Emotions vs Culture 🥺- Fine French Nourriture🍄- Ads are boring 🙃- The new VOD battle 📺- A 2022 look at LTV and CAC 💸
“Emotions are a key process of social inclusion, success, and even health.”
Episode #81. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼
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#1. Emotions vs Culture 🥺
Very regularly, you may be debating with friends about the fact that emotions are good or bad in the workplace. My mind is clear about emotions: they bring value. Merci Patrick Kervern for sharing some key learning from this book from Batja Mesquita How Cultures Create Emotions. Source article from The Next Big Idea magazine HERE.
1- Emotions varies across culture. In America, you praise and acknowledge each other whenever you can, because it is important that everyone feel special and unique. For instance in the Netherlands when you are intimate you do not thank each other.
2- “Emotions are a key process of social inclusion, success, and even health.” Different emotions across cultures have real-world consequences: emotions play a role in patients’ trust in their doctors. White American patients trusted excited, happy doctors more and better adhered to these doctors’ prescriptions. Meanwhile, Asian-American patients had more confidence in and adhered better to the prescriptions of, calm doctors. Cultural differences in emotions have so many real consequences because our emotions are an intrinsic part of our relationships.
3- You may think of your emotions as inside of you, but emotions are between us. “In each cultural group, parents shape their children’s emotions to fit the culture’s normative relationships.”
4- Translating emotions is hard. “Words allow us to communicate about the reality shared by others in our community or culture, but they may be less obvious tools for communicating across different social groups.” Take for example anger and its equivalent Ikari in Japan Chiemi, a Japanese college student told us she was Ikari and that her grandparents suggested she was never home when in reality she had only one evening commitment. But she never let on to her grandparents that she felt Ikari. Instead, she tried to understand them: “they must be worrying; they care about me.” Where Japanese respondents often tried to understand their target of Ikari and accommodated, American respondents, elaborated on how unjust this person was and opposed them. The episodes making up the Japanese Ikari and the English anger are very different, even if these words are both associated with being frustrated by someone else.
5- Understanding emotions takes more than empathy. We need to understand what is at stake, and whether it is good or bad to have emotions (in some cultures anger is related to honor). What comes next? (shame leads to social exclusion in the US, but social inclusion in Taiwan). When confronted with emotions, assume that you don’t know. Be humble, don’t judge, be patient, and keep asking questions.
#2. Fine French Nourriture 🍄
If you are a big fan of biographies x gastronomy, you may enjoy this book from Guy Savoy Savourer la vie (Ed. Flammarion). The book is in French and quite easy to read. Most of it is about the life of Guy Savoy; the finest chapters talk obviously about food… and that is where poetry mixes with ‘Art de la table’ x ‘Art de vivre’.
“Pour reprendre une formule de Frédéric Dard, j’aimerais qu’à chaque bouchée de mes plats, le convive dise « le palais mérite enfin son nom ».
Cooking is about “Le devoir de rendre l'éphémère inoubliable”.
“La magie s'opère après un mélange, une mise en forme et une cuisson, qui permettent de transformer en temps réel la matière en joie.”
Guy Savoy the French chef becomes a poet when he talks about food:
“L'asperge, fière et facétieuse. L'asperge meurt debout. Elle expire la tête haute. Ce légume qui peut être blanc, violet ou vert est inflexible sur sa bonne tenue. Il n'accepte la cuisson que s'il est placé en position verticale dans un faitout étroit et haut".
Agneau et Chevreau. " Qui veut manger la chèvre de Monsieur Seguin? Seul le loup a la dent assez dure pour s'attaquer à pareil mets."
Morilles. "Le cueilleur de morilles est un guetteur, un chercheur, un agent secret à l'affut des indices qui le conduiront jusqu'à l'embusquée". "Et même l'oreille est en alerte. Car, à un véritable amateur, la morille sait parler".
#3. (Some) ads are (not) boring 🙃
Twitter is an endless source of curiosity. I found this past week this thread about NOT boring ads. Quite funny indeed as @MarketingMax selected 10 ads that deserve to be known.
Not much to add here on this thread 👆.
Most ads suck... but some ads are just art jewels. like this Kitkat Lockdown ad, this WMF Grand Gourmet ad that can cut anything, or this Burger King flame grilled ad showing a restaurant ... burning.
Here is my Top3 selection from his 10:
Kitkat ad during lockdown when lots of us were stacking up Zoom calls:
Great ad for a super sharp knife 🔪
BK is a king in advertising 👑
#4. The new VOB battle 📺
My takeaways from this new forecast issued by Cedexis called Will VOD overtake TV advertising in North America in the next few years?
The advertising vs subscription game is on as the video market is going through a major transformation: advertising fights back with "several surveys highlighted that AVOD (Advertising Video On Demand) has been outpacing SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) in time spent for the last 18 months."
In the US, Disney+ will launch an ad-supported offer on December 2022 starting at $7.99 (blending ads and subscription); Netflix will launch its AVOD offer in the first months of 2023.
While AVOD revenues are set to surpass TV advertising revenues in 2025, 'AVOD is increasingly seen as a way to better promote already existing SVOD offers and to increase global retention'.
#5. A 2022 look at LTV and CAC 💸
My takeaways from this great piece from Digital Native by Rex Woodbury called Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition.
With acquisition costs going up and being more and more volatile, 2022 is a good time to revisit the famous rule of thumb of any business looking at becoming profitable: LTV > CAC may not be enough.
Why is CAC going up in consumer business? Just think of the Apple App Tracking Transparency (ATT) change that hit Facebook/Meta with an estimated $ 10 billion loss in business. Advertising ROAS (Return on Ad Spent) is just becoming much harder to measure. Add a recessionary market environment around this and we have a challenging environment.
Why does the LTV to CAC ratio of the 3x rule need to be looked at very carefully? First because in an inflationary economy, you need to discount your future cash flows (Revenue today is worth more than future revenue). Second, you need to add up the costs associated to service your customer (including infrastructure and service costs); you will then need to subtract the cost of running your business to adjust LTV.
Lastly, it is recommended to differentiate the LTC to CAC ratio of customers you acquire organic (who discover your product naturally) vs paid (users you acquire through paid marketing channels). Organic users tend to spend more money on your product and will have lower churn then showing a longer LTV than paid users. Do not show blended CAC.
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