🍣 Statistics is a knife that cuts on both sides
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Hi friend – Rob here. Most brand strategy boils down to three axes:
(Cultural truth can be bundled into market or human.) Which raises two interesting questions:
My take: truth is highly contextual and yes multiple things can be true at once. Nassim Taleb says: “Statistics is a knife that cuts on both sides.” By which he means you can use numbers to tell many types of narratives. Have a big enough data set and you can prove that people both love and hate your product. Or that having lizards as a pet is both a good and a bad idea. The question then is, which version of the truth to you adopt? You adopt the one that gives you the largest chances of a competitive advantage. Which means data-driven approaches are mostly a performance. Data is like a Rorschach test, we often see in it what we want to see. The same data report can yield three wildly different interpretations. The good news: this means we get to choose the version that feels most compelling. We obsess so much with being right, we forget the point is to be less wrong than the other folks. So your data doesn't need to confirm what you're saying, so long as it doesn't deny it either. From there, you can shape the story how you see fit. Rob
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Salmon Theory, by Rob Estreitinho
Helping savvy strategists swim upstream.
Hey friend – Rob here. This is the last newsletter of the year, and goodness me what a year it's been. I was made redundant. I started a business. I lost my mother. I had my best year ever in terms of cash and confidence building. Ebbs and flows, eh? I hope you have a chance to take a break, genuinely turn off those notifications, and sleep in if you feel like it. I bring below 3x articles i wrote recently, and an event we're running in January. See you in 2025, and thanks for supporting...
Hey friend – Rob here. Here's what's been swimming around our brains lately: Synthesis-as-a-Service 5 things i’ve learned from Theophilus Wells IV The question i ask whenever i open a book [Bonus!] Social strategy, deconstructed Grab a cup of caramel tea, and let's get into it. Synthesis-as-a-Service And why it may be an underrated use case for hiring independent strategists. 5 things i’ve learned from Theophilus Wells IV Including directness, self-definition and why impostor syndrome is a...
Hey friend – Rob here. Do you worry about things? Or at all? My suspicion is that you worry far too much about everything. But don't worry, so do i. I think it's part of what makes strategists minimally good at the job. We are always wondering what else we might be missing. It's not a point of advantage, but it's definitely a point of parity. Worrying means we don't take anything for granted. And that's the first ingredient you need to challenge preconceptions about a problem. However. As you...