By Terry F. Yosie A growing number of the world’s largest companies are turning to “sustainability” as a strategic lens to help anticipate and navigate the complexity of the international economy, meet the expanding expectations of a growing global middle class, and manage the heightened risks to their businesses from environmental and social disruptions. As […]

Current First Amendment commercial speech issues, with particular emphasis on the increasing use of compelled disclosures and disclaimers, take the spotlight in this session.

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

A new civic gathering. To cope with political anxiety after the 2016 elections, Eric Liu has started a gathering called Civic Saturday. He explained the event in The Atlantic as “a civic analogue to church: a gathering of friends and strangers in a common place to nurture a spirit of shared purpose. But it’s not about church religion or synagogue or mosque religion. It’s about American civic religion—the creed of liberty, equality, and self-government that truly unites us.” The gatherings include quiet meditation, song, readings of civic texts, and yes, a sermon. The next Civic Saturday happens April 8 in Seattle — and Eric’s nonprofit Citizens University encourages you to start your own. (Watch Eric’s TED Talk)

Medical research facilitated by apps. The Scripps Translational Science Institute is teaming up with WebMD for a comprehensive study of pregnancy using the WebMD pregnancy app.  By asking users to complete surveys and provide data on their pregnancy, the study will shed light on “one of the least studied populations in medical research,” says STSI director Dr. Eric Topol. The researchers hope the results will provide insights that medical professionals can use to avoid pregnancy complications. (Watch Eric’s TED Talk)

There’s a new type of cloud! While cloud enthusiasts have documented the existence of a peculiar, wave-like cloud formation for years, there’s been no official recognition of it until now. Back in 2009, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, of the Cloud Appreciation Society, proposed to the World Meteorological Society that they add the formation to the International Cloud Atlas, the definitive encyclopedia of clouds, which hadn’t been updated since 1987. On March 24, the Meteorological Society released an updated version of the Atlas, complete with an entry for the type of cloud that Pretor-Pinney had proposed adding. The cloud was named asperitas, meaning “roughness.” (Watch Gavin’s TED Talk)

What neuroscience can teach law. Criminal statutes require juries to assess whether or not the defendant was aware that they were committing a crime, but a jury’s ability to accurately determine the defendant’s mental state at the time of the crime is fraught with problems. Enter neuroscience. Read Montague and colleagues are using neuroimaging and machine learning techniques to study if and how brain activity differs for the two mental states. The research is in early stages, but continued research may help shed scientific light on a legally determined boundary. (Watch Read’s TED Talk)

Why we should award disobedience. After announcing the $250,000 prize last summer, the MIT Media Lab has begun to accept nominations for its first-ever Disobedience Award. Open to groups and individuals engaged in an extraordinary example of constructive disobedience, the prize honors work that undermines traditional structures and institutions in a positive way, from politics and science to advocacy and art. “You don’t change the world by doing what you’re told,” Joi Ito notes, a lesson that has been a long-held practice for the MIT group, who also recently launched their own initiative for space exploration. Nominations for the award are open now through May 1. (Watch Joi’s TED Talk)

The next generation of biotech entrepreneurs. The Innovative Genomics Institute, led by Jennifer Doudna, announced the winners of its inaugural Entrepreneurial Fellowships. Targeted at early-career scientists, the fellowship provides research funding plus business training and mentorship, an entrepreneurial focus that helps scientists create practical impact through commercialization of their work. “I’ve seen brilliant ideas that fizzle out because startup companies just can’t break into the competitive biotechnology scene,” Doudna says. “With more time to develop their ideas and technology, our fellows will have the head start needed to earn the confidence of investors.” (Watch Jennifer’s TED Talk)

The case for resettlement. Since the 1980s, the dominant international approach for the resettlement of refugees has been the humanitarian silo, a camp often located in countries that border war zones. But such host countries are often ill-equipped to bear the brunt. Indeed, many countries place severe restrictions on refugee participation within their communities and labor markets, creating what Alexander Betts describes in The Guardian as an indefinite, even unavoidable, dependency on aid. In this thought-provoking excerpt of his co-authored book, Betts outlines an economic argument for refugee resettlement, arguing that “refugees need to be understood as much in terms of development and trade as humanitarianism.” (Watch Alexander’s TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

Teichner interviewed oncology dietician, Mary-Eve Brown, who stressed why good nutrition is essential:

“It’s been reported that two out of three people, when they show up for that very first oncology appointment for treatment are already suffering nutritionally–they’re undernourished or malnourished.”

When asked by Teichner about the relationship between food and cancer, Brown noted:

“There’s a relationship between high fat meats and certain types of gut cancers. There’s even a bigger body of evidence about obesity and cancer, female cancer, pancreas cancer.”

Teichner went to a supermarket with Dr. Margaret Cuomo, who produced a documentary and authored a book titled A World Without Cancer. Cuomo pointed out:

“The antioxidants and anti-inflammatory qualities of the vegetables and fruits that we’re seeing here today are those elements that are going to help us reduce the risk for cancer, diabetes and other diseases.”

Watch Beyond Cancer, the March 12th special broadcast of CBS Sunday Morning for more information that’s Good for You to Know About.

CBS Sunday Morning, 3/12/17

The post Food for thought: Your diet and cancer appeared first on The Good For You Network.

As companies have access to more consumer data than ever before, learn why they should be leveraging that data both to protect and to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

Scotch & Soda, the Dutch fashion house, reveals with it’s ad agency Publicis 133 a new print campaign and a manifesto film that raise the question of borders and encourages us to explore our curiosity.

An echo of the brand values: a blend of curiosity, irreverence and optimism. A nod to the way the brand creates and crafts its pieces: Scotch & Soda collections start when the designers head to the road to unearth remarkable finds.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Brand: Scotch & Soda
Chief Marketing Officer: Adam Kakembo
Responsable Communication : Ozlem Birkalan
Ad Agency: Publicis 133, Paris, France
Creative Director: Antoine Bonodot / Christophe Derigon
AD: Sofia Arias
Copywriter: Erick Ricardo-Acosta
Account Director: Donatien Souriau
Account Manager : Yasmina Bourbih, Lola-Jade Rosine
Réalisateur / photographe: Emma Summerton

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By Gretchen Fox If a world class social media organization is operating at a level 5, I would confidently wager that the great majority are falling between a 2 and a 3, max. I call organizations that are operating at a Level 5 “STARRs.” At level 5, organizations have achieved: Stand Out Authority Status Top […]

Let’s say you’ve built the next big thing. You’re ready to take on the world and make billions. Your product is amazing and you’re convinced you’ve bested the competition. As a point of fact, you know you offer the very best solution in your market. But here’s the rub. If your competition has established stronger customer habits than you have, you’re in trouble.

The cold truth is that the better product does not necessarily win. However, there’s hope. The right strategy can crowbar the competition’s users’ habits, giving you a chance to win them over.

To understand how to change customer habits, we first need to understand what habits are and how they take hold. Simply put, habits are behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. Research shows almost half of what we do, day in and day out, is driven by these impulsive behaviors.

Consider just about any product you find yourself using without thinking and you’ll find a hook. Do you sometimes check your phone without really knowing why? Hook. Ever opened Facebook or Twitter to do just one thing only to find yourself scrolling and tapping 30 minutes later? Hook. Have you ever found yourself unable to stop playing a game like Candy Crush Saga or Angry Birds? Hook, hook, and more hooks.

Hooks have four basic parts: a trigger, action, reward and investment. User habits are valuable precisely because they do such a good job of keeping competitors out, making it exceptionally difficult for a new company to shake users from their existing routines. Here are the four ways fledgling products can win over users from the competition and successfully migrate them from one product habit to another.

1. Faster Hooks

In his book Something Really New, author Denis J. Hauptly deconstructs the process of innovation into its most fundamental steps. First, Hauptly states, understand the reason people use a product or service. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process.

Though it’s excruciatingly simple, understanding Hauptly’s first principles yield big results. Removing steps between the user’s recognition of a need and the satiation of that desire is at the core of all innovation, from the cotton gin to the iPhone. Products that can shuttle customers through the four steps of the hook more quickly than competitors, stand a good chance of winning them over to new routines.

For example, take the corporate collapse of Blockbuster at the hands of Netflix. Customers could watch the same movies at relatively similar prices from either movie rental company. Yet, the ease of having a film always ready to watch, versus needing to drive to a store to pick up the flick, delivered the reward faster. The ease of satiating the need and passing through the hook more quickly made all the difference. Movie enthusiasts migrated their habits to Netflix and Blockbuster subsequently filed for bankruptcy.

2. Better Reward

Our brains crave stimulation. Whenever an experience is more satisfying, more interesting, or more rewarding, we want more of it. Sometimes products establish new habits just because using them feels better.

For example, take Snapchat, the massively popular messaging app, which 77 percent of American college students say they use every day. The company is rumored to have turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer by Facebook, conceivably prompted by Mark Zuckerberg’s fear of losing his grip on college kids’ habits.

But why do so many users impulsively open Snapchat instead of Facebook? For many people, Snapchat is more rewarding. Whereas using Facebook involves scrolling through a cluttered newsfeed of ads, posts from distant acquaintances, and messages from tragically uncool relatives, Snapchat delivers pure high-octane excitement.

A defining Snapchat feature is that messages sent through the app can self-destruct — the receiver has just a few seconds to view the image before it’s gone. Facebook posts stay on the Net forever, whereas Snapchat gives users more freedom to share with, shall we say, indiscretion.

In a recent survey, 14 percent of users admitted to sexting on Snapchat. Though the study found that sharing pics of naughty bits doesn’t occur often, it is one example of what makes the app more enticing.

The ability to share spontaneous (and often embarrassing) images without fear they’ll linger on the web generates more interesting messages for the receiver and therefore increases the likelihood of using the app. If a user was to receive two messages simultaneously, one a message on Facebook and the other on Snapchat, it’s the more rewarding app that gets clicked.

3. Higher Frequency

Studies show behaviors done more often have a higher habit-forming potential while those done less often do not usually become routines. When it comes to pulling users away from their existing habits, products that can engage users more frequently than their competitors, have a better shot at bringing users back.

Every few years, a new way of engaging customers becomes possible. What I call an “interface change,” reshuffles the deck of user behavior and creates new opportunities to form habits. For example, successive interface changes occurred with adoption of the personal computer, then widespread Internet connectivity, then mobile devices, and now the coming of wearables. Each created an opportunity to shift customer behavior out of existing routines and into new, more frequently used interfaces.

When Amazon first began selling books online in the 1990s, it made shopping a more frequent behavior by putting the store inside the customer’s home via the Internet. Today, Amazon has become the world’s “everything store” and threatens all offline retailers with the ease and convenience of shopping for whatever whenever. In many households, dropping an item into their Amazon cart is something done nearly every day.

4. Easier In

A characteristic of many habit-forming products is that they are easy to start and hard to stop. By breaking down some barrier to begin using the product, companies have found success wooing users away from competitors.

For example, though Microsoft Office is still the world’s most popular productivity software, the suite has come under attack by rivals such as Google and Apple who each removed a major barrier to start using their software by making it free and easy to use. When Google Docs first launched, it provided a fraction of the functionality offered by Office. But at the time using Office required downloading and paying for the software while Google Docs provided immediate entry.

Over time, learning how to use Google Docs, creating new files and inviting others to share those documents online, all made leaving difficult. The more the product was used, the more the habit took hold.

The Monopoly In The Mind

Habit-forming products utilize four strategies to get inside users’ heads. By shuttling users through the four steps of the hook faster, better, more frequently, or by making it easier to start using the product in the first place, companies can wrestle user habits away from incumbent competitors.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Nir Eyal. Excerpted from his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

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Learn about a company that is “re-imagining the primary care experience from the ground up,” in this Brand Experience Brief.  Circle Medical Group, is a technology-enabled healthcare start-up whose doctors are available to make house calls 8:00am – 8:00pm seven days a week at no additional charge.  See how it is delivering convenience, transparency, thoroughness, and comfort in a brand experience that serves as an example for all businesses to learn from.

related Brand Experience Briefs:

• Amazon Books Store
• Sharp Healthcare All-Staff Assembly
• Walgreens Chicago flagship store

transcript:

Today you’re going to get a peek into what the future of healthcare looks like.  You’re going to learn about Circle Medical Group, a company that is, in the words of one of its founders, “reimagining the primary care experience from the ground up.”  I discovered the company first as a patient, but was so impressed with what I experienced that I wanted to share it with you as an example of an extraordinary brand experience.

Let me start with some background.  Circle Medical was founded in San Francisco by three tech entrepreneurs in the summer of 2015.  Having gone through Y Combinator’s accelerator program, it raised a 2.9 million dollar seed round, led by Collaborative Fund.   It’s one of several companies that are rethinking the patient experience and using technology to enable a better one.

CEO George Favvas and Chief Medical Officer David Kagan told me they started Circle Medical to change how healthcare works — to create a patient experience around what the patient needs instead of building a healthcare system and squeezing the patient in.  They focus on delivering three benefits.  First, convenience — making it easy to find a doctor, book an appointment, and deal with insurance.  And having doctors available where and when patients want to be seen.

So their app, available in iOS and Android, allows patients to scan your insurance card, find a doctor and make an appointment, chat with your doctor, receive appointment summaries, and check your insurance co-pays and deductibles.  There is no paperwork at all.  The app interface is pretty standard and it made everything simple and seamless, even taking care of insurance for me since Circle Medical is considered in-network for almost all insurance companies in California.

Circle Medical’s doctors are available 8am to 8pm 7 days a week and they make house calls for no extra charge.  In fact only about a third of its individual 3,000 patients go to their offices.  And speaking of their offices, the space functions as an office both for doctors and the start-up so the patient room is a small conference room equipped with a medical table and workstation for the doctor.  But the rest of the place definitely feels more like a tech start-up with its cool industrial feel, open workstations, and bar and game room in the basement.

The second benefit the founders designed the company to deliver is transparency.  David described his frustration with how healthcare is excessively complicated and said he wanted to help patients breakdown what you get and what it means.  The way my doctor explained everything to me and the summary of my appointment that was available afterwards through the app delivered that for me.

Finally, the Circle Medical experience is intended to be thorough.  David observed that both doctors and patients would agree that the typical 7 minutes that a doctor usually spends with a patient isn’t enough time to get and give information and for the patient to feel comfortable with the doctor, so Circle Medical appointments last a half hour.

I personally experienced a fourth important benefit — comfort.  There are four doctors on staff and you can learn about them in videos on the Circle Medical website, so you can relate to them as real people and pick the one who resonates with you.  Also the doctors dress casually so the appointment feels less clinical.  I spent most of my appointment fully-clothed sitting at a small table across from my doctor just talking about my health.  Overall he related to me as a person not a patient.

So from my experience as well as the reviews I found online, I can say Circle Medical delivers on its goal of transforming the primary care experience — and delivering a consumer experience for all businesses to learn from.  There’s a lot more it can do to deliver on its benefits, including integrating with other services, devices, and providers, but as a start-up, it’s definitely on the right track.  Thanks to Circle Medical Group and other companies like it, healthcare is catching up and perhaps maybe will even exceed other industries in delivering extraordinary experiences.

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