Men behaving badly

The article “The End of Rational Economics” had some fresh and inspiring insights on how to estimate the future of economics. Normally it is thought that on average, people act rationally and the invisible hand of economics will guide things in the end. Not always, but on average. Instead of this usual assumption Ariely (2009) suggests that we should begin to base our assumptions differently, according to behavioral economics. One reason for this replacement is the recent recession, where people did not really act rationally, even on average. Behavioral economics is based on the premise that human beings are fundamentally irrational, which is pretty much the opposite of the normal way of thinking.

The article also showed how easily people were lured to cheating. Actually, luring them wasn’t even that necessary, since it was natural (at least in minor issues) for most people to cheat. Rational thinking may actually have a different meaning than what we thought: could it be rational to cheat?

Behavioral economics has its advantages, but it is not clearly better compared to the other possible ways. The problem with behavioral economics is that it is almost every time complicated, has many features that need to be accounted for. Moreover, it takes time to implement the research properly. We also have to keep in mind that rational economics does not presume to be always right. In fact, the researchers pretty much know that they are almost always wrong. Their task is not really to be right. They are just making presumptions and giving some scenarios to consider in the future. These scenarios are important, albeit they would not end up being nowhere near the true happenings. In a way it is similar to predicting the weather: it is just a forecast, and it should be clear to people that the forecasts cannot be always right, it is always just estimation.

As mentioned in the article by Moisander and Valtonen (2011), it is obviously needed to have some amount of deeper understanding (as with behavioral economics), and not just look a list of numbers (maybe more like rational economics). World is a complicated place. Especially when doing a research on consumers if you look plain numbers and use the median as the one correct answer, you may totally miss out on why people like and use certain products. But we need those numbers too. They give some straight answers, which may not be correct, but it may be enough to give some guidelines and directions.

Segmentation? Really?

The article “Marketing Malpractice”, by Christensen, Cook, and Hall (2005), seems to state that segmentation and the principles of it taught in our school do not really work as such. To be fair to the idea of segmentation, it has worked in many occasions, and in reality it might be better than doing nothing. Nevertheless, the first thing that came to my mind after reading this was: Are we really this stupid?

As Marko Parkkinen told to our MediaBizLab group last week, it is not that important to find possibilities and ideas that people could like and buy. Instead the most essential thing is to find the problems that people would want solutions. "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" This sounds very reasonable. Compared to this, segmentation does not seem to the best way to do things. If this really is the case and the researchers of the article are right, it feels silly to think that it took this long for people to figure this out. And those people include me.

My idea – refined

HeyThere!

Facebook has made it somewhat easier to be in contact with friends and relatives. If not directly talking or sending messages, than at least seeing what your friends have been up to lately has turned out to be quite an important way to stay in touch for many people. The profile itself tells people a lot about their friends – maybe even more than they have ever known. The profile eases the “getting to know” –phase also when the user meets new people. This, leads to another point of view, which happens to be important for the idea of mine: would it be possible to get to know people before actually meeting them at all?

I think this would be fascinating to see in action: for instance, when travelling in a plane one could use a smart phone to use “HeyThere” and seeing who else in the plane has a profile. The profile would include personal information, and the amount of info would largely depend on the user. Since the profile would act as a sort of a “shop window” for other users, and also as an extension of one’s personality.

Furthermore, it would partly be compared to internet dating sites. One major problem with those sites is that people may not feel they can truly rely on other persons saying who they are, since they cannot be directly seen. In HeyThere people could check that the people really are who they claim to be with their own eyes. This would encourage them to possibly send a message or go talk to the person. For most people asking a strange person out just doesn’t work, this would lower the threshold of approaching that person. 

One feature would encourage people to find friends from the application: As well as viewing unknown persons’ profiles nearby, the user could also check if there are friends nearby (in a metro, in a night club, abroad).

Many questions still exist: what is the revenue model? Should it have ads or something else? The application surely needs to get a lot of users before it would turn out to be interesting. It could be assumed that the application with most people in it would be a killer. How can we achieve that? What can we offer for people to get interested in it in the first place? It would have to be free of charge to sign in, to begin with. Using it would also be mostly free. Like in LinkedIn, you would be able to pay for an improved version of a profile. In this app it would make sense, for instance, to set a price to see who has viewed your profile. In the free version you would only see how many times during the last week your profile has been viewed.

Moreover, should it include some games, or would that make the app too vast and out of focus? Lastly, are there other similar services available / under development and for what reasons people would choose this service instead of them (business model)? All these questions need to be answered, which means: time to get to work.

Manual of Me

Couple of main issues to consider when communicating and working with me:

After evaluating myself in the MediaBizLab workshop in Sanomatalo, I found myself being close to chameleon, with only developer-side being lower in contrast to the other three characters. This means in practice that in developing phase of a process I can be a bit too anxious to move further on to implementing. In MediaBizLab I will concentrate on improving myself in this issue. 

In my piece of paper I also wrote: Wait for me to get the point. At times it might take some time for me to get the main point in various tasks or ideas, but I personally don’t think that this is (only) because I would be a bit slow. For me it is just crucial to get the point before moving on. I am able to work better when I have “internalized” the main points of a certain task or idea. I need to know why we are doing some things; what’s the catch? Usually I cannot just do some things without realizing what the reasons behind them are. In the end I think it is just a natural way for me to do work, and at times it has proven to be an advantage.