Entries Written By Alistair Vince
The100: Brand purpose, prediction addiction and back in the USSR
The benefits of foresight? Do predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies? Does this make predictions dangerous? Should we stop making predictions? Will I ever stop asking so many questions? (I hope not.) Stuart Ritchie has been unpacking Margaret Heffernan’s book on our addiction to prediction. Our fervent desire to know and chart the future – and our …
The100: Behavioural economics, aspiration windows and The Codfather
The aspiration gap Yup. They’ve done it again. Reach Solutions, whose previous white papers Gut Instinct and The Empathy Delusion made many a marketeer mop their brow, are back making us feel uncomfortable with The Aspiration Window: Given what we now know about the analytical thinking styles of people working in advertising and marketing and our empathy …
The100: Cathedrals, scarcity heuristics and sucking sounds
When you’re last, make it a race to come first Mr D Trott esq has a knack for finding anecdotes around people solving problems in unusual ways. Here’s his tale of a wine merchant using the scarcity heuristic to invent a tradition now culturally ingrained. As a columnist from The New York Times put it: As …
The100: Creativity conditions, ambiverts and poolside.fm
Are you a Monica or a Ross? A Hufflepuff or a Ravenclaw? We like to put ourselves into brackets. Be it as characters in TV series or movies; in colours, numbers or as mythological star signs. Of all these brackets the one of the most typed about is arguably if you’re an introvert or an …
“We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”
Anyone? It’s a line from the 1998 film The Truman Show – the story of an insurance salesman who slowly discovers that his whole life has been a television show. A work of fiction that is precipitously and painfully close to real life. Because all the things we often perceive to be true, may not …
Online retailers: if you can’t get me now, when will you?
In the past 6 weeks I have bought a load of things online including printer cartridges (for the kids’ schoolwork), a large picture frame, cheese (of course), wine (of course), coloured paper, postcards and some 6 packs of shoelaces. All of which I would normally buy from the high street. Thing is, whilst some of …