Forecasting, pricing, purpose and memory

Welcome to the first ever edition of my newsletter. If you’re reading this you are one of the first 83 people to subscribe. Thank you so much for taking the punt. It means so much.

I’ve decided to organise this first edition using the same four sections I use to organise my site: Articles, Threads, Talks and Links. Let me know what resonates most.

Articles:

My latest article, The Forecasting Fallacy, assesses how predictions have performed in five fields. The article argues that poor projections have propagated throughout our society and proliferated throughout our industry. It argues that our fixation with forecasts is fundamentally flawed.

This article is now my third most popular piece behind The Ageism in Advertising and Magpie Marketing. Thanks to everyone who has read and shared it.

Threads:

In his book Priceless, William Poundstone describes coherent arbitrariness; the theory that people don’t judge prices in absolute terms but relative to their context.

The book goes on to explore the many ways that our perceptions of value are flexible rather than fixed.

I summarised seven of them.

You can read the full Thread on Twitter.

Talks:

With the world’s marketing conferences cancelled due to COVID-19 Giles Edwards and his team set up Isolated Talks. The site aims to keep ideas flowing despite the trying circumstances and to raise money for the Samaritans while they do it.

I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute to the project and decided to share a talk based on my article The Pitfalls Of Purpose.

The talk makes the case that brand purposes that miss the mark fall into one of three pitfalls. They pursue a purpose that is too far removed from their product, they trivialise a culturally sensitive subject and they act in contradiction to their claims. Successful brand purposes avoid these pitfalls; they are credible, considerate and committed.

You can watch the entire talk for free at the Isolated Talks website or on the project’s YouTube channel.

Links:

I’ve been learning a lot about memory recently. Here’s five of the best articles I’ve read on the subject:

The Great Forgetting: Sigmund Freud coined the term ‘childhood amnesia’ in 1910 to describe the paucity of solid memories adults tend to have of their first seven years or so. There’s two reasons for this. Firstly the hippocampus, which bundles sensory inputs into memories, isn’t fully developed until adolescence. Secondly, in our early years, we rapidly generate new neurons in the hippocampus which disrupts the circuits of existing memories. Aeon

The Mystery of S.; The Man with an Impossible Memory: Alexander Luria noticed that a patient with a seemingly infallible memory also had a fervent imagination. Separately, neuroscientists have found that amnesiacs who cannot remember the past also struggle to picture the future. Neuroimaging has shown that brain activity during these two tasks is virtually identical. Our imagination draws on memory, recombining actual experiences and modelling them into hypothetical scenarios. Memory is imagination. And perhaps more importantly, imagination is memory. The New Yorker

The Brain That Changed Everything: Fascinating profile of Henry Molaison, who in 1953 had his hippocampus removed in an experimental procedure aiming to treat his epilepsy. Molaison went on to become the most studied neuroscience patient in history. Esquire

How Many of Your Memories Are Fake?: All memory is coloured with bits of life experiences. When you recall you’re actually reconstructing. It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that you’re telling a story about yourself. You’re combining details you really do remember, with things you know to be generally true. The Atlantic

The Strange Case of the Woman who Can’t Remember her Past, or Imagine her Future: There are two distinct types of memory. Episodic memories relate to events and experiences and semantic memories involve facts and concepts. People with amnesia lose their episodic memories and keep their semantic ones due to trauma. Susie Mc­Kinnon was the first patient to suffer from this condition naturally. Since then many more people with severely deficient autobiographical memory have been found. They live happy and fulfilling lives. Which raises the question: If we can get by so well without episodic memories, why did we evolve to have them in the first place? Wired

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Thank you again for being among the first 83 subscribers to sign up for this newsletter. Over time I hope that number will rise along with the value that the newsletter provides. Please let me know if you have any feedback. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time,

Alex