Mail bag! Grad jobs, simplified branding and central bank independence

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0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Waylon Wong. You know, at The Indicator, we have the smartest listeners. I bet all podcasts say that about their listeners. Sure, but in this case, it's true. Yeah, we have been getting some really thoughtful letters that we're going to share with you today. Exactly. Today on the show, Listener Mailbox. We'll learn from you, from Indicator listeners about the troubles facing recent college graduates, about how simplifying branding isn't always simple. And some pushback on our coverage about the Fed's independence. Stay with us.

0:50This message comes from NPR sponsor HP. Easily search through personal files, gain valuable insights, and make smarter, more informed business decisions. Unlock the future of work today with the HP AI PC. With the right tools, work doesn't have to feel like work. To learn more, go to hp.com slash AI PC. This message comes from LinkedIn ads. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing is reaching the right audience. That's why you need LinkedIn ads. You can target your buyers by job title, company, role, seniority, and skills. All the professionals you need to reach in one place. Get a$250 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself.

1:31Just go to linkedin.com slash nprpod. That's linkedin.com slash nprpod. Terms and conditions apply. only on LinkedIn ads. This message comes from Amazon Business. Free your team from time-consuming office tasks with smart business buying tools. Enable buyers to find and purchase items fast. Learn more about the technology, insights, and support available at amazonbusiness.com. All right, listener mailbox. Darian, tell us about what our first listener wrote in about. Yeah, this one comes from Sean von Inglebrechten. My name's Sean. I'm from the Bay Area. I graduated from UC Davis in December. Sean graduated with a degree in managerial economics and accounting.

2:17And he noticed that for all the talk of a robust labor market, sending his resume through companies' websites often went nowhere. I remember applying to those and not getting a response until six to eight months later saying, oh, we didn't pick you. And it's kind of ridiculous. Many of Sean's peers were struggling to land that first job out of college. And so a lot of people were forced to either take a different job or even look into other industries. It wasn't just that easy. Right. So the jobs market for new college graduates has definitely been one of the emerging clouds over what has been a relatively sunny jobs market over the last year.

2:56This spring, employers said they would hire 6 percent fewer new graduates than in 2023. That's according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. And by August, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 20 to 24 years old reached 9 percent. That's nearly one in 10 young graduates looking for a job and unable to find one. It's not a crisis, but it's moderately higher than the same time of the year before the pandemic. I guess the future of the economy has been uncertain. At the same time, people haven't been quitting their jobs much. and off the back of a spike in hiring a couple of years ago, it makes sense the number of jobs for young college graduates has now cooled down.

3:39They found getting into the job market a little harder this year. Lucky for Sean, he landed a job he wanted, doing public accounting at a big accounting firm. Which was pretty nice to know coming out of college that I would have something kind of set in stone. And so I was kind of ready to be done and start getting into the workforce. I imagine that accounting training came in handy. I mean, The major you choose can really affect your chances of a good job right out of college. And we've done stories about the shortage of certified public accountants on the show before. Yeah, Sean said when he was in college, he researched areas that were hiring a lot.

4:13Accounting was one of those, and I was very grateful that I could take advantage of that. Well, thank you for writing in, Sean, and hope you're having fun at your new job. Okay, I'm going to take the next letter from our listener mailbox. fascinating research about what's up with all those ads with clean, pale backgrounds and large text in a sans-serif typeface. Maybe the word simply thrown in there. Millennial branding. Oh, yeah. It is the reign of Helvetica, and we're all living in it. Nick Light is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at the University of Oregon. He explains his job like this.

4:47Basically using psychology and marketing and what we know about those things to try to convince people to do good things for themselves and society. Nick wrote to us about this trend of making marketing as simple as possible. He says it's been around for 15 to 20 years. And the motivation for that, most marketing practitioners would say, is that there are so many marketing messages that consumers are being bombarded with every day, that the way to reach them through the clutter is to simplify. Okay, so I'm thinking like the ordinary for skincare, which is taken to the extreme, right? It's basically just a white background and a list of ingredients.

5:24Yeah, and then HIMSS is another for certain supplements. The eyeglass company, Warby Parker, was a leader in this early on. I saw that Walmart actually introduced their house brand called Better Goods earlier this year, and that had this classic flat design, large, simple text. It was kind of the sign that millennial marketing has gone mainstream. And there's some evidence in my research that that actually is a good thing in terms of what people like. But there is this hidden downside. Yeah. Nick says when people see simple branding, they think that the product is going to work. It's not going to be complicated or some kind of hassle.

6:01So Nick has done experiments with people in the lab and also online, where the participants were presented with some real and fake brands, and they're guided through a narrative journey and asked questions. Some of the brands had simple logos and slogans, while others had busier logos with longer slogans. People were asked about the different companies, and the ones with more stripped-back marketing were perceived as easier or more simple. In some of those surveys, participants were asked what they would think if something went wrong with the products. And when their dissatisfaction or anger is measured, they feel more anger with the supposedly simple products than with the other brands.

6:40Betrayal! Yeah, it's like you promised me simplicity and now you're making my life hard. Come on. So this phenomenon is also backed up by real world reviews in consumer reports. Nick has some advice about brand simplification. This is actually a good strategy to convince consumers that this is something they might be interested in. It's just if you do that and then it turns out it's less simple than people thought, people get angry. This is why you should never overpromise. You should underpromise. Exactly. Underpromise, overdeliver. Well, the next letter, I promise, will be simply insightful.

7:14We have a letter from a listener from Annapolis, Maryland. My name is Mark Abbey. I'm retired. I was, for 30 years, I was a strategy consultant. Okay, so what was in Mark's letter? So this summer, we did a story about the independence of the Federal Reserve, and we talked about how politicians can't make decisions on setting interest rates. This has been the case since the 1950s. Mark wrote in to say it was a mistake, though, to think the Fed was completely apolitical, particularly in the spring of 2021 when we were seeing inflation start to rise. Fed Chair Jerome Powell was basically saying this would be transitory, which was the same line that a lot of the Biden administration had been also saying.

7:58People like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. It's not that I think that the Biden administration interfered with the process of the Fed. I don't think that. But when I look at the decisions that the Fed make, it seemed like they were a little too on the same page as the executive branch. And I think that resulted in some pretty fundamental errors in the spring of 2021 that have continued for quite a long time. Mark points out that the Fed was stimulating the economy with near zero interest rates and buying trillions of dollars worth of bonds at the same time as the Biden administration was juicing the economy with pandemic assistance.

8:39And I just think that that has proven to be a colossal mistake. And minority observers at the time thought it was a mistake. And I think that you had these two parties, the Fed and the executive branch, were too aligned. There wasn't enough constructive conflict between these parties. Now we should point out that this is a hotly debated topic. People who are supportive of the Fed's actions point to how inflation was this global phenomenon. We have some prior episodes that we'll link to in the show notes that go into more detail on this point in time. Regardless, Mark thinks this period illustrates exactly why he thinks it's important for the Federal Reserve to be independent from presidents or Congress.

9:25It's such a bad idea to compromise the independence of the Fed. Well, Mark, we are so happy to have you provide your perspective and to highlight some of the potential nuances around this. Well, thanks. Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to do so. And your opportunity is always there. Praise, critiques, questions, comments, song lyrics, send them our way. Indicator at npr.org. Times New Roman only, please. Yes, indeed. No need to keep it simple. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Patrick Murray. was fact-acted by Sarah Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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