In previous blog posts such as these ones, I have discussed filtering and what the output of collective intelligence might be, and as two of the areas I’m most passionate about is consumer behavior and behavioral economics, I will continue to go down that path.
I’ve recently finished reading the book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few by James Surowiecki and I can strongly recommend it to anyone that’s interested in how opinions are conformed, and why self-organization might be the key to success.
One of the core messages in this book, that groups don’t have to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people to be smart, sparked a vast line of thoughts in my mind and I’ll try to serve some of the more uncluttered ones here.
Much of our thinking, intelligence and decisions are a bi-product of the impressions and thoughts served to us by the environment, if you surround yourself with people that challenge your thinking span, you will develop your thinking skills. My experience tells me that there is such a thing as thinking skills, which isn’t connected to the formal definition of intelligence or even communication skills, but simply a way of prioritizing, filtering and maximizing the use of our thoughts and every day impressions.
Our human core isn’t designed to make fast and smart decisions based solely on ‘intelligence’. To be able to make good and time effective decision in our everyday life we seek the help of our peers.
This is not something that we make an active decision to seek for, but simply something that we do – some better than others – by simulating social and collective intelligence, or what we perceive to be intelligence, from the people around us. Non of us are as smart as we think, however the human race has developed the skill of canalizing the collective intelligence from the people around us.
As you probably know making use of the collective intelligence is what Avail’s behavioral merchandising is all about, applying the collective intelligence used everyday and turning it into e-commerce sales. We all live our lives under the assumption that the more information we have, the better decisions we will make. This, combined with the fact that human beings are lazy by nature, is part of what make recommendations so successful – the more information we get in the shortest amount of time, the better.
The way to success within this field often lies in handling big data in an efficient and insightful way, that makes use of the collective intelligence yet still take the diversity of the input into consideration. In order to product and business develop in a future orientated way, Avail acknowledges and listens to what not is working as well as what is working. With that data we can figure out which collective guess that will be the most accurate and produce recommendations that will make both our customers and their consumers happy.
Much of our software’s cogency is based on avoiding to put forward irrelevant products, an aspect which from an outside perspective can easily be forgotten. However, when you present a irrelevant product for a consumer you aren’t just hurting your direct conversion and sales, you are also strongly communicating that the customer’s needs come second to your sales, one of the most fatal messages you can put out there.
Consequently: Analysing less successful products is as important as putting forward the successful ones, as it is ultimately the less lucrative products that will define the notion of ‘success’.
