by david allan van nostrand | Jul 24, 2023 | Case Study, Strategy, Using Information
How to Make Online Purchases You Won’t Regret How do product review sites make money? Links. When you click on a link to a product in a review, you will be taken directly to a product page on a retailer’s website. No one is surprised to learn that the retailer...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 17, 2023 | Case Study, Technology, The world around us
Cavemen sharpened the points of wooden poles and used them to kill game and fight their enemies. When pointed steel tips were added to the business end of these long poles, spears became lances. When lances were adopted by cavalrymen (and yes, they were men) on...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 3, 2023 | Case Study, Human Behavior, The world around us, Using Information
In 2016, I converted the more than 1,000 slides I had built for my classroom lectures at the University of the West Indies into articles that I posted on a new site, LetsTakeACloserLook.com. The subject of most of those early articles was an amalgam of what I call the...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 5, 2023 | Case Study, Human Behavior, Items in the News, Unintended Consequences
Bud Light put two marketing executives on leave after someone thought it was a good idea to appeal to a transgender crowd that makes up less than one percent of the population. That promotional campaign backfired with unintended consequences, cutting into sales (-25%)...
by david allan van nostrand | May 15, 2023 | Americana, Anthropology, Case Study, Human Behavior
After living among them for many years, University of Michigan anthropologist Horace Miner wrote about the exotic habits and magical rituals of a tribe called the Nacirema. His ethnography “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” was first published in 1956 and was such a...
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 28, 2023 | Case Study, The world around us
I want to put together a list of Readers’ Top 10 Closer Looks Most regular readers know me to be a fact-based non-fiction writer who was a business and consumer researcher for more than 30 years before giving it up to write. All around the world, I learned to look...