It was unlike any other sitcom before or since: largely shot in the first person and voiced by an inner monologue. The creators nicked this idea from something completely different – a documentary about the model Caprice Bourret called Being Caprice.
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According to John Foley, then CEO of Peloton, “in the very, very early days, we charged $1,200 for the Peloton bike for the first couple of months. And what turned out happening is we heard from customers that the bike must be poorly built if you’re charging $1,200 for it. We charged $2,000 dollars for it, and sales increased, because people said, ‘Oh, it must be a quality bike.’”
The meteoric rise of Peloton suggested gyms were a thing of the past. Why travel to exercise when you could do it in your living room? Yet the company’s share price remains 97% below its 2020 peak, and it has recently started renting bikes to help shore up its losses.
In 1934, Sir Allen Lane was waiting at Exeter St Davids for a train back to London, and found himself without a book to read. All that was on offer at the station bookstall were magazines and Victorian reprints. He decided that high quality, engaging, and reasonably priced books should be available to everyone, anywhere. He created Penguin Books the following year.
The Sainsbury’s & Spotify campaigns are based on this simple idea, but different creative styles mean that Spotify’s is more powerful.
It’s a phrase used time and again in brand tracking, but as Andrew Tenzer points out it’s not particularly helpful: it means many different things, depending on who you ask.
Or is it Coca Cola?
In 2003, neuroscientist Read Montague added an FMRI twist to the Pepsi Challenge. In a standard blind taste test, the brain region associated with seeking reward was highly active, and Pepsi still came out on top. But things changed when volunteers were told what they were drinking. This time, Coke was the clear winner, and the area of the brain associated with thinking processes lit up. In other words, the expectation of drinking Coke made it more enjoyable.
The Physical Activity and Fitness Survey asks people how much exercise they do, and measures (with accelerometers) how much they actually do. Unsurprisingly, the two figures don’t match up.
in 1901, Picasso imposed a self-constraint to boost creativity. His ‘blue period’ helped him produce paintings that conveyed a sense of melancholy and sadness, and shattered the assumption that paintings required a range of vibrant colours to be successful.
When pressed to explain the elements in Guernica, Pablo Picasso said: “This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning… I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”
Pineapples were once the ultimate symbol of wealth; used mainly for display at dinner parties, rather than being eaten. Charles II was so taken with pineapples that he commissioned a portrait of himself being presented with one. But they lost their star status once steamships started to import them to Britain from the colonies, and they became affordable to the masses.
A 2024 YouGov report claims that brand buying has become politicised, citing several examples of brands that appeal to different political leanings. But the crucial caveat is that this is based on attitudes not behaviours, and two are very different. Actual purchase data shows that liberals are only 3% more likely than conservatives to buy Ben and Jerry’s. And conservatives are actually 13% more likely to buy Patagonia, despite the brand’s close association with environmental causes.
In 1994, an American health organisation caused popcorn sales to plummet by 50%. A study had shown that a medium bag of popcorn contained 37 grams of saturated fat, so the organisation turned this abstract number into a terrifying reality: the same amount of fat as six Big Macs.
Recent neuroscience studies have shown that our brain is predictive, not reactive. It’s, quite literally, powered by expectations. When we drink a glass of water it actually takes tens of minutes to reach the blood, but it instantly feels like our thirst is quenched – that’s because our brain predicts the restorative effect of water as soon as we drink it.