#47 – On stupidity, self-obsession, media literacy, NPS, pre-testing, and the impact of Ozempic
Hello and happy Tuesday,
in this week’s edition of Strategy Bites (that has been unfashionably delayed by a burst of business travel to Finland, Stockholm, and Germany and just general lack of discipline and planning on my side) we sound out trends in songwriting; we hear some wise words on pre-testing; we read about NPS and all the things that are great and bad about it; we (don’t) empathise with the alcohol and tobacco industry who might suffer from the side effects of Ozempic; and we get refreshed by an inspiring argument that people really aren’t stupid. Nice.
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Six Links of Inspiration:
It’s not just TikTok: why songs are becoming simpler and more repetitive. This is one of those rare cases when both my nostalgic, romantic music journalist heart and my strategist heart beat faster. (Sometimes you can eat your cake and have it, too.) The short of it: song lyrics have become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years.
Some wise words on pre-testing. Sarah Newman cautions people using pre-testing metrics to be aware of the mess behind the seeming precision. It’s worth diving into the comments as well.
She reads the newspaper on TikTok. Amongst the different types of fame you can find on digital platforms, reading the newspapers surely must be one of the rarest. Nevertheless, it’s an important one, considering that many people get their news from these platforms – and only a few of them have ever learned to be critical about the information an algorithm (or the media) is feeding them.
Two Decades of Net Promotor Score: Relevance or evidence? Potentially one of those prime cases of you become what you measure, I’ve had many a discussion about using NPS in a previous company I’ve worked for. I’m a bit of a skeptic, but that’s maybe because all I remember from my days of studying quantitative and qualitative research methodologies is that people don’t say the truth in surveys. So luckily, here’s a paper trying to settle the score on NPS: is it actually helping businesses or hurting them. “NPS follows in a long line of management concepts, such as Servqual or the Kano model, where the ease of application and alignment with senior management priorities wins over empirical robustness.”
Ozempic is coming for the alcohol and tobacco industries next. A lot has been written about the impact of drugs like Ozempic and their impact on food and snack brands. To an extent where it has impacted stock prices. Turns out these new drugs won’t just impact our bad snacking habits. “A new report from Morgan Stanley finds that people using GLP-1 drugs — among them Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound — reduce their consumption of tobacco and alcohol while taking the medications.”
The radical idea that people aren't stupid. In a world where we’re constantly told that people are stupid in some shape or form, this article makes the argument that people really are not stupid. There is of course a reason for it, and a good one, too: “Naive realism, psychological distance, and correspondence bias combine to create the funny feeling that common sense is uncommon. And that’s unfortunate, but it’s also a totally sensible way for a human mind to work. Naive realism is necessary—if your unconscious mental systems had to wait for your conscious self to sign off on everything, you’d drive your car right into a tree (fortunately allowing you to escape any middle-aged scammers in the car). The effects of psychological distance are necessary, too: if you could only conclude something about ‘people in general’ by thinking about each of eight billion people one by one, you’d go insane.”
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this little injection of inspiration into your inbox. If you have, please consider sharing it with your friends.
See you next week (or a bit later),
Maximilian