Before the 1920s, bacon was not a quintessential breakfast dish. It took a brilliant PR campaign from the Beech-Nut Packing Company, who claimed that their product was healthy and backed by doctors.
All Threads
If you’ve ever picked up a Bang and Olufsen remote you’ll know they’re surprisingly heavy. But that’s nothing to do with function – it’s designed to exploit our assumption that heavier things are better quality.
John Lubbock wanted workers to have more holidays throughout the year, but industrialist MPs were unconvinced workers needed more time off. So he proposed the “Bank Holiday Bill”, knowing that banks needed to close at various times during the year, and knowing no business could be done on these days. “If we had called our bill the “General Holiday Bill” or the “National Holiday Bill” I doubt that it would have been approved.”
After years of high transfer spend and the departure of Lionel Messi, the football club had no choice but to get creative. The manager turned to players from its youth academy – La Masia – who lacked experience but made up for it with chemistry, having played together since they were kids. The team went on to win the league in 2023, reigniting the Barca emphasis on possession football, and establishing Gavi, Pedri, and Lamine Yamal as key parts of the side.
Barilla, the pasta maker, has released a series of Spotify playlists with a twist: their duration corresponds to the cooking time its most loved pasta shapes. A great way of practically helping consumers – who no longer need to set a timer – and also making the brand more salient at key moments.
Basketball is definitely not a sport of equal opportunity. Height is so important that if you know an American man taller than 7ft (and aged between 20 and 40), there is a one-in-six chance he will currently be playing in the NBA.
After a dog walker found a mysterious crater on a beach near Dublin, the media quickly claimed it was a meteor strike from a cosmic event. That was until someone on Twitter revealed the truth: “Lads I’m in bits. Some fellas literally dug it the day before with a kid’s shovel.”
The legal system is just one domain in which looks determine outcome: judges fine unattractive criminals more than attractive ones.
You’d think it would be impossible to make music without the ability to hear. But Ludwig Van Beethoven, arguably the finest composer of music the world has ever seen, became fully deaf at the age of 44. He taught himself to ‘hear’ with his body, placing his teeth on the keyboard and using lower notes that he could feel more clearly. During this period he composed some of his greatest works, including the Moonlight Sonata and his only opera Fidelio.
Many of the principles in Behavioural Science directly contradict one another.
– Are we more likely to remember the first word on a list (primacy) or the last word on a list (recency)?
– Do we prefer trying a new restaurant for dinner (novelty) or sticking with our local favourite (status quo)?
– Does repeatedly hearing a false statement make us believe it (illusory truth effect) or reject it (backfire effect)?
If you look past the hype, BeReal is actually pretty niche: it has 2 million users in the UK, far less than Pinterest or even Nextdoor, and 70% of them are 18-24.
When Megan Thee Stallion released her ‘Savage’ remix, featuring a line about Beyonce joining OnlyFans. The site saw a 15% spike in traffic.
The pandemic transformed our travel habits – but not for long. After a surge in 2020, bike sales in 2023 were 33% below pre-pandemic levels, and the lowest in the UK since 1985.
The brains behind Moneyball, and a figurehead for sport’s analytics revolution, owes his success to one trait: “Being the dumbest guy in my own room.” It was this ignorance that allowed him to see opportunities – and find players – that no one else was looking for.
Bing.com’s UK reach rose from 33% in January 2023 to 46% in May 2023 following the introduction of Bing AI, which features an AI chat response (like ChatGPT), an email drafting tool and the ability to create images.