Articles

Why is an ad showing a piece of cake more engaging when the fork is placed to the right of the cake? Enter the field of “embodied cognition” – the idea that without our conscious awareness, our bodily sensations help determine the decisions we make. For example,...

In physics, the Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – it can just change from one form to another. However we are not constrained by this law in commerce when it comes to demand – new demand can be created.  With...

At the conclusion of strategy sessions we identify objectives and allocate responsibilities with timelines. It’s all very clear. But why then has it been found that strategy execution is the number one challenge facing global CEO’s – even more important than...

The 1958 French film Les Almants (The Lovers) was about a woman involved in adultery. Directed by Louis Malle, the film was a hit in France, but when it crossed the Atlantic to the US it was met with horror by the authorities who felt the material was obscene. The...

We ask customers how satisfied they are, because we think that satisfaction means profitability and growth. That’s not necessarily true. Also, those lengthy feedback forms may give us lots of data, but do very little when it comes to telling us about future patronage....

    This year’s Consumer Electronics Show will feature everything from biometric socks and other ‘wearables’ to 3D printers, drones, robotics, virtual reality and TV’s where the clarity is best described as ‘breath-taking’. However, in the recent Brandwatch Report on...

Mrs Keech (a pseudonym) was gifted with automatic writing. Basically she got messages from The Guardians of outer space, and would share the information with a small group who also believed the messages to be real. It became a serious matter when one day The Guardians...

Certain instances aside, such as when you’re driving with your spouse, it’s nice to know how you’re performing. The ubiquity of digital media has provided us with a treasure chest of data allowing us to ‘see’ what’s happening when we’re nowhere near what’s happening....

When it comes to strategic planning, the humourist Sam Levenson makes a keen observation: “Some people are so good at learning the tricks of the trade, that they never get to learn the trade.” The result is that we have a document that is so generic – full of...

The term ‘meme’ was popularised by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. The reason that our genes are selfish essentially boils down to survival of the fittest - your genes are selfish, because they want to replicate themselves. That’s why ‘a chip off the old...

The "world's funniest joke" was exhaustively researched by Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire. The reason for the research was to discover the joke that had the widest appeal amongst different cultures, demographics and countries. The project...

A young man called Andrew Pole loved data, especially the patterns that would emerge. Some of his research was questionable, such as working out the optimal amount of beer that you would drink to have the confidence to chat up a woman, but not so much that you made a...