Random Things

A group of early 50 carrot farmers, headed by Bolthouse Farms, have teamed up with Crispin Porter + Bogusky to rebrand baby carrots and advertise them in a way that mimics snack brands like Doritos. The campaign is designed to encourage kids to choose carrots over other unhealthy snack foods, and is currently being tested in cooled vending machines at schools

Apple’s symbol is an Apple with a bite taken out of it.  This theme is an extension of the company’s original logo, which featured Issac Newton sitting under an apple tree, about to be conked on the noggin.

I think the logo has a richer current running through it, one not envisioned by its creators. Adam and Eve, as we recall, lost their innocence when they bit into the forbidden fruit. When the company is at its best, rolling out products that are entirely unexpected and entirely delightful, we are offered the apple to take us out of our innocent, hum-drum lives — at least until the damn antenna doesn’t work.

This is why secrecy is such a powerful weapon in Apple’s arsenal, and something it should never, ever, abandon.

Charlene Li, author of Open Leadership, makes a great point about this in a recent interview with the Washington Post. She recalls the recent Steve Jobs intro of iPhone 4, a few weeks after the world had already seen the phone, left in a bar by an employee, in news accounts.

“He raised it and said, ‘I think you’ve all seen this thing before,’” Li recalls. “And the energy went out of the room. Everyone knew what it was already.” The bite of the apple wasn’t as sweet.

Apple should be secretive, she says, because that’s what customers want.

“Their whole relationship with customers is about the game, the surprise, the secrecy, the delight that comes with a new announcement. What is Steve Jobs going to do? What is he going to announce? It’s a very special relationship Apple has crafted, because it is closed.”

It’s all smart marketing for Apple, along with hyper-event marketing, limited product at rollout, and Job’s black wardrobe.

For the iPod Nano

For the iPod Touch

In The National Post, Adam McDowell reports on research led by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia finding that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from others.

The paper is “shaking up the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioral economics,” the article says, by questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study an unusual subset — that is, those who are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. The study refers to such people with a colorful acronym, Weird:

After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the U.B.C. team found that Weird people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, antisocial punishment and cooperation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity.

Others punish participants perceived as too altruistic in cooperation games, but very few in the English-speaking West would ever dream of penalizing the generous. Westerners tend to group objects based on resemblance (notebooks and magazines go together, for example) while Chinese test subjects prefer function (grouping, say, a notebook with a pencil). Privileged Westerners, uniquely, define themselves by their personal characteristics as opposed to their roles in society.

Fibonacci/Wikipedia

Moreover, Weird people do not simply react to the world differently, according to the paper, but they perceive it differently to begin with. Take the well-known Müller-Lyer optical illusion, which uses arrows to trick the viewer into thinking one line is longer than another, even if both are the same length. [Diagram, above.]

“No matter how many times you measure those lines, you can’t cause yourself to see them as the same length,” Dr. Henrich says. At least that’s true for a Westerner. For some hunter-gatherers, the Müller-Lyer lines do not cause an illusion. “You do this with foragers in the Kalahari [Desert], and they just see the lines as the same length.”

Moreover, the article says, “educated Americans are even more extremely Weird than uneducated ones.” [The National Post, Behavioral and Brain Sciences]

They asked 180 consumers at a supermarket to participate in a quick little experiment. (The scientists pretended to be “independent consultants con- tracted to survey the quality of the jam and tea assortment” in the retail store.) The consumers were told to focus on the taste of the jam and the smell of the tea, and were asked to pick their preferred product when given a variety of different samples. For instance, a participant might be asked to choose between Ginger and Lime jam, or Cinnamon-Apple and Grapefruit. If they were smelling teas, then they might be given a choice between Apple Pie versus Honey, or Pernod versus Mango.

Here’s where things get tricky. I’ll let the scientists describe their method, in which they slyly reversed the preferences of the hapless consumers:

In a manipulated trial, the participants were presented with the two prepared jars. After tasting a spoon of jam from the first jar, or taking in the smell of the tea, they were asked to indicate how much they liked the sample on a 10-point scale from ‘not at all good’ to ‘very good’. While Experimenter 1 solicited the preference judgment, and interacted with the participants, Experimenter 2 screwed the lid back on the container that was used, and surreptitiously turned it upside down. After the participants had indicated how much they preferred the first option, they were offered the second sample, and once again rated how much they liked it. As with the first sample, Experimenter 2 covertly flipped the jar upside down while returning it to the table. Immediately after the participants completed their second rating, we then asked which alternative they preferred, and asked them to sample it a second time, and to verbally motivate [explain] why they liked this jam or tea better than the other one.

At first glance, this seems like a ridiculous experiment. It’s hard to believe that, when asked to choose between Cinnamon-Apple and Grapefruit jam, I wouldn’t notice the difference. Or that, after choosing Mango tea over Pernod, I would fail to realize that I was actually being given Pernod.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened. According to the scientists, less than a third of participants realized at any point during the experiment that their preferences had been switched. In other words, the vast majority of consumers failed to notice any difference between their intended decision (“I really want Cinnamon-Apple jam”) and the actual outcome of their decision (getting bitter grapefruit jam instead).* We spend so much time obsessing over our consumer choices – I just spent ten minutes debating the merits of Guatemalan coffee beans versus Indonesian beans –  but this experiment suggests that all this analysis is an enormous waste of mental energy. I could have just gotten Sanka: My olfactory system is too stupid to notice the difference