One day in HuRL, the Humor Research Lab, we were talking about our favorite sites on the Cheezburger Network (my favorite is FailBook, in case you care). Among other reasons, we decided that as scientist who study humor, we should be able to build a successful humor website. The team
[An early post this week.] The Super Bowl featured numerous injuries, but not all of them occurred on the field. According to a recent paper, violence as a means of humor in advertising is on the rise. Two of the top five rated ads from Super Bowl XLV (2011) featured
I recently returned from the Humor pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. I got a chance to talk to Bob Mankoff, a cartoonist and the Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker. I asked him: Why aren’t The New Yorker’s cartoons funnier? (sic) His answer is compelling. Yes,
Kelly Herd is a PhD student at the Leeds School of Business. Kelly’s expertise is in the area of consumer behavior, creativity, and innovation. I asked her when is “too many choices” not too many choices? Her response: . . Kelly’s research highlights a limitation of the emerging belief that
Consumers have never been more powerful. Why? Here are two reasons: 1) The rise of the smartphone ……… Almost better than cash. Actually, it is the power of information. To demonstrate the power of information, I recently conducted a class demonstration: I held up a copy of the book “The
Kit, co-owner of the Boulder cafe Atlas Purveyors (@atlaspurveyors), is helping me run an experiment. We want to sell this rubber chicken: How would you do it? Tell us: ____ Lower the price (e.g., only $.50) ____ Raise the price (e.g., only $5) ____ Make it scarce (e.g., last one!)
[Tuesday is the new Wednesday. This post is going up one day early.] . Carmel Hagen (@carmelelise) recently gave a guest lecture in my Consumer Behavior class. Carmel’s expertise is in the area of social media and branding. She is also a pretty cool gal. After her talk, I asked
Although they won’t win this contest, the Big Ten Athletic Conference has created an appallingly bad new logo and coupled it with appallingly bad names for their new divisions. Q: How could they have avoided this debacle? A: Combine art and science by hiring a good designer and market researcher.
Peter McGraw is concerned about his students and has been writing open letters to them. In this Solo Thoughts episode, he reads those letters
Welcome to the final episode of I’M NOT JOKING. Comedian JD Lopez returns from Episode 1 to debrief and reflect on Peter’s experience building
