FREE is unrationally powerful!
Via NeuroMarketing:
When they [Amazon.com] launched a “free shipping” promotion with the purchase of a second book every country except France showed a big jump in sales from the offer. The Amazon marketers investigated, thinking perhaps the French were rational enough not to be swayed into buying a second book. In fact, they found that in France the program had been slightly altered. Instead of zero shipping, the offer in France charged a mere one franc - about twenty cents. From a pure economic standpoint, the two offers are almost indistinguishable. In actual performance, though, the one franc offer caused no sales increase. (When the French offer was changed to FREE!, sales did indeed jump.)
Is testing overrated?
Luke over at RailsSpikes has written a great article in which he seriously entertains the thought that writing code tests is overrated. It’s not that tests aren’t necessary, it’s that there are more ways to go about getting the same result, and you shouldn’t put your eggs in one basket anyway. I’ll be going back to this article many times for guidance. Here’s one salient point:
Code reviews and formal code inspections are incredibly effective at finding defects (studies show they are more effective at finding defects than developer testing, and cheaper too), and the peer pressure of knowing your code will be scrutinized helps ensure higher quality right off the bat.
Spin Master knows good marketing
The New York Times has a great article on the Spin Master toy company. It starts with how they marketed their newest (and now hit) toy by driving around to where the kids are and demonstrating the game in person. The game itself is innovative. You have these little plastic toys that roll into a ball. When you roll them over your playing cards, a magnetic interaction makes the toy pop open. It adds a bit of fun physicality to old-school card and dice based games. Spin Master has gotten very good at figuring out what type of marketing works for the type of toy and audience. (read on…)
Coolness and great design
Check out this quote from quote Scott Kriens, CEO at Juniper, about switching to Macs in the enterprise:
One of the people with a new Mac Book laptop: “Everybody told me I should get one,” he says. “It’s not anything to do with negative perceptions about Microsoft. It’s just that Macs are cool.”
I can totally relate to this, and when I think about it, it’s Apple’s design that makes them seem so cool. Those sexy one-piece iMacs, that svelte aluminum laptop and iPhone. I know I wouldn’t love Macs if they looked crappy. The point is, for whatever product you’re developing, take a page from Apple, figure out how to make people love your product for the look and feel of it. Have the functionality to be sure, but pay close attention to the design, because it is the deciding factor. Great design creates openings against complacent competitors.
A cool client-side social hack
Via readwriteweb, a cool client-side hack that helps you intelligently choose which social bookmarking services to show on your site:
“Not everyone uses Digg. You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote,” writes Raskin. “On the other hand, if you take the bird-shot approach, it overloads your reader with branded badge after branded badge. It turns your page into the village bicycle. Not pretty.”
As a solution, Raskin devised SocialHistory.js, a handy bit of JavaScript code that detects which social media sites your users frequent. Armed with that information, you can display only the relevant badges to each user.
McCain vs Ellen DeGeneres
Witness the persuasive power of invoking basic human rights. When Ellen says it like this, it’s really hard to disagree:
McCAIN: Well, my thoughts are that I think people should be able to enter into legal agreements, and I think that is something that we should encourage, particularly in the case of insurance and other areas, decisions that have to be made. I just believe in the unique status of marriage between man and woman. And I know that we have a respectful disagreement on that issue.
DEGENERES: Yeah, I mean, I think that it is looked at, and some people are saying that blacks and women did not have the right to vote. Women just got the right to vote in 1920, blacks didn’t have the right to vote until 1870, and it just feels like there’s this old way of thinking that we’re not all the same. We are all the same people. All of us. You’re no different than I am. Our love is the same.”
