Real Case Stories

<image generated by chatgpt> Have you ever wondered why in certain states women are far more empowered and educated than others in India? If you look at the southern states Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Karnataka and a few other states like West Bengal you would find that women in these states are far more empowered, educated and you would find quite a few of them in the workforce.  Renowned author Devdutt Pattanaik has explored the idea of the “politics of grain” in India by comparing the experiences of North and South Indian women. He reflects on how the dominance of rice in the South and wheat in the North may relate to women’s access to time and education. According to him, rice requires less preparation time  He suggests that this may be one reason literacy and education levels among women are generally higher in the South compared to the North.  He says "South Indian women make RICE. So have more time to study. The rice boils and stays warm on its own on the ...

In a study, 402 9th- and 10th-grade students from four New York City high schools in low-income areas  were divided into three groups.  Group 1 read an 800-word typical science textbook description about the great accomplishments of Einstein, Curie and Michael Faraday, an English scientist who made important discoveries about electromagnetism. Group 2 read about those scientists’ personal struggles, including Einstein’s flight from Nazi Germany to avoid persecution as a Jew.  The third group of students read about the scientists’ intellectual struggles, such as Curie’s persistence despite a string of failed experiments. The struggle stories included actions the scientists took to overcome these hurdles. At the end of a six-week grading period, students who learned about the scientists’ intellectual or personal struggles had significantly improved their science grades, with low-achievers benefiting the most. The students in the control group who only learne...

The dollar auction is a non-zero sum sequential game designed by economist Martin Shubik, a pioneer of game theory,  to illustrate a paradox brought about by traditional rational choice theory in which players are compelled to make an ultimately irrational decision based completely on a sequence of apparently rational choices made throughout the game, also known as "escalation of commitment" src wiki A one dollar bill is put up for auction with the following rule: the bill goes to the winner, however the second bidder also loses the amount that he bids. The winner can get a dollar for a mere 5 cents, but only if no one else enters into the bidding war. The second-highest bidder is the biggest loser by paying the top amount they bid without getting anything back. The game begins with one of the players bidding 5 cents (the minimum), hoping to make a 95-cent profit. They can be outbid by another player bidding 10 cents, as a 90-cent profit is still desirable. Similar...

The Pizza Principle, or the Pizza-Subway Connection, in New York City, is a humorous but generally historically accurate "economic law" proposed by native New Yorker Eric M. Bram. He noted, as reported by The New York Times in 1980, that from the early 1960s "the price of a slice of a plain, cheese or regular pizza has matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of a New York subway ride." In 1985, the late writer, historian, and film critic George Fasel learned of the correlation and wrote about it in an op-ed for The New York Times. The term "Pizza Connection" referring to this phenomenon was coined in 2002 by New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman, who commented on the two earlier publications of the theory in the Times, and predicted a rise in subway fare. In May 2003, The New Yorker magazine proclaimed the validity of the Pizza Connection (now called the pizza principle) in accurately predicting the rise of the subway (and bus) fare to $2.00 ...

In his book,  Breaking Bad Habits: Defy Industry Norms and Reinvigorate Your Business , author Frank Vermeulen cites a case where the good intentions of the government actually fell flat on its face. The UK government had mandated all IVF clinics to publish their success rates which went up on a Government website. People then started treating this database as a ranking. The website was the government's good intention to implement transparency to empower patients and help them in decision making. What the government failed to factor in was that a clinic's success rate wasn't just dependent on their competency but also affected by the quality of the women. Younger women would probably have a higher chance of getting pregnant over someone who is 40 plus. However, what this resulted in was that clinic's started favoring patients who were most likely to get pregnant and rejected difficult cases. On the other hand, clinics who had expertise in treating difficult cases...

Black Friday  is an informal name for the day following  Thanksgiving Day in the United States , the fourth Thursday of November. It is regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.  In the 1980s , the term “Black Friday” began to be used by retailers to refer to the single day of the year when retail companies finally go “into the black” (make a profit) after being "in the red" for much of the year. Research shows that consumers would choose to shop on Black Friday again, only if their last year's experience brought them pride rather than regret.  For a consumer who bags a bargain in the sale only to find the item was further discounted at a later date, the initial feeling of pride may be tempered by the regret at having bought it too soon and not receiving an even bigger discount.   Source: The Psychology of Black Friday - how Pride and Regret influence Spending by Shalini Vohra The opposite is true, however, i f a consumer was app...

Watch the video to know how: Buy a copy of 'Catlin the Artist Shooting Buffalos with Colt's Revolving Pistol' ca. 1855 on Amazon.com Source: Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) by Herbert G. Houze 10 Things You May Not Know About Samuel Colt by Christopher Klein Samuel Colt and George Catlin: Art and Product Placement by Rsimonse Catlin the Celebrated Indian Traveller and Artist, Firing his Colt's Repeating Rifle Before a Tribe of Carib Indians in South America Americans Really Like Their Guns by Kim Hjelmgaard

What do you see in the image above? Is it a diamond? Is it a rhombus? Or is it a square, rotated  45°? In 2008, Kraft Foods Canada capitalized on this confusion to revitalize a 78-year-old brand, Shreddies. Sales of this popular breakfast cereal had stagnated. According to a consumer research done in its Canadian market, customers wanted the brand to refresh itself without it changing anything.  How to increase sales of a product that is loved by its customers just the way it is? Kraft Foods accepted the challenge and launched the new & improved Shreddie, the 'Diamond Shreddies'. Hunter Somerville's idea, an intern with Kraft Food's creative agency Ogilvy & Mather Canada, became the basis of this campaign - an 'angular upgrade' to the original Shreddie, devised by a team of 'cereal scientists'.  Diamond Shreddies: Original Square Shreddie rotated 45° Packs of 'Diamond Shreddies' was launched with much fanfare. The ...

Source: The Legend of the Potato King , New York Times Blog Why the King had to Rebrand potatoes in 1774? by Sydney Burrows Consumer Behaviour and the Potato by Maud Evelyn Potato , Wikipedia

Our sense of sound, sight, touch, taste, self-motion, and smell don't work independently. Professor Charles Spence  of Oxford University has conclusively proved the intimate connection between our senses. He is, in fact, a leader in the field of Senseploration - the investigation of how our senses mingle and interconnect.  Marketing departments and product-design agencies have increasingly started using Spence's findings. In 2006, the FMCG giant Unilever commissioned a study to find whether volume and pitch of the sound from an aerosol affected a person's perception of the pleasantness or forcefulness of the deodorant inside. Based on the findings, the company invested in a packaging redesign for Axe deodorant , complete with new nozzle technology. The underarm spray, which is targeted at young men, now sounds noticeably louder than the company’s gentler, female-targeted Dove brand See how you score on this sensory test ! Source: Accounting f...

M&M's are part of the main operational food ration for the US Armed Forces. The candies have been part of NASA's every space shuttle mission since Columbia 1981 and are also on the International Space Station menu. Do you know why? Because the candy "melts in your mouth--not in your hand!"  In 1932, confectioner Forrest Mars Sr. moved to England and began manufacturing the Mars bar for troops in the United Kingdom. He  was looking to solve a key consumer problem of the time before air-conditioning: chocolate bars melted in the heat, so Americans stopped buying them.  During the Spanish Civil War , he  saw soldiers eating the British made  Smarties , a color-varied sugar-coated   chocolate   confect ionery , as part of their rations. Mars was thrilled by the unique construct of these candies and knew it to be the perfect solution to the sales slump that hit the family business every summer.  He returned to the Un...

In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses,  Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans , featuring 44 kit-house styles ranging in price from the US $360–$2,890. That's the equivalent of US $9,147-$73,431 today .  Cover of 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog As Sears mail-order catalogs were in millions of homes, large numbers of potential homeowners were able to open a catalog, see different house designs, visualize their new home and then purchase it directly from Sears.  Sears reported that more than 70,000 of these homes were sold in North America between 1908 and 1940. In late 1918, Sears conducted a “race,” building two houses, a Sears Honor Built the pre-cut kit home and an identical house with no pre-cut lumber.  The pre-cut Honor Bilt Rodessa was the easy winner in this race, with 231 hours to spare (compared to the stick-built house).  Today, those two houses are still standing side by side as Sears struggles ...

Brands are potent, valuable and rare. Successful brands drive consumer loyalty, creating long-term economic benefits and confirming with the definition of an asset. However, as late as the 1980s accountancy was unable to accommodate these assets.  In 1984 News Group, the Australian flagship company of Rupert Murdoch's worldwide publishing empire  decided to take pre-emptive action to correct this accounting anomaly and included a valuation  for ‘publishing titles’ in its balance sheet.  News Corporation did this because, being an acquisitive company, it had to find a way adjust its acquired "goodwill". Following the accounting standards of the day - deduct acquired goodwill from shareholder equity - would have ravaged the corporation's balance sheet. Thus, News Group reduced the acquired goodwill by treating the brands as acquired assets.  Following the lead of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the British Bakeries and foods comp...

As of 2015, Costco was the  second largest retailer in the world  after  Walmart  and its stock had soared more than 5,000 percent since going public in the mid-1980s. However, this store doesn't install signs in its aisles. It rather lets it's customers wander in the store, looking for the things they intend to buy while browsing through stuff that they "notice" on the way.  Poor customer experience, right? Wrong! Costco, in fact, has mastered the psychology behind shopping.  Costco constantly changes the location of its top-selling products - such as light bulbs, detergent, and paper towels - forcing the customers to search storewide. And as logic dictates, t he more time consumers spend ambling around the store,  the more likely  they are to spend. Costco rotates upward of 25% of its hard-goods and its products. The result is that, of the 3,600 items for sale, a full 1,000 may be offered only for that particular moment ...

Founded in 1851, Corning Inc. is one of the world's biggest glassmakers today. It boasts of annual sales of nearly $10 billion and billions in annual profits. Developer and manufacturer of the now ubiquitous Gorilla Glass , Corning is another sterling example of a "superstar" firm. Corning has had a rich history of working with innovators from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. In fact, innovation is one of the key values driving Corning's business strategy. Corning regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D ; to maintain and further it's technological leadership. And that's in good times  and  in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning's stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity. Corning has continuously reinvented itself – moving fro...

Mail was the internet before the internet. The mail-order firms like Sears were able to penetrate underserved rural areas by leaning on the then-new infrastructures, such as the railroads that linked far-flung regions of the country.  One of the first mail-order launched in 1872, sixteen years before the famous Sears catalog , was Montgomery Ward.  Aaron Montgomery Ward  conceived of the idea of dry goods mail-order business in Chicago, Illinois, after he observed that rural customers often wanted "city" goods. The first catalog consisted of an 8 in × 12 in (20 cm × 30 cm) single-sheet price list, listing 163 items for sale with ordering instructions for which Ward had written the copy. By 1883, the company's catalog, which became popularly known as the "Wish Book", had grown to 240 pages and 10,000 items.  In 1888, Richard Wareen Sears started a business selling watches through mail order catalogs. The ...

Content marketing began long before the internet.  Radio was an early adopter of content marketing. And one of the most prominent examples of this type of advertising is the  soap opera . In fact, content marketing led to the creation of the monicker "soap" opera.  In the golden age of radio, advertisers sponsored entire programs, usually with some sort of message like "We thank our sponsors for making this program possible", airing at the beginning or end of a program. One of the most successful examples of such advertising is  Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins - In 1933,  P&G chose it's brand Oxydol to sponsor its first radio serial, Ma Perkins .   The fifteen minute show ran five days a week and mentioned Oxydol's name twenty to twenty-five times during each episode. P&G received 5,000 letters complaining about Ma Perkins within the first week. But by the end of the first year, sales had doubled. In fact, t his commitment is regard...

When we look at a scene, our eyes move around quickly, 70 to 100 times a second , locating anything noteworthy.  This visual input is translated into a mental memory map by our brains. These quick eye movements are called saccades .  Saccadic movement is what causes Change Blindness :  a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when humans  fail to detect seemingly obvious changes to scenes around them .  Example of images that can be used in a change blindness task As a result when we see we unconsciously focus on areas that our evolutionary biases deem important (often anything moving fast , anything that looks like a living thing that may be a potential friend or foe). The brain automatically fills in the rest of the details from its memory map — often disregarding details that it thinks it has seen before.  "The Door Study" a 1998 study by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin is the one of the most popular study to demonstrate how change b...

The Bulova Corporation, formerly called Bulova Watch Company, is considered to be the pioneer of modern marketing techniques. Bulova Logo In 1926, when radio was a new phenomenon and not many understood the power of this new advertising medium, Bulova ran the first known radio commercial, "At the tone, it's 8 P.M., B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova time". In the 1930s, 40s, Bulova were sponsors of all of the top twenty radio shows of the time. During this same period, Bulova became the first watch and clock manufacturer to start spending more than $1 million a year on advertising.  It wasn't a surprise, thus, when in 1941 television advertising became legal, Bulova produced the first-ever TV commercial. This 10-second commercial depicted a Bulova clock and the map of the United States with the live voice-over  "America runs on Bulova time." This ad cost Bulova all of $9 , which in today's money is $150 , and was watched by 4000 Americans. Apart...

Over 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt warned against the growing control of a handful of corporate giants, a small group of "superstar" companies—some old, some new—are once again dominating the global economy. As per a 2015 Mckinsey Global Institute report , 10% of the world’s public companies generate 80% of all profits. What's most intriguing is that the gap between these few “superstar” firms and the rest is growing .  But what makes these "superstars" thrive? These firms are known to invest in their core skills so as to relentlessly pursue their long-term goals. And thus it turns out, that a remarkable number of superstar companies are family owned or run by dominant owners who can resist the pressure for short-term results. The last single-arch McDonald's sign in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, modified to mention the drive-thru, dismantled in 2016 For an example, we can turn to McDonald’s. In 1948, the fast-food joint was already a succes...