28 Aug 10 The best sites for local deals
I’ve become a big fan of the recent collective buying movement: startups negotiate a deal with a local merchant which gives the consumer a discount to try the place out. They write up a quick pitch and send out each day’s deal to the user-chosen metropolitan location in a direct response email blast. The spa/restaurant/salon/tour/trip company gets a large number of first-timers in the door (it usually takes around 15 purchasers to trigger the group deal/price in order to ensure it’s worth the establishment’s while). Customers get a great deal, with savings anywhere from 5%-90%, and merchants treat it as a worthwhile loss leader since the customers are usually locals who will come back after a good experience.
The landscape has exploded with many new players (especially with Groupon’s enormous $1.35B valuation) so I’ve compiled a list of some my favorite sites below. They are sorted alphabetically below:
- Bloomspot: My two purchases from them include a gift certificate to Whole Foods which cost $6 for $15 of groceries as well as a restaurant
voucher at Pasita in the West Village (this time $36 for $62 value). These two purchases show an exploration of the local deal coupled with the occasional national chain. Both are also great deals, and with the Whole Foods coupon, there were just about no limitations, so it’s money spent either way for me! - Groupon: The biggest in the field and one with lots of potential based simply on their head-start. They would be really smart to get into the
data-mining side of their business and leverage their substantial sales volume. It’s well-known that they have thousands of merchants on their waiting list. Groupon should be sorting users by buying type and offering deals to small sections of their audience — people buy based on deal category, proximity, price point…these are all data points that Groupon can/should use to start eating into that wait-list, and explore offers which amount to personalized deals to their users. - kgbdeals: I bought from them a 50% off home cleaning (comes out to $30 for 3 hours of cleaning time, with all the necessary equipment provided
by the cleaner!). kgbdeals is part of the greater kgb umbrella brand which includes the kgb service — basically just a pay version of ChaCha — as well as 118 118 and 118 218, two directory assistance subsidiaries in England and France, respectively). - LivingSocial: Spa treatment is my most recent purchase, a great deal @ $90 for a Spa Package: Foot Bath, and Choice of a One-Hour Facial or
Guerlain Impériale Massage (1,599 were purchased!). UPDATE: I got an email from LivingSocial this week saying that this spa (which is/was at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel) is closing, so the deal has been refunded. Boo. - Scoop St. Deals: I recently bought from them a 50% savings for Wednesday Jazz nights at Flute (which has two convenient
locations near me). It should be fun since it makes for 2 bottles of champagne for a total cost of $40, which is enough for a rather big group to enjoy. Plus, as the name implies, Wednesday nights mean live jazz from 8pm-midnight! - Zozi: They focus mainly on trips and events (think: wine tastings, kayaking tours, etc.) but they have had some great deals — and even a recent
giveaway for some free Zozi credits. Zozi is a great company to check out and add to your daily emails in the morning. Their team really knows what it’s doing, and I’m looking forward to buying my first Zozi experience soon!
One company I have not yet tried for deals is Yelp, which just announced they would also venture into the space. While Yelp is better known for its local reviews (I think I linked to their site about 5 times in this post), they are a newbie to the collective buying/deals space. Still, I wouldn’t count out their large and loyal user base as a starter for the platform.
PS- If you’re interested in signing up for any/all of the above services, I’ve linked to my personal referral pages: please consider signing up via those links so I can get some free credits — thanks!
Tags: bloomspot, chacha, collective buying, deals, discounts, groupon, kayak tours, kgbdeals, livingsocial, pasita, scoop st. deals, spa, whole foods, wine tasting, yelp, zozi
28 Aug 10 Stanford Football this week: Andrew Luck profile and ESPN prediction
The New York Times had a feature story today on Stanford QB Andrew Luck. It says exactly what you’d expect: he’s smart (on and off the field), he’s got first-round potential and he hugely admires Coach Harbaugh. As a side note, I have been an Andrew Luck fan before he even arrived on The Farm.
ESPN also had its PAC-10 preview, which was also was about exactly as you’d expect: it’ll be a tight race to the finish, Jake Locker and Andrew Luck will be battling for the Top QB herald and Oregon might still be a threat despite their team’s inability to stay out of police custody.
Both items also had their own surprises. In the New York Times article, Andrew Luck’s dad, Oliver, made a very good point about Harbaugh:
Jim has taken Stanford kids — and they all come from pretty good families; I’m sitting in the parents’ section with doctors and lawyers — and he’s convinced them they are a group of lunch-pail, blue-collar, smack-you-in-the-face, union kind of guys. I just love the irony of that. It’s the last school you would anticipate where you could create that.
He’s totally right.
In the ESPN clip, the commentators claim that USC and Oregon are the schools to watch — Lane Kiffin will have his struggles, and the arrests across just about every position at Oregon will have their effect. But the surprise is at the end: Stanford is the (dark-horse) pick to represent the PAC-10 at the-bowl-which-must-not-be-named.
He is also totally right.
In a year where you really can make an argument for any one of 7 or 8 teams to win the PAC-10 title, it’ll be a great football season.
And Andrew Luck will be a huge part of all the story lines.
Tags: andrew luck, espn, jim harbaugh, lane kiffin, oregon, pac-10, usc
10 Aug 10 The Disconnect
I have recently taken an interest in getting a pair of Tom’s Shoes. If you’re not familiar with Tom’s Shoes, you buy yourself a pair of comfy slip-on shoes and for every pair purchased, Tom’s gives a pair of new shoes to a child in need (usually somewhere in the developing world). They have a tag-line of One for One. Besides the social feel-good element, I’d heard they were just fun, comfortable and attractive shoes to wear, so I wanted to learn more.
At the same time, I happened to read read Sunday’s TechCrunch post about Online2Offline commerce, and I couldn’t agree more — especially about how the two converge:
The key to O2O is that it finds consumers online and brings them into real-world stores. It is a combination of payment model and foot traffic generator for merchants (as well as a “discovery” mechanism for consumers) that creates offline purchases. It is inherently measurable, since every transaction (or reservation, for things like OpenTable) happens online. This is distinctively different from the directory model (think: Yelp, CitySearch, etc) in that the addition of payment helps quantify performance and close the loop—more on that later.
[...]
FedEx can’t deliver social experiences like restaurants, bars, Yoga, sailing, tennis lessons, or pole dancing, but Groupon does. Moreover, for your locally owned and operated Yoga studio, there is little marginal cost to add customers to a partially filled class, meaning that the business model of reselling “local” is often more lucrative than the traditional ecommerce model of buying commodity inventory low, selling it higher, and keeping the difference while managing perishable or depreciating inventory.
The important thing about companies like O2O commerce companies is that performance is readily quantifiable, which is one of the tenets of O2O commerce. Traditional ecommerce tracks conversion using things like cookies and pixels. Zappos can determine their ROI for online marketing because every completed order has “tracking code” on the confirmation page. Offline commerce doesn’t have this luxury; the bouncer at the bar isn’t examining your iPhone’s browsing history. But O2O makes this easy; because the transaction happens online, the same tools are now available to the offline world, and the whole thing is brokered via intermediaries like OpenTable or SpaFinder. This has proven to be a far more profitable and scalable model than selling advertising to local establishments; it’s entirely due to the collection of payment by the online intermediary. [emphasis mine]
I followed every bit of the online purchasing funnel I’m sure you’ve heard as I learned more about these shoes: last week I used Web search to find the site and browsed the product pages to find the style I liked best. I went back later in the week and even located a store where I could try them on. Tom’s is running a good online marketing campaign, with both paid search (on Google, apparently, but not Bing) as well as Display Ads. I know they are a Google Display Network advertiser (yay!) since I am seeing their ads across Google properties like Blogger (see below) and YouTube.
I also can tell they’re savvy about it, since they’re certainly using Google’s Remarketing product, a powerful behavioral tool. As a result, I’ve gone from seeing zero of their messages to seeing plenty of them, all since I visited the Tom’s homepage. (Remarketing, or retargeting as much of the display ad industry calls it, refers to targeting users who have previous visited a site and serving them display ads based on a predetermined cookie length).
Me reading my friend Darius' blog, getting served the Tom's Shoes ad due to retargeting
(Incidentally, I suggest you all add Darius’ blog, Various Provocations, to your feed reader).
The key detail to remember about my online-offline interaction was that while I did revisit the Tom’s website (and in that way, Remarketing “worked,”) I did not yet become a true conversion and go through the billing info and hit the confirmation page. In this case, it wasn’t for a lack of interest (or marketing) — I just wanted the chance to try the shoes on before I committed.
Ultimately, I did in fact “convert:” I bought a pair of shoes. Buying through the brick-and-mortar merchant was attractive to me since it negated my need for shipping and tax (shipping because it was free from Nordstrom and tax because it was under $110 and shipped to my home in NYC).
But the problem is, I’m still on Tom’s Remarketing list. For all they know, I still haven’t bought any shoes and I’m still thinking about whether to go back and pull the trigger. The importance of the “Online2Offline” is defined by its disconnect. So what can be done? What can a company (as a seller, as an advertiser) do to connect the dots?
I propose one of two ideas:
- An aggregation service capable of tracking all conversions in one place. It’s a space that companies like Blippy play in and it’s not without its faults and dangers. But plugging in to such a service would allow for a centralized place for all conversions that happen (on debit/credit cards at least). Perhaps this is the value-prop that Blippy sees in the future.
- An offline-to-online conversion tracking system. The idea is simple, but obviously the implementation is key. What incentive does the consumer have to acknowledge the offline conversion online to close the loop? Why should I in my case, in other words, bother to go back online to Toms.com and let them know that I’ve successfully purchased my shoes (thanks in large part to their online ad spend)? Could one build a new breed of rewards system which gives consumers a reason to “report” back purchases? Talk about optimizing ad spend and reducing waste: is it really all that far off, especially in this time of the increasingly personal Web?
Tags: blippy, conversion, cookie, Google, google remarketing, nordstrom, one for one, online2offline, remarketing, techcrunch, tom's, tom's shoes
27 Jul 10 Facebook is just like real life
Stan James writes about how he thinks Facebook amplifies that demoralizing feeling you get when you see people raving about how glorious their lives are. He likens it to TV, and the idea that we’re all seeing a sanitized and unrealistically cheery version of each other.
Andrew Sullivan linked to the piece and excerpted:
Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be psychologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms. So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertently created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.
There are certainly parts of this that are true. But I disagree with his overall argument that this is somehow different from life. Reality TV, in all it’s forehead-to-the-palm-of-your-hand idiocy, pretty strongly refutes the notion that TV stars are the sculpted Adonises that James claims. Also, fictional shows like, say, The Office, show their fair share of grit and grime (including ugly actors, boring locations, work place monotony, cleaning and bathrooms [see below]). Sure, The Office is about laughs, but TV’s focus is not as singular as it is made out to be. And, while Hollywood actors and actresses can be attractive, the success of shows like Ugly Betty imply that people, at some level, see through that.
Moreover, I think we all scrub our external-facing lives to make them appear as squeaky clean as possible. We all want to look suave (that’s why we comb our hair); we all want to appear intelligent (that’s why we’re proud to discuss our cool jobs/classes); we all hate doing house-chores (that’s why it’s always put off to the last minute). Therefore, the depiction of life that we project to others (while offline) is not so dissimilar from the rose-tinted lenses of TV, or Facebook.
For example, the idea of posting only flattering photos on one’s Profile Pictures album seems analogous to putting only happy memories on the mantle, to sending out Christmas cards every year with a smiling family and dog with a copy of the year’s annual family resume.
What makes this entire phenomenon either more or less pernicious to you is that, like in life, bad things can and do get through. Sprinkled among the portrait photos and the group shots, there is bound to be a goofy one here or there. Little details can slip through the cracks: an errant photo of you in an other-than-perfect smile gets tagged — watercooler gossip spreads virally in person. Maybe someone posts on your Wall about how crazyyyy last weekend was…and just like that, the picture isn’t like a TV set, it’s like real life again.
Ultimately, is it any more annoying when someone is gloating “loudly” on Facebook about their fabulous (fill in the blank: ______ job/house/car/kids) than when they do so in person?
I don’t think so (feel free to disagree), I think that’s just life.
Tags: andrew sullivan, christmas card, daily dish, Facebook, the office, tv, ugly betty
28 May 10 Microkitchens
This is an awesome, awesome piece in Wired about the production of Toy Story 3.
It’s as much about creating a movie as it is about a team which knows each other and works well together.
A choice bit is when producer Darla Anderson is quoted as saying:
“Walking to the bathroom or getting a cup of coffee is often the most productive part of my day. You bump into somebody by accident and then have a conversation that leads to a fix.”
It reminds me a lot of Google culture, and why the unofficial “rule” is that Googlers should never be more than 150 feet away from a microkitchen.
It’s not only about delicious snacks (which it partially is). As this article proves, it’s not just some cliche team-building thing…it is what helps the Pixar team collaborate, and the effect at Google is no different.
Tags: collaboration, Google, pixar, productivity, toy story 3
11 May 10 Platonic Conceptions
I’ve been recently thinking a lot about ideals: the ideal job, the ideal girlfriend, the ideal New York City apartment*. Before I get too emo or abstract, I should state that I’m a bit skeptical of Platonic conceptions, of the Gatsby variety (discussed on Various Provocations blog, excerpted on Google Books). I’ll explain in the same manner as I often like to do; I’ll try to weave together a number of otherwise disparate anecdotes. However, the overarching idea here is: it’s hard to cling to a Platonic ideal, and when you do, it can be dangerous to your end goal.
My bundt cake, with the strawberry creation in the background
My first example came from the Mother’s Day dinner my dad and I jointly prepared. I should rephrase that to accurately reflect that I only contributed for the dessert portion of this, but I’d like to think my efforts were respectable. We had a delicious miso Chilean sea bass (fresh fish from here) as well as two desserts: a strawberry shortcake and an orange bundt cake. (This parenthetical is a big tangent, but a worthwhile one: for those of you who are in NYC, I could not more strongly recommend the monthly cake special from Benoit, Alain Ducasse’s midtown bistro. It’s either $20 or $25, with something different each month and each one has been spectacular. We’ve had every month’s since it started in late ’09 and not only are they a steal, but they’re beautiful, and delicious — we’ve seen pumpkin pies, bouches de Noëls, coconut-chocolate ganaches, etc. This month’s was a strawberry shortcake with a very delicate pistachio filling and a thin layer of meringue on top. Fabulous. As for the bundt cake, I actually made that from scratch, see pics here and here, and that was my total contribution to the dinner preparation. It should be noted, however, that my dessert was just as popular as the Benoit cake.).
Anyhow, we had these two desserts. And when the inevitable question of comparison came up, the issue was phrased as a comparison not of each implementation — this strawberry shortcake versus this pound cake — but of their respective Platonic conceptions. Which do you prefer, the world’s best strawberry shortcake or the world’s best orange bundt cake? Earlier in the meal, we ran across a similar problem (this is a family that likes food). When discussing the Peking duck at previous night’s dinner at Chinatown Brasserie, we asked which was preferable when eating 北京烤鸭: the Platonic thin, pancake/tortilla-like wrapper or the Platonic conception of the white, fluffy bao?
Images via Flick
Fair questions, both. Except my uncle pointed out: seeing the world via a binary (or even ternary) lens was inherently limiting: perhaps there is a cake out there which combines the wonders of strawberry flavor, layered whipped cream, with the satisfying weightiness of the pound cake. (Actually, that sounds pretty good.). What about a wrapper, a vehicle for the Peking duck which allowed for the best of the thin wrapping and the flavor-absorbing bao? By pigeonholing yourself, or either of these food dilemmas, into an “either…or” version of the ideal, you miss out entirely on the possibility of a delicious hybrid!
My second example is from the first line of this piece. I have been apartment hunting, and while I knew who my roommates would be (Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum) we didn’t have an apartment squared away until recently. It was tough, New York real estate is a tricky business, and dealing with brokers can be no fun. There are plenty of 
fun neighborhoods we liked, but we also wanted to be sure we had a space we liked that was commutable for the three of us. Anyhow, I think we each had in our heads the “perfect apartment.” The apartment in my head was more than just an aspirational, it was a really nice place: plenty of light, too much space, 2.0 bathrooms, marble countertops, super convenient location…I may be a bit hyperbolic here but I had a Platonic conception of the ideal apartment. So did my roommates. And in a real estate world where inventory flies off the shelves faster than Ben & Jerry’s in a heatwave, we acted quickly on an apartment which I’m sure fits in none of our combined Platonic conceptions of a place. The location can’t be beat, and it has a large living room space to entertain. It’ll be home. And we’ll make it a great home. It took us, all of us, to realize how to temper our expectations and put aside whatever ideals we had in our heads.
Now, I don’t have an MBA. And I don’t (currently) run a start-up. So I’m uniquely unqualified to tackle the issue of whether an MBA is a plus or a minus in the start-up world. But I’m going to try and answer, and propose what I think is the best solution. (Hint: it relates to the Platonic form I’ve been writing about so far.).
On the one hand, you have Guy Kawasaki, who proclaimed on Twitter that the MBA was not only of no utility to him as an entrepreneur, but in fact it was a negative. (I’m not sure if I’d even entertain that 
thought…I can understand an MBA being of no positive value, but it’s a different thing entirely to say that it has actively hurt him as a Silicon Valley fixture). On the other hand, you have Vivek Wadwa defending the MBA as “the best investment I’ve ever made.”
Wadwa, who has various appointments at Cal, Duke and Harvard, summarizes Guy’s thoughts as follows:
Kawasaki explained that his issue with MBAs is that they are “taught that the hard part is the analysis and coming up with the insightful solution.” In other words: implementation is easy and analysis is hard. “But this is the opposite of what happens in startups. Implementation is everything in a startup.” Kawasaki believes that MBAs aren’t a good fit for startups, and engineering graduates are.
Wadwa agrees that the average (tech) entrepreneur does not need to know much about pricing assets or about accounting cost flow assumptions, perhaps staples of the MBA program in the U.S. And he’s right. But, Wadwa argues, there is enormous value in learning how to present business ideas, how to integrate teams and how to manage. So why not re-envision the MBA entirely? Why is this piece a back-and-forth between two guys, spitting out jabs 140 characters at a time? Plenty of top schools are looking at reworking their entire programs, given the changing business environment (and perhaps the realization that their model wasn’t best preparing people for business). Maybe, then, there is a time and a place for the Platonic conception. There is a time and a place for the ideal, the imagined.
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* Of the three examples I threw out at the top of this piece, I’ve discussed only the apartment in detail. I’m pretty happy on the other two.
Tags: alain ducasse, apartment, bao, benoit, bundt, cakes, dessert, entrepreneurship, erika, fitzgerald, gatsby, Google, guy kawasaki, mba, mother's day, peking duck, plato, platonic conception, sea bass, startups, techcrunch, union square, vivek wadwa
24 Apr 10 A riddle for you, kind of.
It’s like one of the Mensa quizzes in the back of the airline magazine. Except I saw it while standing in front of a urinal. (TMI?)
It took me a second to figure this one out, but it’s a clever ad. And, so far as brain-teasers go when in the bathroom at a sports bar, this was particularly fun. (Note: I did in fact finish using the urinal and wash my hands before taking these photos. Just wanted to clarify that).
A hint from the bottom of the ad, which I found a bit helpful:
Message me — or better yet, leave a comment on this post — if you get it.
First one wins a prize of absolutely zero monetary value. Have fun!
22 Apr 10 The number of signals
I’ve been thinking a lot about data recently. I don’t just mean in the IBM Smarter Planet sense — data not just in volume. Instead, I’ve been thinking about how one works with data, given that the number of signals for any given project seems today to be increasing exponentially.
My thesis here is not simply that “too much data is bad.” Nor am I saying “data is the only real currency we have today.” I believe that a combination of intelligent signal-gathering, coupled with a robust data set, together result in streamlined and actionable results. I intend to prove this with three examples: foursquare’s recent work to battle check-in fraud; a Google advertising product, Conversion Optimizer; and metadata in a Tweet.
About two weeks ago, foursquare announced that they would be kicking up their cheating detection. They said:
What we’d like to do is award points, mayorships and badges only when you’re at the place you say you’re at. Last week we started using a few different tricks using your phone’s GPS to try to verify this. (and if your phone doesn’t use GPS, we use a few different tricks)
But just a day later, they had to issue a second blog post, clarifying their new policy and the changes they were making. People didn’t understand how fraud would be determined (and they wanted to know more). Based on the second post, it seems clear that people wanted to know specifically: in the absence of precise GPS data, how would the foursquare team determine what are legitimate check-ins and what are not? Foursquare’s response was that they’re constantly tweaking the system: when one checks in via a means sans GPS — say, via SMS — the team would use a variety of signals to determine whether you were being honest or not; the phrase “history, frequency, etc.” was the most commonly cited technique. But here, with a dearth of data, foursquare found itself looking for extra information, for more layered data about the check-in (and the user) than is currently available. They acknowledge the system isn’t perfect, but that’s the best they can do.
On the flip-side, I’ve been recently hearing about colleagues who have campaigns opted in to Google’s Conversion Optimizer. I’m told the system is good, but it’s too good: it is rules-based, and does everything it can to stick to the conversion metric it has been given — and often it adheres quite strictly. The tool, as smart as it is, does what humans can’t: it stand strong on those borderline cases. But it’s strictness as a strength is also its rigidity as its downfall. Indeed, Conversion Optimizer has a virtually unlimited number of signals to process: there are so many moving parts, so many potential levers to pull, that even the system must, at some point, start to eliminate otherwise valuable information. It is in many ways a corollary to the Paradox of Choice, fewer choices and less information would make the algorithm’s job easier.*
Finally, ReadWriteWeb recently posted a fascinating image, via Raffi Krikorian, a dev on Twitter’s API/Platform team. It breaks-out the anatomy of a Tweet…it shows the full metadata embedded right along with those 140 characters you input on your keyboard. I’ve read at least one opinion which states that Annotations could be trouble from a metadata perspective (for many of the standards-based reasons scholars raise objection with Google books). But this outline gives a glimpse into perhaps the best way to solve this wonderful problem space of data volume: how best to structure for organizing, sorting and extracting meaning or trends? It is important that (at least at the beginning), Twitter is bundling this as structured data.
Ultimately, I see this scenario as the Goldilocks reality: too little and too much and just right. The “quality” (i.e. the source) of data is about equally as important as the volume. We have the ability to solicit and accept not just a floodgate of information. Today, we can receive a discreet number of particular signals, each with different intervals and frequencies of their own. This is how data (and those who examine/tease out meaning from data) will succeed in the years to come.
*As usual, I want to state up-front that my comments about Google — as well as its products, employees and business partners– have neither been sanctioned nor screened by Google. I also want to make clear that I am writing anecdotally here: I am not even aware of the clients in examples discussed herein.
Tags: 4sq, APIs, cheating, check-in, conversion optimizer, Foursquare, goldilocks, GPS, IBM, metadata, paradox of choice, SMS, tweet, Twitter
06 Mar 10 Chinese Easter bunnies at Whole Foods
I’m sorry but it’s honestly the first thing I thought!
Tags: bunnies, Easter, whole foods
21 Feb 10 On Maslow and Advertising
A while back, a friend’s mom told me about a game she used to play with her friends and colleagues (she has a background in law and interactive media).
The premise of the game is that all advertising is rooted in one of two things: sex and fear. More on sex in a minute, her point about fear was that even if advertisements did not play on your explicit fear of, say, security, they would touch upon your fear of being an outsider when you didn’t know about the latest and greatest products.
The point of the game, however, centered around sex. She 
pointed out that you could use just about any jingle or slogan to promote Viagra, even phrases from otherwise unrelated products. My favorites were the adaptation of Men’s Warehouse: “You’re going to like the way you look, I guarantee it.” Or the use of Chevy’s ads, “Like a rock.”
It’s a fun game, but it drives home a point: advertising appeals to our base instincts, desires and thoughts.
Which is why I found this article on “neural advertising” in Time such a good read.
Researcher Martin Lindstrom monitors consumers when they are exposed to advertising; he checks brain activity, pupil dilation, sweat responses and flickers in facial muscles — all markers of emotion.
To figure out what most appeals to our ear, Lindstrom wired up his volunteers, then played them recordings of dozens of familiar sounds, from McDonald’s ubiquitous “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle to birds chirping and cigarettes being lit. The sound that blew the doors off all the rest–both in terms of interest and positive feelings–was a baby giggling. The other high-ranking sounds were less primal but still powerful. The hum of a vibrating cell phone was Lindstrom’s second-place finisher. Others that followed were an ATM dispensing cash, a steak sizzling on a grill and a soda being popped and poured.
Imagine, then, if companies go ahead with the talks Lindstrom is already having: European supermarkets piping the sound of percolating coffee or fizzing soda into the beverage department or that of a baby cooing into the baby-food aisle.
This would be a combination of the explicit physiological Maslow needs coupled with the love/belonging and esteem higher up the pyramid.
What would this mean for Web marketers? How could you drive home affinity to the same set of interests and needs online? Can you use the same hook (namely, sound) to draw in your audience without making the user feel as though s/he is being bombarded?
Tags: babies, chevy, hillary clinton, jingle, marketing, maslow, maslow's hierarchy, mcdonald's, men's warehouse, neural advertising, ricky bobby, sex, slogan, viagra
