Can traditional fairy tales teach us anything about changing behaviour through narrative? After all, that’s the ultimate goal of content marketing.

If you’re writing for business then you’re writing to sell, whether that’s shifting widgets or pushing your point of view.

Over on the Neuromarketing blog, Roger Dooley has complied the Ultimate Neuromarketing Reading List. I’ve read a few of these, but found many more to add to my own Must Read list. Worth a scan for all marketers. Photo by Nicole Honeywill on Unsplash

Here’s a great post on trust and the “attention asset” from Seth Godin. A few simple principles:If you’re not measuring attention in dollars and cents, you don’t know what it’s worth.If you’re treating everyone the same, you’re wasting attention.If you’re burning trust to get more attention or more action, you’ve wasted both of them. … […]

We’ve talked a lot about how a little cognitive “friction” can aid learning and recall. Now, researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have produced a font designed exactly for that: Sans Forgetica. I think I first came across the research through the Harvard Business Review. Here’s a blog post from 2012. It’s also […]

This is interesting. Jordan Peterson on perceptions of reality: Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundred years ago, with the works of Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens (any more than they could view […]

The Economist’s Johnson column on the lasting influence of Latin on our language. Ad and ab are workaday prepositions in Latin, the former usually meaning “towards”, or “at” (think of ad hominem) and the latter meaning “from” (think abscond, abdicate and such). Iurare means “to swear”. So in Latin, adiurare meant to swear to do something, and abiurare meant to swear off it—the ab and ad clear as day to your average […]

The great space debate continues. For years, I used two spaces after the full stop (or period, if you prefer). Then, I learned and understood the rationale: modern typography requires only one space. Partly in deference to the designers and editors who pick up my stark copy and convert it into beauty, I switched. Now […]

More than just a digital copy of the printed page. Author Jody Sabral has a fascinating piece on the world of digital publishing (on BBC.co.uk). I was particularly struck by two aspects. Firstly, how the absence of a physical product is driving fresh approaches to marketing – no longer a lonely book-signing in the darkest […]

We need more storytellers. Here’s a great little interview with Steve Clayton, Chief Storyteller at Microsoft. I know Steve a little from our days at Microsoft UK and, as you’ll read (or see in the videos), he has a great feel for story. Also worth reading is a follow-on article, How to Tell Your Story, […]