Knowing and Making

An intriguing situation with an advertising campaign in which the government promotes breastfeeding of babies. The "Breast is Best" campaign, aside from biasing sales in Kentucky Fried Chicken, is intended to encourage new mothers to breastfeed their babies instead of using bottles. Breastfeeding generally is thought to improve the health of the baby and, possibly, also of the mother. However, the campaign appears to have the surprising side-effect of reducing  the number of breastfeeding mothers. Apparently, highlighting the fact that people need to be encouraged to breastfeed creates an unintended norm...leading many people to (not consciously, I believe) think that bottle feeding is the default option. Therefore, a pro-breastfeeding organisation has asked the government to stop the campaign. I'm sure the new coalition, with its new budget constraints on the COI (Central Office of Information - the civil service advertising department) will be happy to oblige. ...

From Rory Sutherland , current president of the Institute of Practioners in Advertising: "We need to broaden the definition of what we do to reflect the new reality of the market place because if we don't create a new model based on human understanding, then we are in danger of using 1950's packaged goods persuasive techniques to solve today's communications problems! With behavioural economics we can align ourselves to a recognizable science..." I'm a great supporter of Rory's campaign to bring science into the marketing world - the field today is too driven by gut feeling, and treats creativity as an end instead of a means. Science lets us clearly understand the business problem, create a solution and demonstrate that it will work. I disagree with him on one point in particular, but we'll come back to that. In the meantime, I've been reading Sam Delaney's book  Get Smashed , a history of the British advertising industry from the 1940s onwa...

The Office of Fair Trading is conducting a market study on advertising and pricing . This is of interest to me because one of my company's services is advising clients on how to structure their prices. Finding the right price structure is in the interests of both supplier and consumer; although pricing can look like a straight zero-sum game where any gain by the supplier is a loss to the consumer, this is not at all true in general. Thanks to the OFT for pointing out the study to me. The authors have requested comments on what its scope should be; I have made the following submission: Consumers' experienced utility of a good is not always predictable in advance, and pricing can be a key factor in several situations relating to this. Purchases can broadly be classified into four types: In the first type , consumers have a good prior understanding of the utility they can expect to gain. This is the type of purchase dealt with by rational choice theory. Many of the pricing practi...

According to this posting from Felix Salmon (if I can match Gawker's CPM) I could make about £150 a month if I sold advertising on Knowing and Making. Some way to go before I can give up the day job . Please refresh the page a few more times if you want to help. Still, it could just about pay for one of the following: all my visits to the pub my council tax dinner at Gordon Ramsay once a month a subscription to the FT, the Economist, and all the economics books I read the money I pay Google for advertising my software on their site Maybe it's worth it. That is, if I could get Gawker to sell the ads for me. Think they'd be up for it?