Curio #51
Happy Monday morning!
I hope you glide through this week and straight into the Christmas weekend like a newly oiled sled on freshly fallen snow. Take some time for yourself; you’ve earned it.
Today’s Curio includes:
🧠 This week’s Big Insight.
🤖 Why Nike bought RTFKT. [Digital Trend]
👩🔬 When buying green is inconvenient. [Market Research]
💡 2x more subscribers with GA4F. [Case Study]
🧠 The Big Insight
In an experiment, one group of people was reminded of how having insurance can protect their wealth in an accident.
Another group were primed to think about paying for insurance and never needing it.
No real money was lost or saved.
Yet the just thought of losing their hard-earned cash convinced the first group that they needed insurance and the other that it was a scam.
It doesn’t even have to be YOUR money.
A different study found that salespeople who feared rejection, harsh criticism, or losing reputation became less creative and more risk-averse.
Furthermore, it doesn’t even have to happen to YOU.
Often hearing (or reading) about how someone else regretted a poor decision is enough to make you more risk-averse.
Here’s your Big Consumer Insight for this week:
We want to have nice things but not as much as we want to avoid risking our peace of mind today or in the future.
Thankfully, risk aversion can be reduced by showcasing one option as less risky than all others.
McKinsey does this by celebrating its clients.
Management consultants are expensive, and the projects can be risky.
And you don’t want to be the executive who burned cash on hiring fancy consultants for nothing.
By showcasing the success of their clients and projects in countless blogs, articles, podcasts, and books, McKinsey creates social proof that their consultants have done it all before successfully.
🤖 Nike bought RTFKT; a company that makes sneakers for the metaverse.
Richard Lawler writes;
“One comparison I’ve heard repeatedly over the last year is that buying NFTs to ‘flex’ on people in the metaverse is just like collecting sneakers, and now Nike is apparently trying to make sure it’s ready for the literal version of that possibility.”
Nike is buying into a world where blockchains will have access to the virtual merch we own and bring them to our avatars wherever they are.
Even though NFT’s sold for millions of dollars only months ago and are now waiting to be resold for much less, virtual products are on their way to a less volatile economy within games and virtual events.
👩🔬 Dear brands, don’t judge me for not buying green. It’s inconvenient.
In the UK, as many as 82% of customers say that more people should use reusable coffee cups, and 57% want coffee shops to charge a fee for using disposable cups.
As a result, some coffee chains in the UK now offer rewards to customers for bringing reusable cups.
But do more people bring disposable cups to cafés that offer rewards?
Nope.
There’s always a gap between our beliefs and our actions. Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance.
And this tension drives our opinions and behaviours.
Researchers suggest that brands nudge us every time we get stuck.
And instead of tough love, remove the five barriers keeping us from putting our money where our mouth is:
The economic barrier.
The knowledge barrier.
The convenience barrier.
The performance barrier.
The trust barrier.
💡 ZEE5 increased transaction value by 125% and 2X subscriptions with GA for Firebase.
In case you didn’t know, GA4F automatically connects with Google Ads and logs unlimited event data in a single place.
You can probably tell where I’m going with this.
With GA4F x Google Ads, ZEE5 (a streaming service in India) increased bids for prospects who shared engagement stats with subscribers with a higher lifetime value.
GA4F is available for free. Besides the setup, all you need is an appreciation for using signals from real user behaviour to plan and optimise your campaigns.
Stay curious!
Aliyar