short and spazzy

Wired: Speaking of testing, I assume you market-tested the title of the book?

Ferriss: Oh yeah, with about 4,000 people, in three separate rounds. Testing is how I ended up with the title of The 4-Hour Workweek as well. That was one of about 12 titles I tested using Google AdWords. I bid on keywords or phrases associated with the book content, like “world travel,” “401K,” etc. And then the ads that were displayed had the title of the book as the headline and the subtitle as the ad text. And then I just looked at the clickthrough rates.

Wired: What was on the pages when people clicked through?

Ferriss: Nothing—just “under construction.”

Wired: I have to tell you, The 4-Hour Workweek did nothing to reduce my workweek. In fact, I took the title as pure provocation. You know, if you’d said, “Improve your work efficiency by reducing the time you spend on email,” OK, that’s more plausible—if less interesting. I read the book. I still work a lot.

Magazines have long used focus groups to tailor their package. New Scientist took another route for its latest issue, testing whether neuromarketing, which examines the brain’s response to products and brands, could help make the magazine more appealing.

To find out, the British publication found 19 right-handed men who occasionally buy the magazine (on the rationale that including women and left-handed men would have required a much larger study). Those men were connected to an electroencephalograph machine, which measures brain waves, and shown three different covers for 36 seconds each. The subjects’ reactions were then analyzed by NeuroFocus, a company with headquarters in Berkeley, Calif., which then rated the results on a scale of 1 to 10, based on factors like memory activation and emotional engagement.