Monica Yoo

technology. science. marketing.

Too Much Noise

I am an information junkie that reads just about anything I get my hands on – books, articles, blogs, advertisements, magazines, billboards, tweets and my most recent addition, food and ingredient labels. This may sound like a lot to absorb, but all of these things combined don’t even come close to how overwhelmed I feel when I wake up each morning and check my email inbox. I scroll through pages and pages of attention-grabbing subject lines like:

  • “Don’t miss this exclusive sale!”
  • “You’re going to LOVE this!”
  • “We miss you <3”
  • “Limited time only…”
  • “Ring in the new year with X, Y and Z!”

When I see the flood of these unread emails, a brief panic goes through me and I immediately skim the subject lines and do a single group delete. Done. Immediate relief. If I’m looking for something in particular, I may peek at a couple of emails, but those usually get zapped too.

I know what you’re thinking, “You could just unsubscribe from those emails.” You’re right, I could. However, I’m not going to just in case there comes a time I will want those emails. 99% of the time I’ll probably delete them all, but for that measly 1% I’m going to endure the daily pain.

It’s stressful being a consumer.

Then I got to thinking, marketers need to know their audience better.

Seth Godin writes,

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants.

So true. No one, especially nowadays, appreciates feeling like they’re being mass marketed to, and I get it – the idea of businesses knowing your buying patterns and interests is creepy. However,  whether we want to admit it or not, there is some level of expectation that businesses should have an inkling of what we want. It’s almost offensive to receive “recommendations” or “suggestions” from websites and businesses when they are way off and totally wrong. Right?

Take Netflix recommendations for example. When I first signed up as a member, over 6 years ago, I’d flip through a ton of random hodge podge selection of movies. Fast forward to today, and I love what gets recommended to me. Perhaps too much.

Data. Data. Data. It’s out there. And as marketers, we just need to be better about slicing, dicing and making sense of it all.

 

Remembering Steve Jobs

A true visionary, innovator and creative. He will be missed.

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes … the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. … You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. … They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

– Steve Jobs

Why We Reject Creative Ideas

We all agree that creativity is highly valuable, but why is that we’re still resistant to creative ideas? The news site ScienceDaily explains some interesting findings.

Based on the experiments at the University of Pennsylvania:

  • Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
  • People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
  • Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
  • Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

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