As soon as I finished reading Daniel Willingham’s fascinating book Why Don’t Students Like School?, I immediately put it on my list to blog about. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, applies the principles of cognitive psychology to the world of education. Essentially, his goal is explain to teachers how their students’ brains…
When apparel retailer Gap releases a new clothing design, marketing analysts look to a key customer segment as an early indicator of the product’s popularity: the people who work in its stores. “Our employees are also our target audience, so we know quickly by those first-day employee purchases if we have a hit on our…
We always seem to be on a search for cause. In college my statistics professor’s favorite expression was “correlation does not imply causation.” In case you’re not familiar with the phrase, I’ll borrow the explanation I learned in school: When male college students wake up with a headache, a large percentage of the time they…
Ever notice that food tastes better when someone else makes it for you? In the fourth annual Food and Drink issue of the NY Times magazine, noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains: When you make your own sandwich, you anticipate its taste as you’re working on it. And when you think of a particular food for…
For Scotts Miracle-Gro, social media has proven to be an effective brand fertilizer. According to Beth Dockins, director of customer service, many of the company’s customers prefer to tweet or Facebook a picture of their issue over having to talk about their lawn problems on the phone. But social media can just as quickly open…