Mindframe

Today’s consumers are savvier than ever. In this age of constant media bombardment, it may feel harder and harder to stand out from the noise enough to actually reach people. However, there is one foolproof way to get noticed. According to a 2012 Nielson study , 92 percent of respondents say they trust earned media, “such as word-of-mouth or recommendations from friends and family,” more than any form of advertising . If you can get your customers talking about you, more customers will follow. So how can you turn your customer experience into a share-worthy story? One useful tool is the Kano Model , created by Professor Noriaki Kano in 1984. While studying customer satisfaction and loyalty, Kano found that creating an above-average experience required fulfilling three categories: must-bes, one-dimensional needs, and “attractors” or “delighters" . Essentially, it’s a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for sales. Must-bes are the things your product or service m

In 1543, Polish astronomer and mathematician Copernicus published a then-radical theory, carefully timed just before his death: the Renaissance-era scientist had come to the conclusion that the Earth rotated around the sun. At the time, the implication that the Earth did not sit at the center of the universe was a deeply disturbing one. However, later on, this belief would prove extremely useful—for instance, when we began developing space-worthy crafts with which to explore the heavens. Over four centuries later, a tourist touched a wall and wondered how long it would stand. The man in question was astrophysics professor J. Richard Gott, the wall was the Berlin Wall, and the professor was about to have a revelation, thanks in part to Copernicus. Gott’s reasoning was this: in the same way that we are not the epicenter of the solar system, this moment and his presence were in no way integral to the history of the wall. This meant there was an equal chance he was standing the

If you’ve taken a psych class in the past four decades, you’ve probably encountered some version of the following story: In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo recruited 21 male Stanford students of perfectly sound mind and body to portray either prisoners or guards—decided on a coin flip—for a two-week scientific study into prison psychology. Although the “guards” were instructed not to become physical with the “prisoners,” the guards quickly turned sadistic and the prisoners were so psychologically shattered that the experiment was cut short after just six days. The moral of the story is that even the healthiest among us have a tyrannical authoritarian lurking inside, ready to be unleashed the moment we are handed our own uniform and pair of reflective sunglasses. There’s just a few problems with this. Well, scratch that, there’s more than a few. Despite the prevalence of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment tale, it has a number of glaring flaws that disqualify it from saying m

As Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman says, frequently we underestimate the role of luck in our successes. To illustrate this, consider the case of a Corbin, Kentucky gas station owner named Harlan Sanders. One day, while working in his station on U.S. Highway 25, he happened to hear a customer complain, “Damn! There ain’t a decent place around here to eat!” Sanders, who had bounced from job to job for years, would later remember, “I got to thinking. One thing I could always do was cook.” Smithsonian magazine reports what happened next. Sanders remodeled the store room of his station into a restaurant, where weary travelers could order country ham, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and fried chicken. By 1953, business was going so well that the café had been expanded to accommodate 142 eaters, and Sanders was offered $164,000 for his Corbin business—which he promptly refused. (about 1.5 million in today's money)That same year, Sanders met entrepreneur Pe

We all know the story of the New Coke debacle—or at least, we think we do. It’s one of the most notorious corporate blunders of the last century. ‘What group of geniuses could look at a brand like Coca-Cola and decide to reconfigure the formula?’ we ask, rhetorically. ‘What were they thinking?’ After all, what’s the most beloved cola on the planet? If you’re like most people, your answer would probably be Coke. And you’d be right—and wrong.   As a Pepsi TV campaign once famously showed us, a blindfolded person tends to prefer Pepsi. And yet, culturally, Coke is the icon and Pepsi is the runner-up, the also-ran.     “Culturally” is the key word here. Over a century of marketing momentum has enmeshed Coke in our brains, building strong unconscious associations with childhood, America, sports, nostalgia, and Christmas. Heck, the modern red-suited version of Santa Claus came from a Coca Cola ad. You’re not just drinking any old brown carbonated liquid, you’re drinking the dis