Micro-Moments

There’s been a lot of discussion recently around micro-moments, one of the latest marketing tactics from Google, as an attempt to facilitate shared experiences between brand and user.

In short, micro-moments seek to capture consumer demand at its most powerful; in those small, every-day moments when people seek answers to the questions they are most frequently asking.

Self-Confessed Experts

There is an idiom that sometimes pops up on social forums about ‘incompetent people being too incompetent to recognise their own incompetence’.

While often used as a catch-22 to win Internet arguments, it does have some grounding in reality, as over-estimations of competence are surprisingly common in all fields of knowledge.

Insights Good and Bad

Back in the early 90s one of the most pervasive sources of misinformation weaved its way into mass media, one that is still widely believed today despite numerous revisions and an updated scientific consensus.

The source in question is the USDA food pyramid, introduced in 1992 and the first of its kind to not only separate food into common groups, but also recommend daily servings of each.

Changing Minds

When it comes to influencing people to pick up a habit or start a new behaviour, it helps to consider how they think about existing habits. The best framework for exploring this is Sherif’s Social Judgment Theory.

An important component of this model is the Latitudes of Acceptance; a theory of how people respond to information that either confirms or denies long-held beliefs.