Social media is no longer social – we are using it less to keep up friends, and more to pass the time and to follow strangers. In fact a recent FTC filing revealed that only 17% of time spent on Facebook involves consuming content from friends, with the majority spent watching random videos recommended by the algorithm.
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Brands often claim that customers who like their social media pages tend to spend more. But a study from the Journal of Marketing Research shows this is just correlation. Joining a brand’s social network has no impact on consumer attitude or behaviour; it is simply a symptom of preexisting fondness for the brand.
Ad people are much more likely to use social media than the general public. It’s no wonder that so many marketers overestimate its effectiveness within the media mix.
This one idea underpins the ads from Suddenly Fragrances (Lidl’s own brand) & Surreal, yet the two resonate differently – celebrity references feel more natural for perfume than cereal.
In the early days, Southwest Airlines had to sell one of their planes or face bankruptcy. Noticing that the average gate turnaround time was about 60 minutes, they would be able to fly all their current routes with one less plane they if they could shrink their gate turnaround time from 60 minutes to 10 minutes. So they developed a radical new boarding process with no assigned seating, and in doing so revolutionised the airline industry.
Despite having one of the speediest boarding processes in the industry, Southwest are employing a range of tricks to make it just five minutes faster; installing a colour-coded carpet that shows where different boarding groups should line up, and playing fast paced music in the jet bridge to hurry passengers up.
Spain is one hour ahead of the UK despite being, geographically, on the same time zone. The reason? In 1940, General Franco aligned Spain’s national clock with Germany’s, to show support for the Nazi regime, and it has stayed like that ever since. It’s a key reason why cultural activities take place so late in Spain.
Specsavers makes £4 billion each year, but the founder still spends time writing birthday cards for employees. As she says, “it’s caring for the people that are at the sharp end, working really hard every day, to make sure that nobody falls through the net.”
In 1951, when the Dartmouth football team played against Princeton, undergraduates at each college saw different versions of the very same game. In a post match survey, they both thought the other college had started the rough play and had been unnecessarily dirty. An early example of confirmation bias in action: we see what we want to see.
We might associate Spotify with music, but the company describes itself as a “seamless one-stop destination for all things audio.” This has given it licence to expand into podcasts and audiobooks, both of which are growing at double digits YoY.
Spotify pays artists based on the number of streams they receive, which only counts if someone listens to 30 seconds of a song. As a result, artists are incentivised to pack albums full of short songs, all of which hint at the chorus in the opening few seconds, as opposed to longer experimental songs that take a long time to build.
Comparing claimed Spotify usage vs actual usage, one quarter of those who claim to use it monthly do not use it at all.
Only 2% of Spotify artists earn more than $1k a year.
In the early days of Spotify, users complained that the shuffle feature wasn’t random: how could two songs from the same artist play back to back? In reality the issue was a misunderstanding of chance, so Spotify actually made the feature less random to make it seem more random.
A fun nostalgia trip? Or a year long surveillance campaign?