Do you remember those catchy tunes from the late 1980s? I Should Be So Lucky? The Locomotion?
The first time you heard them they were quite fun, memorable even. But then they got more airplay. And more. And more. Radio stations figured out that the sugary, bubbly popness of the tunes would cut through a lot of background noise and get your attention, so they played them again and again. Soon we had Got To Be Certain, and Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi, which were exactly the same as the first two songs. Then a "strategic inter-agency collaboration" with Jason Donovan on Especially For You. (Jason looks a bit less lifelike in this alternative version).
After a short interlude in late 1989, another number 1 with Tears On My Pillow, which was meant to be more sophisticated but was equally artificial, overproduced and in fact just the same old song as I Should Be So Lucky. By this time anyone who wasn't a 13-year-old girl was thoroughly sick of Miss Minogue, who wasn't even on Neighbours any more. Interest and record sales rapidly declined, and thankfully Nirvana showed up to distract us.
On a completely unrelated subject, do you remember those talks about behavioural economics that infected the market research industry in 2009? Someone had read Nudge, and someone else got a copy of Predictably Irrational. It's quite easy to write a behavioural economics talk - you just claim that everyone else in the world thinks people are irrational, but you have spotted (with the help of Daniel Kahneman perhaps) that they're not. Read out a list of cognitive biases - anchoring, hyperbolic discounting, social norms. Show some slides with illustrated examples of each bias. If you're brave, test one of them on your audience and hope they haven't yet been to enough identical talks to see through your ultimatum game or your auction. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else.
Read the rest of this amusing article here: KylieMinogue
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