B's Buzz

In Duncan J. Watts’ 2011 book—Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, Chapter 5 (History, the Fickle Teacher)—sampling bias suggests we should pay attention to the failures as well as the successes when developing an under-recognized pattern like behavioral definitions.

Pip Coburn’s Total Perceived Pain of Adoption (TPPA) is a long-winded way of saying the cost of switching—a well understood concept by salesmen and marketers around the world. TPPA is coincidentally also the acronym for a venereal disease testing regiment. A positive confirms a negative—a syphilis infection. The third strike against this acronym is when it comes to coining a causative definition the audience gets to decide its fate. So even if the originator believes a new coinage fulfills the Made to Stick SUCCESs model (also available in the store) the real test is in the marketplace of language and usage.

Nevertheless, a book centered on the cost of switching has several illuminating stories including the featured one around the once trendy Atkins Diet. The Ten Sets of Questions in Chapter 11 can be mind jarring.

TPPA is but one example of why we use the baseball metaphor, batting average to lay bare the odds of a designer behavioral definition being a hit. Said simply, times at bat and the push given a line-up of emerging behavioral definitions is central to the resulting hits to strike outs.