Dunno, I’m a little skeptical as to whether this will be a useful thing to do. I suppose you have to wear something anyway, so it may as well promote EA ideas, but I don’t think this way of doing it is really going to change anything… but I have no education in marketing etc, so I could be very wrong. It seems to me like putting the url of an important website, or just saying “Effective Altruism” straight up, is a better way of advertising the ideas.
I’m a professor in the history of science, working at the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral economics. The particular areas of research that I focus on have to do a lot with persuasion and social influence, and as part of that, I have read quite a bit on marketing and promotion, including using modern marketing tools. I have also done quite a lot of practice in marketing since starting up the organization over a year ago. Other core members of Intentional Insights have strong educational backgrounds in marketing as well, particularly in the nonprofit context. For example, my co-founder, Agnes Vishnevkin, has an MBA in nonprofit management, and has over 10 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, including marketing/fundraising.
Why aren’t you pursuing a typical marketing path? Or are you, and it just hasn’t been shared? I’ve seen no evidence of your attempting to identify a consumer target, build a positioning, etc.
Why aren’t you testing your merchandise against the target? Someone with marketing experience should know that asking the people who are already converted (into EAs) are the exact opposite of those whom you want to test your message against, you want it to work with non-EAs you’re targeting. Frankly, if your testing was working, I’d expect to see much improved products and materials. They are quite poor at the moment.
Why are you pursuing PR? Not only do marketers know well about the unsustainability of PR, but also we know it’s a valuable, short-term resource that you don’t want to exhaust on low-converting material.
I do hope there are strategies behind each of these 3 observations, and it would be great to hear what they are and what I haven’t seen.
1) We’re working on developing buyer personas internally right now.
2) We are testing merchandise against the target. Check out this article here as an example.
3) PR in the social media world is a much looser and fluid thing than it used to be. This book has been especially impactful in shaping the Intentional Insights approach to PR.
On a meta-level, this EA Forum post was meant to get EAs interested in the project of creating merchandise, and building allies who might be interested in collaborating on it. If you have marketing expertise yourself, I’d be interested in the possibility of chatting with you about this. My email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Dunno, I’m a little skeptical as to whether this will be a useful thing to do. I suppose you have to wear something anyway, so it may as well promote EA ideas, but I don’t think this way of doing it is really going to change anything… but I have no education in marketing etc, so I could be very wrong. It seems to me like putting the url of an important website, or just saying “Effective Altruism” straight up, is a better way of advertising the ideas.
Thanks for sharing! I have quite a bit of education in marketing, and this is actually a quite effective way to market ideas.
Care to expand? I haven’t seen much evidence of marketing experience in your background or work, but would be happy to learn more.
Sure!
I’m a professor in the history of science, working at the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral economics. The particular areas of research that I focus on have to do a lot with persuasion and social influence, and as part of that, I have read quite a bit on marketing and promotion, including using modern marketing tools. I have also done quite a lot of practice in marketing since starting up the organization over a year ago. Other core members of Intentional Insights have strong educational backgrounds in marketing as well, particularly in the nonprofit context. For example, my co-founder, Agnes Vishnevkin, has an MBA in nonprofit management, and has over 10 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, including marketing/fundraising.
If this is the case:
Why aren’t you pursuing a typical marketing path? Or are you, and it just hasn’t been shared? I’ve seen no evidence of your attempting to identify a consumer target, build a positioning, etc.
Why aren’t you testing your merchandise against the target? Someone with marketing experience should know that asking the people who are already converted (into EAs) are the exact opposite of those whom you want to test your message against, you want it to work with non-EAs you’re targeting. Frankly, if your testing was working, I’d expect to see much improved products and materials. They are quite poor at the moment.
Why are you pursuing PR? Not only do marketers know well about the unsustainability of PR, but also we know it’s a valuable, short-term resource that you don’t want to exhaust on low-converting material.
I do hope there are strategies behind each of these 3 observations, and it would be great to hear what they are and what I haven’t seen.
1) We’re working on developing buyer personas internally right now.
2) We are testing merchandise against the target. Check out this article here as an example.
3) PR in the social media world is a much looser and fluid thing than it used to be. This book has been especially impactful in shaping the Intentional Insights approach to PR.
On a meta-level, this EA Forum post was meant to get EAs interested in the project of creating merchandise, and building allies who might be interested in collaborating on it. If you have marketing expertise yourself, I’d be interested in the possibility of chatting with you about this. My email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org