TLF Gems Newsletter November 2024

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Samuel Beckett

I'm typing this before the budget has been announced, but by the time you read this it will have been reported and analysed to the nth degree. We've had to think about the impact of the budget quite hard, because of our quarterly Index of Consumer Sentiment.

The Q4 fieldwork always happens in mid October, which left us with a quandary: do we stick to our usual schedule for consistency, or do we delay it so that we can get a measure that reflects any impact the budget has had on consumer sentiment?

In the end we decided to do both. We went ahead with the usual fieldwork in October, and we're now doing a post-budget survey as well so that we can see what difference (if any) the announcements have made to consumer sentiment. We'll share the pre and post budget results in a Budget Special report as soon as we can, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 6 things we think are worth your time this month

The Long Term Costs of Layoffs

What damage is caused by a round of layoffs? Many executives believe the pain is short term, but this research shows that layoffs do lasting damage to employee engagement, taking years to recover even if new employees are recruited to fill essential roles. "There’s no such thing as a quick business win without a human cost to the business, and your rebound is likely to take years rather than months."

Read: The Long Term Costs of Layoffs

The Most Important P?

Marketing is traditionally about the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). Over time marketers have been put into a smaller and smaller box focused on Promotion, but Mark Ritson argues it's time for them to bring their influence to bear on the most important of the Ps, Product. I agree, and I think if we're not careful we'll find CX following a similar trajectory as an adjunct to Product rather than as a key influence on it. "If there is one thing I have learned from a thousand customers discussing a hundred different products it’s that the things a company thinks are small are, from a consumer perspective, big."

Read: The Most Important P?

Solving Employee Loneliness

Really thoughtful piece by Bruce Daisley about the apparently intractable problem of employee loneliness. He resists easy explanations like getting everyone back into the office to take a more nuanced look at the problem and some possible solutions. "The importance of slack in creating the circumstances for social connection is vital."

Read: Solving Employee Loneliness

AI and Education

I really enjoyed this article from a radiologist who, if AI hype was to be believed, would no longer have a job. It's a balanced piece looking at advantages and disadvantages of AI adoption, and raised one issue I hadn't really thought about. If AI looks after the "easy" cases so that humans can focus on the more complex ones, how do the human experts hone their skills to tackle those complex cases? How do they learn to use their judgement? "The only reason my mentors are able to interpret more advanced imaging is that they have an immense grounding in these fundamentals. Surely, something will be lost if we off-load this portion of training to AI, as it would if pilots turned over their 'easy' flights to computers."

Read: AI and Education

Why You Need Experiments

Really interesting post from Nico Neumann (with a link to the research if you're feeling up to it!) showing that price elasticities estimated from observational Marketing Mix Models can be wildly wrong compared to experimental studies. Interesting for 2 reasons: 1) this suggests that you might well be better able to put your prices up than you think, 2) to draw robust conclusions about interventions like this you need to run experiments. "Put simply, we need more brave brands willing to experiment—even with prices."

Read: Why You Need Experiments

What I'm Reading: Into the Woods

There are a lot of books about storytelling, but this is one on my favourites. Rather than offering a "how to", John Yorke describes the structure that all narratives tend to share, and more importantly discusses why that shape is so fundamental, and why stories matter to us. "Storytelling has a shape. It dominates the way all stories are told and can be traced back not just to the Renaissance, but to the very beginnings of the recorded world."

What I'm Reading: Into the Woods

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Budget Special - The Index of Consumer Sentiment Q4 2024

With pre and post-budget surveys around the announcements made in the 30th October Budget, this report explores how consumers are responding. The data shows that there had been a significant decrease in Consumer Sentiment prior to the budget announcements, before falling even fur...

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