Sandeep Dayal about his book “Branding between the Ears: Using Cognitive Science to Build Lasting Customer Connections“: “When you look at cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, linguistics, and social anthropology, they have one thing in common: they’ve all been trying to understand why people behave in a certain way, and they’ve all been trying to understand, “How does the human brain work?” All of that knowledge has been applied in different areas, such as public policy, investing, and finance, but, for whatever reason, it wasn’t applied to branding. If you think about what branding is, it’s about influencing consumer choice, and if you’re going to influence consumer choice, then you want to understand how the brain works so that you can be more effective in making those influences work…Ninety-five percent of the time, we are making brand choices instinctively, and only 5 percent of the time will we sit around and create a spreadsheet or a systematic comparison. So then, how do we make choices instinctively? We rely on certain simplifying rules, and those rules are stored in our brains. Some people call these rules cognitive biases, but I prefer to call them ‘cognitive wisdom’ because they help us get by in life.”
FT: “Eric Schmidt…thinks the next big thing is the “bioeconomy”, not the internet. This catch-all label, Schmidt explained to me at the Aspen Ideas forum last month, describes “the use of biological processes to make use of things that we consume and manufacture… advances in essentially molecular biology… plus advances in AI have allowed us to do new techniques and grow new things.” Helpfully, he listed a few innovations this economy might include: new plastics that naturally degrade without polluting water, “biologically neutral” cement that does not hurt the environment, soil microbes that reduce fertiliser use, soy-based roof-coating that reduces urban heat and, my favourite, compostable dining ware such as edible forks. Put another way, the bioeconomy is based on stuff that is grown using synthetic biology.”
Thomas Sowell: “Going into debt to create long-term investments makes as much sense for the government as for a private individual’s borrowing more than his annual income to buy a house. By the same token, people who borrow more than their annual income to pay for lavish entertainment this year are simply living beyond their means and probably heading for big financial trouble. The same principle applies to government expenditures for current benefits, with the costs being passed on to future generations.” [via CafeHayek]
