Summary: One type of efficiency often leads to inefficiency in other areas. It’s important to maintain a balanced perspective on different types of efficiency and to relate them to your overall goals. Dishwashers frequently have an efficiency label on them. Those labels irritate me because they imply there’s only one kind of efficiency that matters…
Summary: Micropayments are a good idea in principle, but they haven’t caught on. Why? This article identifies three top reasons: (1) The hassle of lots of little charges. (2) The hassle of signing up. (3) The lack of a clear industry leader. Amazon could solve this. I don’t like platforms, but this seems like the…
Summary: Quadrant analysis can help organize thoughts, products, business units, and tasks. This article discusses 6 2 by 2 matrices that are helpful for business. You probably know and have used the Risk vs. Reward matrix, which creates four quadrants defined by low risk vs. high risk and low reward vs. high reward. It’s a…
Summary: The marketing funnel and the customer journey map are two useful mental models for understanding how your customers interact with your marketing efforts. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. You’ve seen many versions of the marketing funnel. Some of them are simply conceptual and don’t have any numbers attached to them. There might…
Summary: We can fail at estimating probabilities when we allow inconsequential similarities to cloud our judgment. If you flip heads five times, are you “due” for tails? Our brains have learned to take short cuts, but these shortcuts don’t always work. When they don’t work, we call them cognitive biases. The representative heuristic is a…
Summary: Understanding the different types or flavors of CDPs can help in the evaluation process, but it can also give marketers ideas about how to use a CDP to bring value to a business. This article highlights 10 types. Today’s podcast is a shorter version of an article I wrote for Martech.org, which I’ll link…
Summary: Memory of an event is disproportionately affected by the peak experience and the experience at the end. People who plan events for a living should take this into account in their planning. Cold: Your memory of an event may be disproportionately affected by two things Continuing my series on the thoughts of Daniel Kahneman…
Summary: As part of a review of the thoughts of Daniel Kahneman, this article discussed why focus can affect our judgments, and how the ease with which we can think of examples affects our understanding of probability. If you want to understand or learn something, you often have to devote some time to focused, careful…
Summary: In this second post on the thoughts of Daniel Kahneman we consider prospect theory and fear of loss as a contrast to expected utility theory. Here’s a quote from an article I’ll link below about Daniel Kahneman’s ideas. “For a long time, the most widely-accepted view of how people make decisions under uncertainty was…
Summary: Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that makes us latch on to the first bit of data we hear. This post discusses eight ways to combat this bias. Daniel Kahneman might be best known for his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” which I haven’t read, but I’ve read and heard a lot about Kahneman’s…
Summary: Water might get into a bathtub in many different ways, but it all goes out through the drain. This is analogous to your marketing efforts. You might “fill the tub” with several different types of marketing efforts, but they might all lead to one drain — or one “last touch point.” If you look…
Summary: Watch changes in engagement and take appropriate actions. When engagement declines, send an email or so something to get them back. When engagement increases, find out what you’re doing right, or get a testimonial! I thought I had coined a new phrase in the May issue of The Krehbiel Letter, which is available online…
Summary: This article explains why third-party cookies matter, what their loss will mean for internet marketing, and what companies should do now. How do you know which part of your marketing is helping you? That’s an old problem, and over the years people have tried various methods for solving it. Let’s say you publish “Carrot…
Summary: What you pay attention to will change the way you perceive the world, and what you take from it. I have a friend who quotes some ancient theologian to the effect that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” What does that mean? I think I can illustrate it with a story…
Summary: To make your content stand out in a crowded field, consider these nine concepts: voice, focus, frameworks, recurring segments, vocabulary, message, favorites, characters, and skits. Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The…