Monitoring Opinion's Mass Channel Because Every Brand's Value Lies In What People Believe
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Without his mustache, he’d still be a mass-murdering, psycho-racist, but he’d be so much less…Fuhrer (photoshop courtesy of Buzzfeed).
Another totally-unrelated random thought from this past weekend: if you don’t believe we lose valuable things in the ever-increasing, pell-mell pace of modern life, than why did you miss that lost Daylight Savings hour so much Sunday? Hmm…
Tags: Adolph Hitler, Buzzfeed, Daylight Savings, Photoshop
You know, about the time I realized that we were already four years into the US Mint’s ten year program of releasing five state quarters a year, I also concluded too much choice can really mess you up. Convenience stores along the Indiana toll road have six full sections of soft drink options. An October 2009 Netcraft website survey tallied up 230,443,449 websites. Bruce Springsteen rather famously cited fifty-seven channels and nothing on, but that was back in the dark ages of 1992. Today he’d be off at least by a factor of ten.
Too much choice can paralyze people. It’s why so many of us use news and content aggregators to try to corral the vast internet into something usable. It’s why high end clothing stores never feature racks of clothing. And it well might explain why Roper insists 92% of our purchase decisions are driven by recommendation. In a world of endless options, searching for the very best of anything can lead to an awful lot of spinning.
The graph above, which I first noticed on Buzzfeed after they picked it up from a charmingly offbeat blog called weathersealed, slams home the notion of too-much-choice in living color. The ever-splintering shades chart the chronological expansion of Crayola colors, from the original eight in 1903 to today’s 120 shades. If this doesn’t blow your mind, your world is too black and white. I mean, just look at all those purples.
I would make some crack about today’s kids having it so easy. But honestly, I’m not sure that’s true.
Tags: Bruce Springsteen, Buzzfeed, Crayola, Indiana Toll Road, Netcraft, Roper Research, US Mint, Weathersealed.com
In my daily scanning of internet ephemera that I justify under the catchall heading of ‘keeping tabs on the culture,’ two items popped up yesterday that my cerebral cortex couldn’t reconcile without massive cognitive dissonance.
First, an item posted on MediaPost’s Center for Media Research, presented a new study conducted by an eyewear client that found–perhaps not surprisingly–very positive benefits to wearing glasses. Beyond the obvious enhancement of visual acuity, kids consider other glasses-wearing kids to be ‘smarter’ than non glasses wearing kids. The 6-10 year olds surveyed also considered the glasses-wearers more honest but otherwise, didn’t judge them about their appearance positively or negatively.
Hmm… All these findings constitute incredibly-favorable survey results for a seller of childrens’ eyewear, but that’s not what created the cognitive dissonance. No, the problems arose when hours later, this concise item popped up on Buzzfeed, explaining that hipster glasses were officially no longer cool.
I can’t process both points of view and so, for the time being, my synapses will no longer be holding hands.
Tags: Buzzfeed, Cognitive Dissonance, Hipster Glasses, MediaPost, Research
