Suggestions per Serving is a Case Study in Adjusting KPIs to Make Your Boss Happy
So I bought a pack of Weet-Bix.
And somehow, the boring ‘suggestion per serving’ table caught my eye.
Usually I would just ignore this since I’m not really watching what I eat (even though I really should), but one piece of information caught my eye.
Suggestion per serving….2 biscuits? I assume it means I’m supposed to eat 2 biscuits in one sitting. I also assume it would be some big-ass biscuits if I, an “overgrown” dude, am to only to eat two.
For a guy who used to fill three quarters of the bowl with corn flakes, this is quite disappointing.
I took off to social media to voice my discontent, where a friend quickly pointed out that it’s to make us think that the various calories and sugar content seem small. Of course it’s going to look small in calorie content if you are assuming I’m only going eat two biscuits?? Fortunately, mother didn’t raise a quitter and I’m not going to quit after just two puny biscuits.
What the Weet Bix did to me (or, any packaged food out there whatsoever) is applicable to a wide range of scenarios. It can be found, for example, when you are watching the news, or when you are creating a report for your boss.
Like, when you are watching the news. Election season, or re-election season is coming up. You suddenly see cool sounding numbers popping up. Such as, “unemployment rate has gone down since X has taken office”. You go and think, wow this X guy must be pretty good!
Ignoring that unemployment is a separate topic and that there is a gazillion of different things affecting them (not just the dude calling the shots on behalf of the country), if I were to apply my newfound knowledge I gained from the Weet Bix carton, there is a good way to reduce unemployment level.
I just, simply, change the definition of unemployment so that less people are qualified to be categorized as “unemployed”. Suppose if the original definition was “people who work less than 40 hours a week”, I can just change it into “people who work less than 4 hours a week”. I’d think it’d be harder for people to qualify as “unemployed” no?
(note: this is just a made up definition, if you want the real stuff go look up the official definition in your country)
In other case, suppose you are compiling a report to your boss, on the brand perception of the company. You know the company’s product has a lot of complaints from customers. The product, just so it happens, is a monopoly in several regions in your country. Your boss wants the brand perception to be better. But they are not really doing anything to improve the product either (which is the source of the complaints). What can you do?
Following the wisdom of the Weet Bix carton, perhaps you can change the definition by which you define the brand perception.
Suppose you are trying to measure brand perception by looking at what kind of things are people saying in social media about your product. I assume you will have some ‘keywords’ or identifiers to categorize if a social media post is praising or dissing your product. In this case, you can just “adjust” the keywords or identifier to make it more post to be identified as “praising” the product.
In the extreme example, when a social media user posted “Product A sucks ass”, normally you will put the word “sucks” as a keyword that have negative connotations on your brand and you put it in the “bad keyword list”. But if you adjust the way you are categorizing these posts, and for example, put the word “sucks” into “good keyword list”, you just turned a negative post into a positive post (at least, from the perspective of the system you are using to categorize these social media posts).
So there you have it. If your boss does not really sweat the details, you too, can make your boss happy today.
