Jaewoo teaches and writes about design thinking, behavioral economics, and field experiment for customer experience. He is professor of marketing and participating professor of experience design at Kookmin University. Jaewoo has been Visiting Scholar at Stanford University since September 2024.
(CNN) — Everyone at Hanoi’s humble Cafe Giang however, is after something more than just a caffeine fix. They’ve come for “cà phê trúng,” or egg coffee, a Hanoi specialty in which a creamy soft, meringue-like egg white foam is perched on dense Vietnamese coffee. While destinations across the city now serve it, this cafe claims to have invented it.
There are hot and cold versions. The former is served as a a yellow concoction in a small glass. It’s consumed with a spoon and tastes almost like a coffee flavored ice cream — more like a dessert than coffee. The hot version comes resting in a small dish of hot water to maintain its temperature. The strong coffee taste at the bottom of the cup seeps through the egg — the yellow layer on top — and is quite thick and sweet, though not sickly.
A tasty coffee with creamy foam impressed me. However, I was more impressed by the low stools. In this cafe, people bent their knees and pressed their hips back on the stools, much like doing a squat exercise.
I believe, we are not only what we eat but also “how we move.” I learned this only after having gone through painful days to form a new habit such as moving computer mouse using left hand or doing computer tasks at standing desk. I suspect Vietnamese people, at least, look healthy because they develop a healthy posture habit. I may need to import their low stools to improve my bad posture habit.
I followed map in Prague, Czech Republic. I crossed a bridge (Legions’ Bridge), climbed up a tower (Petrin Tower), and drank beer at a local brewery (Strahov Monastery Brewery). However, I went to one place most tourists are not interested in. I visited a design exhibition held at a convention center (Výstaviště Praha Holešovice).
Professional designers opened their booths and invited visitors in the convention center. I listened to presentations, tested products, talked to designers, and bought a few items.
Afterwards, I became curious about this product and googled “Love Magenta.” I expected to find a person who loves the purplish red color and sell 3D food printers. Surprisingly, Love Magenta is the online store of the Deutsche Telekom. The website of “Love Magenta” says:
Magenta – so much more than just Deutsche Telekom’s corporate color, the most important element of our corporate identity.
But Magenta means even more to us: It represents our attitude towards life. Our employees show their pride in our brand with our everyday products. We showcase our favorite color perfectly in our online shop: sometimes bold, sometimes understated – but always stylish and up to date.
The shop offers a constantly changing range of high-quality products, including fashion, accessories, and gadgets. What these items have in common is the color Magenta, of course – and the love and attention dedicated to each detail. All products are designed and produced exclusively for our shop. This ensures the highest possible quality, and gives our designers complete freedom to create truly unique items. It’s never been easier for our employees and customers to express their love for Magenta in so much style.
Take a look – we’re sure you’ll find something you like.
Color is an effective marketing tool and some colors are stylish. Silver Bang & Olufsen speakers and white Balmuda toasters are eye catching. However, most success cases come from product manufacturers. How can service companies link themselves with stylish colors when they have no tangible, visible products? Deutsche Telekom gave an answer; Really New Products (RNPs) such as 3D food printers help service companies link their colors and styles. In the near future, other Really New Products such as wearable devices, voice recognition devices, or drones will be effective marketing tools for service companies to promote their own colors in stylish ways.
Japanese draw, Chinese speak, and Koreans write. This is my temporary conclusion about how people communicate in three countries. I *suspect* Japanese draw because they intend to help readers understand messages correctly (receiver-oriented), Chinese speak because they find typing Chinese characters difficult (sender-oriented), and Koreans write because these two reasons do not apply (message-oriented, maybe).
Since Japanese like drawing, cartoon is frequently spotted in Japan. At one train station in Fukuoka, for instance, cartoon boards say that people should not throw away cigarette butts, riders should not sit down with their legs spread, women should not put up cosmetics in the train, and riders should not open up their newspaper wide.
Although cartoon is easy to understand, I wonder whether cartoon works for Chinese listeners or Korean readers.
Taipei is hot in summer. After sweating an hour, I ordered an iced coffee at 羊毛與花 Youmoutoohana Coffee. To my surprise, it served me a glass of coffee with a metal straw. After sipping coffee through it, I became a huge fan of metal straw. This summer, I will buy and bring a few metal straws to office with me to enjoy coffee more and consume plastics less.
I keep these in my tote bag (if you are worried about them getting dirty, I suggest a pencil pouch), and whip them up out whenever I’m at a coffee shop. Once at Starbucks, a talkative barista commented on my straw. “Hey, I’m with you,” he told me. “You’d hate to work here. You see how wasteful people are from behind this counter.” I’ll be gifting them to all of my friends for World Oceans Day on June 8.
Thai designers make interesting experimentation. At a department store in Bangkok, I found several stationary items and kitchen utensils designed by Qualy, seems to be a local Thai design company. Although this company introduced a series of interesting products including owl-shaped salt and pepper shaker or bear-shaped one, the most interesting one is mushroom-shaped magnetic.
Shiitake is a mushroom native to East Asia and consumed in many Asian countries. It is considered a medicinal mushroom in some forms of traditional medicine. Qualy website says,
Shiitake magnet Make sure you don’t put these in your soup. They are actually mushroom shaped magnets. And not just any mushroom, they are shiitake mushrooms, to remind you to seize opportunity. Just place them on any metal surface to secure your notes. It’s like picking mushrooms from a field each time you remove a magnet.
Although I do not know why shiitake mushroom is related with seizing an opportunity, the form is certainly eye-catching and attractive enough to open wallet.
In Shenzhen, China, people ride bicycles almost for free because bicycle sharing companies such as Ofo (yellow) and Mobike (orange) compete each other aggressively.
Thanks to the competition, renting and returning bicycles is extremely convenient. When I subscribed Mobike, I could use app to search for available bicycles nearby. When I met a lonely bicycle on a street, I simply scanned its QR code to unlock and ride it. When I finished my trip, I parked it anywhere I wanted and then scanned its QR code one more time.
Certainly, aggressive competition raises numerous problems. For instance, some bicycles are broken, others are dirty, and the others are even dumped out in the woods! However, competition solves a challenging problem that other bicycle friendly cities failed to address, that is, bicycle theft. Since bicycles are for free in this city, no one is interested in owning or stealing them. A sharing economy, when it truly comes true, could change how we value a product or service.
Psychologists have long claimed that people do not know the value of a product or a service. Instead, people shape their preferences on the spot. For instance, when Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec asked 146 U.C. Berkeley undergraduate students whether they wanted to attend a free poetry recitation, the percentage of respondents willing to attend the free poetry recitation was 35% when they had first been asked if they would pay to attend the recital, but only 8% when they had first been asked whether they would attend the recital in exchange for pay. As written in the Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer, Tom “had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not have a pre-existing sense of whether an experience is good or bad-even when they have experienced a sample of it.
Henckell is my favorite cafe in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen. It is a local place with great coffee and sandwich. I feel cozy inside. It has only four small tables.
There is a tip jar next to the credit card machine on the counter table. Interestingly, it has a smiley face, two arms, and two legs. One day out of curiosity, I kept watching how many guests tipped in this human-looking tip jar. Afterwards, I also asked a server whether guests liked it. Surprisingly, I noticed that a few guests hesitated putting coins into this jar for an unknown reason. The server even told me that not few guests complained about the tip jar because its mouth is too small to insert coins.
When human flavor is added to an object, people like the object. It is supported by academic studies about anthropomorphism. For instance, when a car is anthropomorphized and its characteristics are congruent with the proposed human schema, people evaluate it positively (Aggarwal and McGill 2007). When a garbage bin is anthropomorphized (e.g., “feed me”), people follow the message and show prosocial behaviors (Ahn, Kim, Aggarwal 2013). When an innovative, uncertain product is anthropomorphized (e.g., “this little guy”), people tend to adopt this product (Jiang, Hoegg, and Dahl 2011).
However, anthropomorphism might backfire if the usefulness of the product is sacrificed. When I come back to this cafe, I want to draw a different character with a bigger mouth and see what happens.
People are often reluctant to comply with social causes because doing so may involve personal sacrifices of time, money, and effort for benefits that are shared by other members of society. In an effort to increase compliance, government agencies and public institutions sometimes employ financial tools to promote social causes. However, employing financial tools to induce prosocial behavior is expensive and often ineffective. We propose that anthropomorphizing a social cause is a practical and inexpensive tool for increasing compliance with it. Across three prosocial contexts, we found that individuals exposed to a message from an anthropomorphized social cause, compared with individuals exposed to a message relating to a nonanthropomorphized social cause, were more willing to comply with the message. This effect was mediated by feelings of anticipatory guilt experienced when they considered the likely consequences of not complying with the cause. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
In this study, we adopted a food-waste composting campaign. A total of 104 undergraduates (54% female and 46% male; mean age = 19.8 years) participated in return for course credit. Participants in the anthropomorphism condition were exposed to a campaign poster showing a garbage bin with humanlike features of eyes, a nose, and a mouth alongside the caption, “Please feed me food waste only!” Participants in the nonanthropomorphism condition were shown a campaign poster in which the garbage bin lacked humanlike features and was accompanied by the caption, “Please put food waste in only!”. Participants completed a measure of expected compliance with the campaign (α = .89) using response scales from 1 (very unlikely) to 9 (very likely). In addition, we employed a 4-item measure of anticipatory guilt adapted from Cotte, Coulter, and Moore (2005). The four items assessed the degree of guilt, shame, responsibility, and accountability, respectively, that participants would feel if they did not comply with the campaign and were administered with 9-point scales (α = .89).
As expected, we found increased compliance in the anthropomorphism condition (M = 6.99, SD = 1.62) compared with the nonanthropomorphism condition (M = 6.24, SD = 1.80), β = 0.22, SE = 0.34, p < .05. Moreover, anticipatory guilt was higher in the anthropomorphism condition (M = 5.16, SD = 1.39) compared with the nonanthropomorphism condition (M = 4.49, SD = 1.64), β = 0.22, SE = 0.30, p < .05, which in turn resulted in an increased level of compliance, β = 0.45, SE = 0.10, p < .001. When we controlled for anticipatory guilt, the direct effect of anthropomorphism on compliance was no longer significant, β = 0.12, SE = 0.32, p = .17, Sobel z = 2.04, p < .05, which suggests that anticipatory guilt mediated the effect of anthropomorphism on compliance.
Chinese government tries hard to reduce plastic waste. Recently, it banned plastic waste import. According to financial times, half of the UK plastic waste need to find alternative places desperately.
In contrast, Chinese people seem to overuse plastics. In Shenzhen, for instance, plates are often wrapped with plastic packages. We should tear it down and throw it away. Sometimes, plastic gloves are provided at the restaurants. We wear the gloves when eating bread.
I suspect Chinese people are addicted to plastics probably because they consider plastics cleaner and safer than water or napkins. If we aim to reduce plastic consumption in China, we should consider the Chinese psychology about plastics seriously.
We now see a wide variety of floor signage. In Singapore, there is a yellow-painted footstep on the right side of the paved road at the Marina Bay. Since this road is crowded by runners, this signage probably helps them run on the right side of the road.
In Shenzhen, China, there are orange-colored lines at the subway stations. Since many people are in a hurry, these lines help them not to rush forward when the train is coming, and wait for the next train if they cannot get on.
Although floor signage is visually salient, I wonder whether this is needed to change our behavior, because we learn rules naturally. We learn how to avoid bumping into other runners when running on a narrow road and we also learn how to navigate a huge crowd to get on a train. Although I am a strong supporter of behavior economics and nudge, I believe some nudges interfere with learning. Not surprisingly, some people argue that behavioral economics are not always as effective as thought (Why nudges hardly help)(The dark side of nudging). We need to study more about which specific nudges are ineffective and how we can modify these nudges.
In Copenhagen, people rarely take taxi. They ride bicycles or, if needed, take public transportation such as bus or subways. Therefore, I was not surprised when I heard that Uber’s operation was illegal. According to the news on March 28, 2017 by Alanna Petroff at CNN,
“The government is passing a new law that will essentially make our business untenable here,” said Harry Porter, a spokesperson for Uber. The updated taxi rules — which require cars to install taxi meters and video surveillance features — leaves 2,000 Uber drivers and 300,000 riders in the lurch in Copenhagen, the only Danish city where Uber operated.”
One day, I should have used taxi service because my flight was scheduled to leave early in the morning. I was recommended to book a taxi at Taxa 4×35. Although I saw many Taxa taxi on street, but did not trust its service at first. However, I changed my thoughts about Taxa after using a feature on the app which informed me in real time where the reserved taxi was. The taxi arrived at the right time at the right place and, more importantly, relieved my concern before I used it.
In fact, the real-time location informing feature may not be special in Asia where massive amount of people catch a taxi frequently and use heavily their messenger services such as Wechat or Kakaotalk. However, this feature is quite fresh where taxi is not constantly and/or urgently needed.
