One's relative, three's a crowd

Forget the theory of crowds.

According to Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, testing large groups of people does not guarantee you an accurate answer to a problem.  Herd instincts get in the way.

Take a jar of jelly beans. Ask people to guess the number inside. Prime one big group of people with numbers significantly lower than the real number. Prime another group with numbers significantly higher. We'll all stick close to the number first specified. Whether it's true or not. Our natural tendency is to make relative rather than absolute decisions or choices.  We're only human, after all!

Click here to view details of the IPA's Behavioural Economics programme

Gap plugs the gap

I was reading a piece from Advertising Age earlier today about the proposed new GAP logo.

It seems that Marka Hansen, Gap North America president, has acknowledged that the proposed switch was a mistake.

The real story behind the logo - created by New York agency Laird & Partners - is that "given the passionate outpouring from customers that followed, we've decided to engage in the dialogue, take their feedback on board and work together as we move ahead and evolve to the next phase of Gap." In other words, they havelistened to the negative feedback from designers, bloggers and ordinary consumers among their 720,000 Facebook fans, They were allegedly already planning a crowdsourcing project to assess perception of the new logo. Of course, social media provides informal crowdsourcing on tap and actually may have saved Gap not only the cost of setting up such a project formally but making any logo changes at this stage.