In fact they’re very rare. Panel data shows that the most common number of items purchased in a supermarket is one, with half of all trips buying 5 or fewer items.
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Motown record label dominated the charts in the 1960s, collecting 35 number ones from artists like Stevie Wonder, the Supremes and the Jackson 5. The label’s founder, Berry Gordy, had the idea of building this factory of talent while assembling cars at a Ford plant. “Different stations would put things on there, and they would go out another door a brand new car. I said, my goodness, I could do this with people.”
People like to think they have sophisticated taste in movies, but as Netflix chief executive Ted Sarandos puts it, “they just want a movie that they love.” Maestro, with its seven Oscar nominations, couldn’t get it into the top ten most-watched films on Netflix last Christmas: viewers preferred Zack Snyder’s space opera Rebel Moon and the arrival of the 1990 classic Pretty Woman on the service.
In a controlled study, people listening to new music liked a song more when they were told it was popular, vs the same song without any extra information. So much for independent choices.
Want to become an NBA player? It helps if your dad played in the league. And you can massively increase your odds of becoming President by the same token (though beware low sample sizes for that stat).
Nescafé has expanded its customer base by venturing into ice cream and iced drinks: a new way of staying relevant when less than half the global population buys instant coffee.
Nespresso entered the coffee-to-go market in 2024, opening its first cafe near Liverpool Street station – as the busiest train station in England, it’s not a bad place to attract new customers.
NPS is a simple way of gauging customer experience, but don’t confuse that with a measure of growth: studies consistently show that NPS changes don’t predict market share.
The Netflix autoplay feature led to “by far the biggest increase in the hours watched KPI of any feature we ever tested,” according to the engineer who created it. Different timings were tested – 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds – but 10 seconds turned out to be the sweet spot. Just enough time to catch your breath, but not too long to lose interest.
Netflix now charges £4.99 a month for weekly shows with ad breaks. Sound familiar?
Reed Hastings, with no prior experience of the film and television industry, applied the gym-model of subscription to movie rentals to create Netflix.
Reed Hastings decided to start Netflix after being fined $40 at a Blockbuster store for being late to return a copy of Apollo 13.
Netflix shows are not made equal. As the company’s recent viewing report states, “the top 1 percent of titles accounted for about 22.32 billion hours of viewing, almost 24 percent of the total. The top 10 percent brought in 68 percent of all viewing – 64.16 billion hours.”
In 1985, thousands of blind taste tests showed that consumers preferred a new, sweeter formulation of Coca Cola. The company took this at face value, replacing the original Coca Cola with a new drink using the sweeter recipe. But the ensuing backlash to New Coke shows the limitations of objective thinking. Insiders forgot that, in the real world, people don’t consume drinks blindfolded. The data ignored the strength of the original Coca Cola brand.
When Trinity Mirror media group asked consumers what they wanted in a new newspaper, they said content that was upbeat, optimistic and politically neutral. But when the group launched New Day – a newspaper that offered exactly that – readership was so low that the paper shut down within just 2 months.