Happy Monday morning!
Today’s Curio includes:
🧠 Every product needs an enemy. [Consumer Insight]
🚀 Writing better emails. [Leadership]
🤖 Decision Intelligence is coming to your company soon. [Digital Trend]
👩🔬 Top 5 factors that drive brand loyalty. [Market Research]
💡 How a bicycle helmet DTC brand is using Shopify to grow globally. [Case Study]
🧠 Every product needs an enemy. And here's why.
People don't change their behaviour unless their point of view is changed.
And we're bloody stubborn at sticking to our opinions.
We carry a mental file with our fears, desires, assumptions, and knowledge of everyone and everything. And anytime we're reminded of it, we quickly reach out for that file and make a decision based on what's in it.
In the short run, our decisions are consistent with our existing beliefs. Over time, as the content in these files changes, so do our opinions, but that change is slow.
There’s a quicker way to get people to change their minds. Prompt them to create and test competing point-of-views aka Disrupt-Then-Reframe.
And for decades, marketers have been using this technique in advertising.
For example, in their longest-running 'Priceless' campaign, MasterCard disrupts viewing shopping on credit as buying things you can't afford and reframes it as doing something special for the people you love.
And the whole planet went awwww!
It’s one of my favourites examples of creating a conflict (shopping on credit) and resolving it (doing something special).
Every campaign needs conflict.
Otherwise, your ads won't get anyone to change their opinions. And you won't get them to stop doing whatever they're doing right now and buy your product.
Yet most marketing briefs purposefully stay away from conflict. God forbid we scare someone away.
And then we're surprised why people don't click our ads and those who do, don't buy anything.
Your product needs an enemy.
It needs to save people from the tyranny of wasted time, hidden costs, harmful chemicals, plastic waste, vendor locking, uncertainty, anxiety, loneliness - literally anything that’s keeping them from moving forward.
Pick a fight. Playing it safe is nice, but safe doesn't change minds. It doesn't turn spectators into customers.
🚀 How to communicate clearly in your emails.
Emails are a bit of a menace.
There are hardly any good books on productivity without an entire chapter on the evils of a mismanaged inbox.
I’ll be honest with you. I love emails.
Because a well-written email can:
Save you from hours of meaningless labour.
It beats IMs when it comes to sharing important information.
It promotes autonomy and critical thinking across the team.
But all emails don’t do that.
Most emails read like poorly strung together IMs, mostly incoherent and largely void of any critical thought.
So, let’s start with the basics.
An email is not a journal entry. It’s a tool to help you tell people;
what they need to know and
what they need to do.
Stick to that. Use the two jobs as headlines if it helps.
And once you’re done writing, wring it through the nine standards of critical thinking.
Clarity
Accuracy
Precision
Relevance
Depth
Breadth
Logic
Significance
Fairness
Emails are not an information dump. Every message from you should inform and inspire people to think—chuck out everything that doesn’t fit the bill.
🤖 What is Decision Intelligence? (In 100 words or less.)
By 2023, more than a third of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence, including decision modeling. - Gartner
Personal biases, personal ambitions and external pressures influence our decisions.
Decision Intelligence is a structured approach to integrating data, analytics and AI into organisational decision making. DI is the commercial application of AI to the decision-making process.
According to the co-founder of Peak - a Decision Intelligence platform:
[DI] is the most important software category for a generation and will change how the world works.
Learn more:
Introduction to Decision Intelligence by Cassie Kozyrkov.
What is Decision Intelligence by Richard Porter.
👩🔬 Quality and sense of community drive brand loyalty.
💡 How Spotify is powering global growth for small DTC brands with their nimble tech stack.
Challenge: Global e-commerce sales are expected to grow up to $6,4 billion by 2024. Beyond selling great products, DTC brands are struggling with adapting to the challenges that come with growth and the changing needs of their customers.
Solution: DTC brands are building nimble tech stacks for everything from funnel optimisation to improving customer retention and inventory management using app integrations.
Results: L.A. based Thousand implemented a Back-in-Stock alert app that notifies customers when an item is available again via email, helping them save over $70,000 of otherwise lost revenue in 2021.
Stay curious!
Aliyar