Articles exploring case-study through the lens of behavioral science and experimentation. Practical frameworks for growth leaders who measure in revenue, not vanity metrics.
26 articles
In 2011, JCPenney hired the executive who'd built Apple's retail empire to do the same for them.
Dan Ariely's MIT candy experiment showed 257% more foot traffic when truffles cost zero instead of one cent.
On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner free-fell 24 miles from the edge of space in front of 8 million live YouTube viewers, with Red Bull's logo on his helmet.
Katzenberg and Whitman raised $1.75 billion before writing a line of code. Quibi launched in April 2020 and shut down by October.
When the Mini Cooper relaunched in the United States in 2002, the marketing didn't hide the car's size — it made the smallness the entire campaign.
Charlie Munger's most useful idea wasn't about investing — it was that behavioral biases compound non-linearly when stacked.
In 1977, Lee Ross at Stanford asked students if they'd wear a sandwich board on campus.
In 1985, Coca-Cola ran 191,000 blind taste tests over four years and spent $4M validating a new formula. New Coke failed catastrophically within three months.
Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson didn't benchmark Best Buy when designing the Apple Store.
In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped how human memory decays over time. Coca-Cola's $4 billion annual ad budget is a defense against his curve.
In 2001, two MIT researchers ran an auction for Boston Celtics and Red Sox tickets.
The average American grocery carries 30,000 SKUs. Aldi carries 1,650. The German discounter run for decades by a pair of reclusive billionaires earns $662…
In 2009, Jared Spool published one of the most consequential UX case studies in modern e-commerce: a major retailer was losing roughly $300M a year because…
Jo Malone had no marketing budget and a single Bergdorf Goodman pop-up.
In 1997, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Steve Jobs walked to a whiteboard, drew a 2x2 grid, put one product in each box, and killed everything else.
In the late 1940s, Chivas Regal was dying. Sam Bronfman doubled the price instead of cutting it — and saved the brand.
Netflix users spend 1.8 seconds evaluating each thumbnail before moving on. The entire $270B business is built around winning that 1.8-second window.
Nike didn't win sports by accident. They built a $165B brand by stacking three well-documented behavioral biases — Authority Bias (Milgram, 1961)…
B.F. Skinner's 1957 pigeon experiments on variable reinforcement built every slot machine in Las Vegas.
In 1980, Kmart was ten times bigger than Walmart. By 2002 Kmart was bankrupt.
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a useful measure. The Cobra Effect is the most colorful illustration of Goodhart's Law — but Wells Fargo's…
In 2009, two Domino's employees nearly destroyed the brand with a viral YouTube video. CEO J.
In 1996, an American who didn't speak French and didn't drink vodka set out to build the world's most expensive vodka brand.
Atticus Li shares five real enrollment flow A/B tests from NRG Energy that collectively projected over $1M in annual revenue — with exact metrics…
How a cleaner homepage, a modal instead of a dedicated page, and a flat primary metric quietly killed enrollment conversions—and what to change in your…
From Obama's $60M fundraising lift to modern campaign optimization, political A/B testing is a masterclass in high-stakes, time-constrained experimentation…