Neuromarketing: “Why do people purchase Tide brand laundry detergent rather than Purex or Persil? What drives consumers’ allegiance to a brand, and what compels them to abandon it? In the end, the choice of the best detergent for one’s washing machine should be based on tangible factors, including price and effectiveness. So why isn’t that the case? A 2021 PWC study shows that between 80–86 percent of American consumers are willing to pay more for speed and convenience regardless of the quality of the product, and an equally impressive 18 percent are willing to pay more for luxury and gratification services. This sort of consumer behavior has implications that go well beyond what gets rung up at the register. Well, that’s the territory of neuromarketing, the field of study that aims to understand how the human brain is functionally affected by advertising and marketing approaches.”
Doug Field in WSJ: “The disruption in the auto industry, driven by software, autonomy and electrification, is going to be as big as anything that’s happened in the last century.” Key ppoint: the car will become like the iPhone.
Derek Thompson on America needing a scientific revolution: “Four hundred years ago, the first scientific revolution overthrew old ways of looking at the world and embraced experimentation over tradition. We could use a similar revolution today. The U.S. relies on a fleet of scientific agencies—the CDC, FDA, NIH, and NSF—that are decades old and that, in many cases, act their age. The CDC publishes excellent research, but it utterly failed to respond quickly and adequately in the face of a national emergency. The FDA protects Americans from some terrible medical products, but its protectiveness also deprives Americans of some very good and urgently needed products. The NIH and NSF fund a lot of brilliant research, but their hegemony over scientific funding makes it hard to know whether we could be doing much, much better. American science needs more science. That means, above all, that we need more experiments. We shouldn’t have to depend on 20th-century institutions to guide 21st-century progress. The lesson of Fast Grants is that we don’t have to.”
