I have somewhat of an obsession with colors and their names or designations. Whenever I can get my hands on color guides or paint sample booklets, I snatch them up. For instance, I have boxes full of those Pantone Guide strips; and having worked in the automotive industry, I have literally piles of automotive production color books with samples of all the exterior colors from various cars. I have samples from nearly every year of nearly every major make and model of car. There is something about the classification of color; I’m fascinated with the taxonomic designations and, more importantly, the aesthetic of all the sample colors lined up in neat rectangles with numbers beneath them.

Anyway… Mimosa. Mimosa is the color of the year, according to the “global authority on color”, Pantone. Read on about 2009′s color:

Pantone makes its money by selling color measurement devices and color guides. They provide standardized palettes mostly for design industries: graphics, fashion, textiles, interior design, etc. So their main customers are design folks, people who would be interested in things like the Color of the Year.

But the thing about Pantone’s selection is that it’s meaningless. They write a blurb about the color, like how we need a cheerful hue for these difficult economic times; but really, they could relate any color to anything else. The real reason for the whole spectacle is marketing. The color of the year selection gets the design folks all up in an interested frenzy, talking about Mimosa and mentioning Pantone every time. And with every mention, Pantone becomes more the universal authority on color. Genius marketing, well done.

During a time of controversy, the best way to win over public opinion is to convince the public that there is no controversy. Sometimes, when an issue is too complicated for the general public to make an informed decision on their own, they rely on the opinions of experts, and politicians stop debating the points of the issue, and start debating the consensus. That’s a consensus war. It’s happening with the global warming issue, and it’s happening with the economy. A reasoned, logical debate of the finer points of the fiscal policy won’t convince the average American. The only way to win the hearts and minds of the American people is to tell them the experts opinion.

Recently, Obama attempted to shut down the controversy surrounding his so-called “stimulus” package by saying “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.” Then later saying “economists from across the political spectrum agree” on the need for this massive government spending package. Of course, that is not the case. In actuality, many, if not most, economists disagree with the stimulus package. So in response, the Cato Institute took out a full page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, and Roll Call disputing the president’s claim. Hundreds of top economists, including Nobel laureates and prominent scholars from major universities, signed the statement. There were more than 200 economists signatures on the original ad, and over 100 more have signed on since then. Read on to see the original ad:


the original, full-page Cato ad can be found here in pdf form

Text from the ad:
“There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”
— PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, JANUARY 9 , 2009

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

All good marketers know that there are subtle psychological cues that can help seal the deal. Aside from the testimony of trustworthy sources, visual cues tend to be the most persuasive tools available to the advertiser in selling his product. Attractive women. Beautiful scenery. Speed. Action. Mouthwatering images of food.

Credit card companies know this well. If there’s any industry that manages to motivate action through subtle psychological cues, it’s the credit card industry. Consider the fact that they attempt and succeed at exploiting the human instinct towards tribalism. “Become a member of an elite club and raise your social status in the process.”

One of the most common tactics used by credit card companies is the use of color branding. Take for example the new Visa Black card that we discussed earlier in the year. In this case, black creates mystique and allure: the Johnny Cash effect.

Then there is the Blue from American Express credit card. American Express has had gold cards, platinum cards, black (the centurion), the clear card, etc. Now they have blue. What cues does this send? It says things like “wide open” “freedom” “fresh air” “new beginnings” – not to mention the fact that most marketers agree that blue is the most universal calming and pleasant color. With this card, AMEX is trying to say “come on in, credit cards can be nice, pleasant things that are good for your health.”

The fact of the matter is that human beings are influenced by subtle, sub-conscious cues. The biggest industries in the world know this well. And they exploit it. Such simplistic concepts have such big effects. So the next time you develop your marketing campaign, pay attention to the colors.

Apparently, all you have to do to make money online is invent a fake, but morally reprehensible, tragedy, put together a video about said tragedy, then sell t-shirts.
Oh, I almost forgot… then PROFIT.

The Save Our Cats and Kittens From Fishermen (SOCKFF) video has been making the rounds of the blogosphere for a while now, and still, not many people have called shenanigans on it. That amazes me. This video is obviously fake. It has zero evidence of it’s claim, it doesn’t show any cats being eaten by sharks, it doesn’t show any cats being pierced with hooks (although a gloved man pretends to), it doesn’t show anything really. It only shows black cats supposedly dangling from a hook, and a gloved man pretending to hook a kitten but blocking the camera’s view at the last second. Take a look at the cat dangling frame:

If that cat were actually dangling from a hook that had been pierced through it’s back skin, the skin would be stretched out far more than it is there. In fact, it looks like the cat’s actually hanging from some type of harness around it’s midsection. Take a good look. This video is fake, and it’s fairly obviously fake in my opinion.

The owner of the website, a guy by the name of Grady Warren apparently, is a genius. He posts a video that pulls at the sad strings of animal lovers everywhere, then he sells t-shirts. People think they’re helping out the kitties, but all he does (supposedly, he may not even do this) is donate a portion of the proceeds to either the lunatic PETA cult, the SPCA, the World Wildlife Fund, or the Humane Society. What percentage of the funds go to those charities? Who knows. It could be as little as 1 cent per thousand dollars. Warren does post this little disclaimer:
We are a for-profit Florida Corporation. We are promoting awareness of animal abuse and our donations to these four established charities will be used as the individual organizations choose.

The really interesting thing about this whole SOCKFF affair isn’t that it exists, since this scam has been around for a long time (it used to be dog’s as bait). The interesting thing is that so many people have been fooled by it. Face it, very bizarre shit happens in the world, and the internet has video of a lot of it, so it stands to reason that something like this could be true. That possibility is all he needs, the long tail of the internet does the rest. If only a small number of the people who see that video end up buying a t-shirt, he’s at least recouped the money he spent making the shirts. Genius business plan if you ask me. Well done, Grady Warren.

Is this the mysterious business genius, Grady Warren? The world may never know.

According to a new Ohio State University study, merely touching a product in a store can make you willing to pay more for it. It’s been known for a while that consumers tend to feel ownership of goods even before they buy them, but this study is the first to examine that phenomenon in any depth. Researchers have shown that it can take as little as 30 seconds after first touching an object for a consumer to grow attached to it, even something as insignificant as a coffee mug.

The researchers ran a study where participants were shown a coffee mug, and were allowed to hold it either for 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Then they were then allowed to bid on the mug in either a closed (where bids could not be seen) or open (where they could be seen) auction, and all participants were told the retail price of the mug. It turns out that people who held the coffee mug longer seemed not only more compelled to outbid others in an auction, but they were also more willing to bid more than the retail price for that item. Read on for a detailed description of the study, and some suggestions on what this phenomenon means in practical terms:

Participants in the closed auction were told the mug was worth $3.95 at the university bookstore, and participants in open auctions were told it was worth $4.95. Also, they were all informed that there were several identical mugs available for at the campus bookstore right next to the testing location. Everyone who participated in the experiment was given $10 and told that the winning bidders would have their bid amount taken out of their payment if they agreed.

The results:
The people who held the item for 30 seconds bid significantly higher than people who touched the mug for only 10 seconds. The average bid in the open auctions was $2.44 for people who touched the mug for 10 seconds and $3.91 for those who held it for 30 seconds. The closed auctions had similar results. People in the 10 second group bid $2.24 and those in the 30 second group bid $3.07.

Co-author of the study, Hal Arkes, said “We took the most minimal type of attachment; not a new car or a suit, but a mug. And we found significant differences in consumer valuations that begin in a matter of seconds.”

Another interesting aspect of the study was that some participants actually bid more than the retail price of the mug, even though they knew identical mugs were for sale right next door. People who held their mug for 30 seconds bid more than the retail price four out of seven times. Bids even went as high as $10 on two different occasions in the 30 second group. On the other hand, in the 10 second group, bids only went past the retail price once.

What does this mean for business owners?

If you’re selling a product, any product at all, you need to get your potential customers to handle that product. Get them to pick it up or handle it somehow, even if it’s only for 30 seconds. Let them try it out, let them feel like they own it, and they’ll be that much more likely to buy it.

For retail stores and people selling smaller products, that’s easy enough, but the same idea applies even if you’re selling real estate or something intangible like life insurance. You have to get the customer to feel a certain level of ownership of your product, before they actually buy it.

What does this mean for consumers?

As always, be aware that your brain is a tricky bastard. Remember that every human being has certain built-in biases, but that you can overcome them as long as you know how they work. When you’re shopping, try not to think of each item as a “one of a kind”; don’t get attached; and try to determine a price objectively before you pick something up, test drive it, or examine it in depth.

I am so looking forward to the Star Wars Force Trainer.

The Force Trainer is basically a simplified type of EEG machine. It comes with a headset that measures a players brain waves and allows them to manipulate a ball inside a clear 10-inch-tall tube. It translates your brain waves into action, just like a biofeedback machine. This is the first time EEG technology is being used in toy, and the potential uses are endless.

Not only can it work as a fairly inexpensive (it’ll be $90-$100) biofeedback machine to help children learn how to achieve a relaxed state of mind quickly… but imagine what can be done with this thing by some enterprising “home engineers”. This machine translates brain waves into electrical signals, that means with minimal effort, a person could perhaps rig a light switch to the headset, or the power on your TV.

Plus, I think the machine interprets the brain wave signal on a scale, which means it could be programmed to do more than just turn something OFF and ON. With some practice on the machine, a person might be able to change channels with it (up, down, neutral), who knows. I can’t wait until this thing hits the market and the masses get to work. Exciting times in the Empire.

Burger King is all about the viral kookiness these days, and their latest advertising enterprise is actually pure genius. They’ve created the “Whopper Sacrifice,” Facebook application, which will give you a coupon for a free Whopper if you delete 10 people from your Facebook friends list.

Burger King got me interested with their Whopper Virgins ads, and initially I loved this campaign because of how it seemingly makes fun of all the Facebook obsessed freaks out there. The website says: “Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test. Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we’ll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice ten of your friends.” And the app actually makes each “sacrifice” show up in your activity feed for everyone to see. It says something like “Vito sacrificed Jimmy James for a free Whopper.”

But I thought about it, and wondered what BK could possibly gain from this. And then it came to me:

The Kicker: The Foot-in-the-Door

In Social Psychology, there’s a tactic called the Foot-in-the-Door (FITD) technique which involves getting a person to agree to a relatively small request first, after which they’re more likely to agree to a larger request. Basically you ask for a small yes, then you can get a bigger yes, and so on. There have been a number of studies into the effect. For example, back in the 60s, some scientists asked people to either sign a petition or place a small card in a window in their home or car about keeping California beautiful or supporting safe driving. About two weeks later, the same people were asked by a second person to put a large sign advocating safe driving in their front yard. The people who agreed to the first request were far more likely to agree to the second. This tactic works because the human brain wants to be consistent, we always strive to align our opinions with what we know we’ve said in the past. That’s why “flip-flopping” is looked down on, even though, if you think about it… changing your opinion in the face of new evidence is actually a good thing.

So what Burger King is doing here is quite genius. Even though people think it’s no big deal to drop 10 “useless” friends to pick up a 2 dollar coupon, it may actually be having an effect on them. I wouldn’t be surprised if, after this campaign comes and goes, the customers who dropped friends for the coupon were actually more likely to frequent Burger King than those who didn’t engage in the friend dropping. Psychology plays a big part in advertising, now you know.

“I think Che had perseverance and morality. Being the underdog and fighting against injustice and standing up for the forgotten moved him so hard. Kind of like Jesus, in a way…”
“I think anyone who buys a T-shirt of Che has gotta be cool. If I see someone with a Che T-shirt, I think, ‘He’s got good taste.’”
-Benicio Del Toro

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail … This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
“If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba), we would have fired them against the heart of the US, including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
-Che “Kind of like Jesus…” Guevara

The irony is thick, as it always is. His face is on suburban t-shirts all around the country, and Hollywood is making a hero out of Che Guevara, aka the butcher of La Cabaña, the man who killed journalists, businessmen and merchants, presided over mass executions, prison labor camps, and caused economic ruin to millions.

Admittedly, there’s a certain romance around him. He was trained as a physician and traveled the world as a revolutionary, fought in jungles and all that fun movie stuff. The thing is, he killed actual people and had a real ideology of oppression. Che’s socialist plan was about oppression at its core, as socialism always is. It was about forcing the personal will of a few powerful men on the rest of society. While the capitalism he hated so much is about the combined will of all citizens. Capitalism is an amazing computer which calculates the desires of every person with every choice they make. The free market is a reflection of the wants and needs of each participant. The best example is this: in a socialist “paradise”, a group of people cannot create a capitalist commune if they want to; yet, in a capitalist paradise, anyone can create any type of commune based on any type of system they want. Socialism can exist in a capitalist society, but not the other way around. In the end, capitalism is about freedom, and socialism… isn’t.

So why do so many people wear Che’s image? Because human beings have an innate drive toward cultism. We need to belong to some group, while at the same time we need to rebel against tradition. And Che symbolizes a certain hard edged secular religion, and a vague rebellion against everything. His brand allows you to be a rebel and still fit in. His real ideology is meaningless at this point, and his face is simply a design element, like the Nike swoosh or the golden arches or the silhouette of Michael Jordan dunking. So you can’t fault the wealthy suburban teenagers for wearing it, it’s fashion, and they don’t know any better.

In the US, we’re comfortable, away from all the pain and suffering of the third world, so we can fantasize about anything we want. We can rail against genetically modified crops, while in Africa they save millions of lives by allowing more nutritious food to be grown in less fertile land, with less space. We can complain about third world “sweatshops”, while in those countries, the workers have the choice of working either in those factories, or as subsistence farmers making less than half what the factory pays. We can talk about the horrors of capitalism, but capitalism has given us the freedom to be so wrong. Without the years of free market capitalism giving us the wealth we have, we wouldn’t have the free time to complain today or the social freedom to express our poorly thought out views in t-shirt form.

Ironically, the Che face of today symbolizes that more than anything else, the triumph of capitalism over socialism. He’s been fully assimilated by the free market, with t-shirt companies and Hollywood studios making money from his image and consumers using it as a fashion statement. Freedom has won, Viva la Revolucion.

The UK is the most watched country on Earth, and still the citizens seem to be increasingly preoccupied with crime. As of 2004, England had one surveillance camera for every fourteen citizens, and it’s gone up since then, all in the name of security.

But do CCTV cameras actually reduce crime? The statistics aren’t all that spectacular for the studies that show a positive result, and most studies suggest that camera density has no overall impact on the levels of crime at all, especially in residential areas. A better idea might be along the lines of the West Midlands Police’s ‘Operation Momentum’ – using posters and an understanding of psychology, instead of cameras, to try to limit crime. Read on:


this controversial poster went up in the London Underground in 2002

The above poster, Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes, is an exceedingly creepy 1984-esque public service announcement poster that went up in London a few years ago. The point of the poster is the eyes. Those bizarre, disembodied eyes may be a way to actually cut crime rates without resorting to intrusive and expensive cameras. Psychologists from Newcastle University found people put nearly three times as much money into an ‘honesty box’ when there was a pair of eyes on a poster above the box, compared with a poster that featured an image of flowers. And it may not just be an image of eyes either, the cameras in the first poster may have the same effect by triggering the feeling of being watched.

(via BoingBoing)

Mythic Entertainment has come up with an interesting way to make one of it’s games more appealing: monuments to the top players. Bragging rights are a major part of these online games. Players spend countless hours building up their characters, going on epic adventures, trying to defeat bizarre creatures, they deserve some rewards. That’s the whole reason most people play these games, they want to feel like real heroes. And with the market of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) getting so thick, each game is trying to out-do the other in terms of giving the player the best sense of accomplishment and heroism. So coming sometime this month, Mythic will release the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning’s patch version 1.1, which will be add a feature that creates statues of top-ranked players in the major cities.

Only the best of the best will be getting their names on these statues, the top ten players in each realm. And Mythic has hinted that they may be releasing even more rewards for its best players. They’re pulling out all the stops trying to woo World of Warcraft players over to the Warhammer world.

This is a great idea from Mythic, and it’s probably the start of something big. Most of the other MMORPGs will start doing similar things, offering rewards like statues and special weapons or capes or even real world recognition for the best of the best. It not only draws people into the game and gets them interested in that particular game, but it keeps them playing for longer. It gives them a more tangible reason to spend every waking hour trying to defeat a completely made up evil.