Stirred and yes, Shaken.

Long day at work analyzing Financial Reports

Excitement of seeing friend who is moving to Oz for good!

45 mins wait at the Bar of an overrated Covent Garden venue

Participation in a forced banter with the Bartender

2 Chocolate Martinis

One careless Head flick from a girl at the adjacent Table

Craving the Sound of Silence

Where did all the silence go?

I sit on a bus/train and 66% of the people are on their phones, oblivious to the unwelcome intrusion they exercise by belting out details of their mundane lives on top of the stoppage announcements in the vehicle. I don't want to know about your latest crush in school. I also don't need to know what was so shocking in your friend's day that made your entire conversation a recurring series of "No!" and "Really?" and an occasional "Wow!".

I don't understand why everyone doesn't have their phones on vibrate? Making a personal statement via your ring tone? What a depressing death of all known modes of creativity.

My tolerance is also abysmal for the leaky standard iPod earphones.

Psychiatrically speaking though, I wonder if there is something seriously dysfunctional about a world where people cannot wait to actually get home to have a decent conversation with the spouse. They have to get it out of the way while being Publicly transported. I know I am making a prejudiced differentiation between a phone conversation and sitting down with a book. When you think about it, they are not that different. Except for the intrusion aspect, I guess. Rare would be that annoyance that comes off a nicely creased spine, yellowed cover pages of a Penguin Classic. I am prejudiced.

Where did all the Marketing sense go?

A popular consumer opinion website recently ran a survey asking users to comment on which advertisements were annoying them the most. Not surprisingly, with a resounding majority (more than 7000 votes!) the obnoxious winner is everyone's most hated moustached man on Go Compare.

Perhaps, being annoying and loud = memorable = better product recall = effective advertising? Unfortunately not. Amongst the hundreds of blog posts, comments, websites dedicated exclusively to shred any claims of the advertising merit of this promotion, there is no indication whatsoever of any likelihood of using the product based on this campaign.

Let's bring Psychology in
In fact research by Douglas, Kellaris, Cox and Cox and several others suggests that advertisements without music performed better on recall and recognition measures than ads with music.

Therefore even though I wonder if this loud and pointless Promo may perhaps result in the downfall of the product in question, I'd be maligning the scientific method, if I were to say that the usage of the product has or may have suffered due to this marketing fiasco. I would need empirical evidence for that particular website usage over the past few months in order to say that.

Let's check some figures: Market share as on Dec 2009 compared to Dec 2008

1. Moneysupermarket.com 18.97 per cent (-4.3 per cent),

2. GoCompare.com 6.89 per cent (+0.72 per cent),

3. Confused.com 4.23 per cent (+0.5 per cent),

4. Comparethemarket.com 3.32 per cent (+1.93 per cent)

It appears that biggest rising star is the friendly Russian Meerkat.

Crushingly though, GoCompare has also registered a recent increase!

Check the Google Trends report for usage of some websites.

I'll post in another 2 months with more data to corroborate my tentative hypothesis. Right now the rising trend is too small for me to discard my hypothesis and the advertisement is too awful for me to give up moaning about it.

References:

1. Market share data from business.scotsman.com.

http://business.scotsman.com/medialeisure/-Terry-Murden-looks-at.5988705.jp

2. Trends data from Google

3. Douglas, Olsen G, Creating the contrast: the influence of silence and background music on recall and attribute importance. Journal of Advertising (2005)

I'm Green because I'm better than you.

Bought the new environment friendly Tea? Green T-shirts, bags, accessories? Was there a small crowd witnessing your altruistic deed at the time? No? Well done you, as new research suggests that people are more likely to buy green products when said products are costlier than their regular equivalents and also when such a purchase is being made in public.

Research on the shopping habits for environmental friendly products equated buying green products, which are costlier and perhaps of a more basic quality to the Biologists' interpretation of Altruism. Biologists associate altruism with a 'costly signal' which in turn is usually associated with status.

Experimental data revealed that conditions which led to perception of a higher status resulted in a heightened desire for Earth-friendly products. However this was only observed when

shopping was done in public as opposed to private. Participants were also more likely to buy green products when these were significantly higher in price than non-green counterparts. The researchers behind the study are hopeful that these findings may pave a way into manipulating status and competition related messaging to promote Environmentalism.

There has been some truly fascinating research in the Neurosciences linking brain regions to some of the most sophisticated and 'human' experiences and traits like empathy and altruism. E.g. Scientists have found that activation of the Posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC) predicted subjects' propensity to engage in altruistic acts.

It is of course incredible to see how the discipline of Neuroscience, and specifically functional imaging has evolved from what the cynics argued was glorified phrenology to an instrument unravelling the very nature of being human.

Read More:

1. Griskevicius, Vladas; Tybur, Joshua M.; Van den Bergh, Bram, Going green to be seen: Status, reputation, and conspicuous conservation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (2010)

2. Tankersley, D, Altruism is associated with an increased neural response to agency. Nature Neuroscience. (2007)

Hazards of Obedience

So, yet another bunch of pop Psychologists, this time in the guise of a panel responsible for a fake French Game Show have attempted to replicate Stanley Milgram's classic albeit controversial experiment conducted at Yale University in the 60s.

The original Milgram experiments investigating obedience to authority used a simple experimental design and placed one of two subjects in the role of a "teacher" and the other was the designated 'Student'. The subjects were informed that the experiment is on memory and learning and on the effects of punishment on these. The 'student' is then put in another room strapped to a chair and explained that he needs to learn word pairs. E.g. When initially presented with 'Butter - Bread' he needs to be able to respond with Bread when the 'Teacher' presents the cue Butter. If he failed to recall the correct second portion of the presented word-pair, he would be administered an electric shock. What is noteworthy is that the 'Student' is actually an actor and receives no real shocks. The subject in the role of the teacher however, does not know this and is expected to operate a panel delivering shocks of varying intensities going right up until a fatal Voltage on the insistence of the experimenter whenever the student is wrong.

How far is too far?

Surprisingly (contrary to the consensus that Milgram himself obtained from a range of individuals including Psychiatrists, general educational community etc.) more than 60% of the subjects were willing to go to the absolute limit of the shock spectrum administering almost 450 Volts at times to the 'students'. This was despite the full realisation of the discomfort being voiced by the actors in the other room who in some cases pleaded to be set free and demanded to be released from the experiment.

What is interesting to note is that while a few subjects refused to carry on, a majority were quite compliant to the demands of the experimenter and pulsed lethal dosages of electric current to strangers! The moral compass, it seemed, collapsed when faced with an authoritative figure. This platform is inadequate for discussing the ethical, moral and legal ramifications of this experiment. Needless to say, the French TV show has brought these issues in the forefront again. Another quite similar offspring of this fascination of Media with Psychology was the Oliver Hirschbiegel movie Das Experiment (German, 2001) which tackled issues of authority and role playing gone wrong.

Milgram experiments of the 21st Century

Try approaching a Grant awarding body with a proposal of replicating Milgram experiments! Understandably the entire issue is laden with too valid an argument against carrying out experiments that knowingly put people in extremely distressing situations and are designed on deception. However, compliance, obedience, authority and personality characteristics that make some people more vulnerable to these than others is a valuable field of research and it would be a shame not to explore it further.

In comes immersive virtual reality.

Slater et al (2006) carried out the original Milgram experiments but replaced the 'students' with a virtual female human being on a computer. The cyber victim protested with genuine discomfort and demands for experiment termination as the original Milgram actors. The researchers concluded that "in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real."

Read More

1. Milgram S. Obedience to Authority: McGraw-Hill; 1974

2. Slater M., Antley A., Davison A., Swapp D., Guger C., Barker C., Pistrang N., Sanchez-Vives M. V. (2006. ). A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PLoS ONE 1, e39.

3. Telegraph Story on the French Game show, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7457780/French-contestants-torture-each-other-on-TV-Game-of-Death.html

Shots from India #1

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