand should also stand for something. We might be inclined to choose a well-designed product over another one, but as we form deeper relationships with frequently purchased brands, we tend to purchase products that complement our self-identity, whether consciously or not. This relationship between consumer and product is referred to as a self-concept attachment, in which the product helps to establish the user’s identity.

Let's take a Tesla Model 3 as an example. When we see someone driving a Tesla, we might associate certain words with the person. Neophile. Innovative. Bright. The person who purchased the Tesla was more than likely aware of the brand association and chose to purchase the car to be associated with those same words.

Another point that I also took away from the presentation is that Mauro stated that without consumer insights, companies can't innovate. Being that getting my Master's in Market Research and Consumer Behavior, this sentence put me at ease knowing that I'm in an area of study crucial to product innovation.

After doing a bit of research on the web, I managed to find the same presentation that was given at event. Whether you're a UX designer, a brand strategist, or CPG marketer (and have about 40 minutes to spare), I'd suggest checking it out.

Biometrics Don't Lie

Reading Blink for my freshman year psychology class in college was an eye-opening experience (no pun intended). I became fascinated with psychology and the factors in decision-making. This interest has stayed with me throughout the years.

From my previously pursued career path in the visual arts, I became increasingly aware of the effects of visual aesthetic elements on emotional perceptivity. From color selection to other product design characteristics, the relationship between my design intuition and marketing elements I came across during my daily routine became increasingly evident. This interest/awareness ultimately to my newfound obsession with neuromarketing.

For those who might not know what neuromarketing is, according to Wikipedia, "neuromarketing is a field that applies the principles of neuroscience to marketing research, studying consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli". In order to measure these responses, researchers use technologies to assess how your brain and body reacts to the color of a logo or the sound the car door makes when shut, for example.

A great example of neuromarketing at work is a recent study put on by eye-tracking firm, Tobii Pro, for Toyota where they had 92 participants wear proprietary wearable eye-tracker glasses and they measured what the users paid attention to, how long they focused on something and what they ignored. The business implications were to use the results to improve the showroom car tour, an important part in the potential car customers decision-making process.

What I've learned in my experience with market research (and pretty much life in general) is that people sometimes don't/can't say what they want. This might be for various reasons (which is why running a research study with acquaintances might not be the best idea). In some cases, people can't really articulate what they want. Or perhaps, what people say isn't what they want. People are fascinating in this way and what neuroscience does is tell it how it really is. It provides a look at why people do what they do, regardless of what they say.

I recently discovered Roger Dooley's podcast and I have to admit that I'm a pretty avid fan. At one point in the recent episode, Brand Marketer Jonathan Gabay, mentions that although big data provides helpful insight in consumer behavior for marketing purposes, from a psychological point of view, neuromarketing differs from big data in that it's not how or where people click, but why they click. To quote him, "Neuromarketing is the way forward."

Saucin'

I recently came across an article on the importance of market research and felt obliged to write my personal experience with it (since I'm going to be getting my Masters in Market Research & Consumer Behavior 'n all).

I wrapped up my Peace Corps service in Morocco in April 2015. I loved my service (a topic for a future blog post), but as I got closer to the date when I was going to be back in the states, all I could think about was eating foods I wasn't able to have for over 2 years. When I came back, all the foods I had craved seemed to taste exponentially better because of my heightened attention in my consumption. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

One afternoon, my mom prepared a traditional Peruvian dish, Papa a la Huancaína. I had always been a huge fan of the lightly spicy Huancaína cheese sauce served over the potatoes and then the thought hit me: "Why isn't the sauce available for purchase as a ready-to-serve, packaged product in stores? Heck, I mean, I'd totally buy it (at the time being a single 29 year old self-proclaimed foodie/convenience-seeker)."

That idea sent me on a bit of an entrepreneurial journey to bring my mom's Huancaína sauce to market.

I had an inkling that our target demographic would be affluent foodies if the product was marketed as an organic, gluten-free product and stocked in local "healthy" grocery stores. This involved tinkering around with the recipe. And we did. But in order to see how this sauce compared to the original, I decided to learn as much as I could about market research to find out what people thought.

I came to find out that there are 2 types of data collection: quantitative (online, mail and telephone surveys) and qualitative (i.e. phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, focus groups). With the data from quantitative research being highly structured, one could use the data to recognize patterns and draw broad conclusions. Qualitative, on the other hand, is less about the volume of data you'd collect from surveying and more about capturing in-depth options and experience about your business, product, or what have you.

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My first step was to test my theory about the initial demographic I had in mind for the potential sauce product. I decided to pass out samples of the sauce, along with surveys, at farmer's markets and pretty much any place where you'd find foodie's congregate.I also just happened to be taking a Consumer Behavior and Advertising class at the San Francisco City College (CCSF) during this time, so I decided to approach my teachers with the idea of handing out samples and running surveys with their class. They agreed. The results were interesting (folks kept comparing it to Velveeta, which was a thought that had never crossed my mind), but the data was not as statistically significant as I would have liked it to be.

Next, I decided to approach the culinary department at CCSF to see if they'd be able to let me run a few focus groups with the students in the culinary program. Since they had a bit more of a refined taste palette, I thought it'd be great to get their opinions on our original sauce and the organic version. Some insights included that the organic version tasted earthy, perhaps a little too spicy, and the texture wasn't as pleasing as the original version.

Now, mind you, this was my first foray into market research. In retrospect, there were several biases in the implementation of my experimentation. But, overall, it was a fascinating learning experience. I learned how difficult it is to select the right, unbiased candidates for focus groups, how tricky it can be to create good surveys (from which you'd be able to pull valid insight from), and how powerful marketing research could be a tool for business growth. Some important reasons for a business to conduct market research include:

1. Discover who you really compete against in the marketplace (you will be surprised, I promise)
2. Uncover your differentiators
3. Find your competitive advantage
4. Learn what services your clients appreciate most, and why
5. See emerging opportunities in the marketplace
6. Adjust your marketing messages to reflect what customers really want to hear
7. Find out what your customers think about you
8. Discover which weaknesses you need to fix right away
9. Get your Net Promoter Score and find out whether your customers are likely to recommend your company to others
10. Learn how well known your business is in the marketplace
11. Explore why some customers chose to buy from another company, instead
12. Find out how your pricing compares to the competition
13. Find out how important price is to your buyers
14. Discover whether there is demand for your new product or service
15. Recognize emerging trends in the marketplace
16. Demonstrate that you care about your customers — the act of doing research shows that you are interested in them and their opinions
17. Discover the one thing your customers would change about your business
18. Find out if you are well positioned to enter a new market
19. Determine what issues you should be writing and speaking about to engage your audience and build your visibility
20. Find out whether internal perceptions about your company match external perceptions
21. Learn how your customers find you
22. Find out why your customers chose you over a competitor
23. See if your customers are aware of all of your key products or services
24. Find out what you are known for in the marketplace
25. Benchmark your business against competitors in your industry

After a couple months of research, we decided on shifting the business model from sauce production company to an import & distribution company. I had to dissolve the business because of my move to Madrid for my masters program, but lots more market research posts coming up in the near future.

Building Trust in a Digital World

I had the chance to attend an American Marketing Association event last night. Leveraging digital tools, Paolo Parigi (Lead Trust Scientist at Uber and Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University) gave a presentation on the topic of trust - an important psychological factor in business, specifically within the sharing economy. His methodology, referred to as an online field experiment (ofe), in assessing how interactions and user experience creates, increases, or decreases trust and how to discover which is happening and what might be causing it, involved the usage of investment games. Below are a few snapshots I managed to capture during the presentation. Parigi addressed certain scenarios when it would be best to use ofe's and, taking into consideration how varied trust can build across different cultures, acknowledged that ofe results would vary across countries. All in all, an insightful presentation.

Madrid's A-Callin'

Looks like I'm moving to Madrid to get my Masters in Market Research & Consumer Behavior.