Knowing and Making

Since last year I have been discussing the idea of "System 3" - a set of mental capabilities and processes involved in imagination and mental simulation. These capabilities appear to be used for several mental activities, notably: planning and thinking about the future counterfactual reasoning daydreaming and mind-wandering consumption of fiction mental replay of past experiences and in empathetically considering how other people experience an event Recently some other writers in the market research industry and elsewhere have been discussing System 3. Here are some of their thoughts: Kathryn Ambroze at HCD with  a detailed writeup of a System 3 approach including examples Ambroze also takes an in-depth look at different models of thought, contextualising  System 3 as a way to model future thinking or prospection Thomas George of DoWell Research, on using System 3 to build brands Brian Carruthers of WARC, reviewing my System 3 talk at IIeX Amsterdam ESOMAR ...

Do you remember those catchy tunes from the late 1980s? I Should Be So Lucky ?  The Locomotion ? The first time you heard them they were quite fun, memorable even. But then they got more airplay. And more. And more. Radio stations figured out that the sugary, bubbly popness of the tunes would cut through a lot of background noise and get your attention, so they played them again and again. Soon we had Got To Be Certain , and Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi , which were exactly the same as the first two songs. Then a "strategic inter-agency collaboration" with Jason Donovan on Especially For You . ( Jason looks a bit less lifelike in this alternative version) . After a short interlude in late 1989, another number 1 with Tears On My Pillow , which was meant to be more sophisticated but was equally artificial, overproduced and in fact just the same old song as I Should Be So Lucky . By this time anyone who wasn't a 13-year-old girl was thoroughly sick of Miss Minogue, who wasn...

While I would love it if this idea came true, doesn't it sound a little like special pleading? Tax breaks on market research, proposed by...three companies which spend money on market research. Oh but wait - they also have the support of "accountancy groups near Henley-on-Thames". Hmm. Don't accountancy groups also make money right now from the existing tax breaks on technological research and development? Why yes. Is market research a good thing? Yes, just like jobs and apple pie - not famously the subject of a lot of tax breaks. There is one good argument though, not clearly made by the article: research has a positive externality. Research allows us to test more innovations, and innovations by one party - whether successful or not - tell the rest of us something about what to try in the future. That's a good thing - but only if (like the patent system) people have to disclose the results of their research. Maybe we should offer tax breaks on disclosure  of...

I received the following emails today: What should I do? Are these two offers exactly equivalent? The John Lewis voucher somehow sounds better, because they sell better stuff. I could get (a fortieth of) a Macbook! Then again, I buy stuff in M&S more often, so the voucher is more likely to be used - and I could get a very nice dinner there for £25. If they'd offered to buy me dinner in return for my time, I'd probably be even better disposed towards them. And yet, if a client offered me £25 cash for 30 minutes work, I'd turn it down. Is it possible that I feel more positive towards B2B Marketing and Vocus than I do to my clients? Hardly. The only possible rational explanation is that I am less worried about establishing a reputation for cheap work in the eyes of a market research company than in the eyes of my customers. If this were happening, it would be a strange form of intuitive price discrimination. But this isn't really what is going on. It's...