What’s In This Issue?
Marketing Lessons From Vietnam
We spent the last few days living on a boat in the middle of the famous Halong Bay where the food was proudly advertised as "Western." They had corn flakes for breakfast and prawns with cream sauce for dinner. It was a luxurious (and expensive) experience. Our last meal before the boat was lunch at a small family owned street side noodle shop in Hanoi where we ordered four steaming bowls of Pho (Vietnamese Noodle soup) just by pointing. I'm not sure they even served anything else. And the whole meal cost about $4.
On paper, the boat should have been better. They had all the data and offered a customized and comfortable experience. The street shop didn't even have air conditioning. Yet we spent two days on the boat dreaming about that Pho. So often we spend time and money laser focused on understanding our customer and forget about what makes us special. What is the beautiful unique unforgettable experience that we offer? And how can we do it so well that after someone has it, they spend all day and all night dreaming about coming back? Any time I travel, that's the question that always comes back to my mind.
How The Internet Makes Stupidity Viral
Earlier this week the US government had to officially ask people to stop jumping out of moving cars to dance in the streets in response to a viral dance challenge for one of Drake's songs. About the same time I first read this story, for some reason another story and video about how you can make a spare tire by wrapping duct tape around a bare rim popped up. It's hard to get away from stories like these and they all seem to have one thing in common: they take stupidity and glorify it to the point of helping it become viral. In some cases, the danger is limited to dumb adolescent behavior. In others it is literally life threatening. The real problem is that stupidity is fun to watch. This truth explains the popularity of probably 80% of all reality television. The question worth asking, I suppose, is whether watching dumb people do idiotic things is actually making us all a little stupider?
Why Netflix Uses Taste Communities Instead Of Demographics
Earlier this week Netflix announced that they would be stopping their long standing policy of asking customers to vote on early pilots for programs to see if they have enough critical mass and audience to continue. In the same week, at a television industry event a Netflix executive shared that Netflix finds demographics to be useless as a predictor of what people watch. Instead, "Netflix’s scientists have found that there are several connections among content types and what people like to watch, which goes 'several layers deeper' than genres. They refer to these as 'taste communities,' and have identified 2,000 of them" that describe exactly what all of us like to watch.
Intrigued yet? It's not surprising that Netflix has (and uses) this type of data to develop hit shows. What is fascinating is just how much their research might actually reveal about how humans think and perceive the world. Sadly for us, some have described this data as the "most closely guarded corporate secret since the formula for Coke," so there is probably no chance we'll ever get to see it unless someone at Netflix decides to write a book about it. Now that would be an immediate best seller.
