Blogs

I’ve been at The 2010 TDWI World Conference in San Diego this week, where the theme is "agile BI that delivers data (I would use the term ‘insights’) at the speed of thought.” Timing is everything when it comes to making decisions – and influencing other to make decisions we’d like to see.

We’ve all experienced Red Car Syndrome at some point or another. You test drive a red car. You like it. Suddenly, you start noticing red cars everywhere – not because the number of red cars has increased, but because the experience of driving a red car is now personalized. Online advertisers use Red Car Syndrome to connect consumers with the products they genuinely want, as I was reminded first-hand recently. While searching for kitchen fixtures online, I noticed that many of the ads featured a pair of pricey fixtures that initially caught our eye, but that we had rejected as exceeding our budget. But the ads seemed to know our tastes better than we did, and ultimately we succumbed and made the purchase.