00:00:00
I think the NHS could create massively greater patient Satisfaction by deploying certain behaviors and
00:00:06
techniques like what well Rory Southerland he is an author columnist
00:00:12
and the vice chairman of Aug UK one of the largest marketing companies in the world he's an adman stories are the PDF
00:00:19
files of human information they're the vehicle we use for storing information and the vehicle we use for sharing it if
00:00:25
you want to improve how people feel psychology is a better area for exploration than rational Improvement
00:00:31
don't make the Eurostar faster make the journey more enjoyable and that's one of the cleverest reframings you can do the
00:00:38
Uber map is a psychological moonshot what bothers us about waiting for a taxi
00:00:43
isn't actually the duration it's the degree of uncertainty and if you have a map which shows you where the taxi is
00:00:49
you're basically relaxed you can genuinely perform magic in perception what is the seat covering for the Tesla
00:00:56
it's called vegan leather now actually to be honest we would have called those plastic seats back in the day if it
00:01:02
makes things feel more valuable is it a con without further Ado I'm Steven
00:01:08
Bartlett and this is the dire of CEO I hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to
00:01:15
[Music]
00:01:21
yourself Ry first of all thank you for being here as uh as someone who built a
00:01:26
marketing business and has worked in sort of similar industry um to you for a huge portion of my life um you're
00:01:33
someone that I've always looked up to and even young members of my team here cite you as being an inspiration on an
00:01:39
ongoing basis for the work they're doing just broadly on even of these new platforms like Tik Tok because the
00:01:45
principles and the psychology and the the sort of rationality underneath much of your work is is really really
00:01:51
Timeless um so thank you for being here I that's a great honor and um uh we'll
00:01:56
get into some mutual fanboying later um but no I mean I one of the great insights I think which I hope helps
00:02:03
motivate everybody working in our industry and related Industries is that when you create perceptual value you are
00:02:10
creating value value can be created in the mind every bit as much as it can be created in the factory and I think there
00:02:16
was a an unfortunate story about marketing that treated it as kind of optional extra it was the fairy dust on
00:02:23
top of the real intrinsic value that resided in a product or service and I completely dispute that I think we value
00:02:30
things according not to what they are but what they mean and what they mean is context dependent it can be uh massively
00:02:37
transformed by storytelling Framing recontextualization and you can
00:02:43
absolutely use psychological um mechanisms to make things more valuable more enjoyable more precious that's one
00:02:50
important point I might make the additional point which is to be honest over ambitious but I make it anyway
00:02:56
which is that actually perceived value is a very environmentally friendly form of value to
00:03:02
create because you can generally create meaning and imbue a product with meaning
00:03:08
um with a lot less carbon consumption than is necessarily involved in making the product three times bigger or five
00:03:14
times faster and you know my argument would also be if we're looking for
00:03:20
breakthrough 10x moonshot improvements it's actually much easier
00:03:25
to find psychological moonshots than technological moonshots you know make a train 10 times faster you know it was
00:03:32
possible in 1840 1820 okay very difficult to do now um to a point of
00:03:38
just dangerousness or you know extraordinarily difficult engineering problem making a train journey 10 times
00:03:45
more enjoyable that's still doable in my view give me an example then what's the
00:03:50
the example that always comes to mind for you of where someone has managed to put tremendous moonshot style value on
00:03:58
something a brand po just with marketing and advertising but
00:04:03
what I'm always very fond of is I think the Uber map is a psychological
00:04:08
moonshot and it's based I mean the the story which may or may not be true is
00:04:13
that one of the founders of uber was inspired by watching Goldfinger and when he saw Bond effectively following
00:04:20
Goldfinger using a tracking device there was a scrolling map in the dashboard of the db4 which showed him where
00:04:26
goldfinger's car was so he could Trail it while remaining out of of sight um uh
00:04:32
then um what was extraordinary about that was that it was based on a very
00:04:37
clever insight into human psychology which most of us ourselves aren't really aware of which is the we would say and
00:04:44
we confidently say we believe that I hate it when a taxi takes a long time to turn up I like it when a taxi turns up
00:04:51
quickly so a rational person or an engineer would react to that by saying what we need is a predictive algorithm
00:04:58
so that taxies to be available in areas where we predict heavy demand so that we can service customers more quickly and
00:05:05
by the way there's nothing wrong with that it may be a very worthwhile thing to do although it's worth saying that it requires quite a lot of scale in order
00:05:12
to achieve that but the real insight with the map is that deep down you know somewhere in
00:05:18
the amydala what bothers us about waiting for a taxi isn't actually the duration it's the degree of uncertainty
00:05:25
in other words is he here yet maybe he's pared around the corner or what if he can't find that house maybe he's already
00:05:31
left was the person on the phone lying and so wait that period between booking a taxi and waiting for it to arrive was
00:05:37
one of General high stress now what's interesting is you could reduce that stress I admit by getting the taxi to
00:05:43
turn up very quickly or at least you'd reduce the period of stress but the stress would still remain on the other
00:05:50
hand if you have a map which shows you where the taxi is you're basically relaxed okay instead of going oh my God
00:05:57
you know where is he where is he I'm sure you know maybe he's already left i' better go and stand out in the rain so
00:06:03
he doesn't miss me or get impatient you just look at the map and you go oh look he's stuck at those traffic lights I'll have another pint Okay now what's
00:06:10
interesting is that the quantity of waiting is the same with or without a map you know in pure quantitative
00:06:17
measured SI unit terms of time and duration no difference the quality of
00:06:23
the waiting is totally transformed it's almost taking it from a a system dependent on TR on trust how much you
00:06:30
trust that particular firm how have they performed in the past do they sometimes lie to me have other taxi drivers
00:06:35
sometimes lied to me to A system that is almost completely trustless where I don't need to trust you because I can
00:06:40
see for myself and I suppose there's also an element of trust which uh okay was provided historically in London by
00:06:46
the knowledge and the knowledge was an interesting thing because I I occasionally debate this which is was
00:06:54
the knowledge really about knowledge in other words we don't need black cab drivers to St to this level of detail
00:07:01
now we have the technology of the satinav yeah and pure sort of utilitarian people go why on Earth am I
00:07:07
paying a premium for a black cab driver to learn all this stuff um when he could simply buy a TomTom for 300 quid and
00:07:13
stick it on the dashboard and there's some argument for that okay the only
00:07:19
other point is that you have a very high degree of trust one of the great things you could say about the knowledge is it
00:07:24
sunk cost it's commit it's proof of commitment you're only going to actually go through that Pro process if you're
00:07:30
pretty serious about being a really good cab driver also it provides you if you think
00:07:37
about if you've spent what a year and a half two years scuttling around London on a moped with one of those clipboards
00:07:43
rehearsing for your sessions of the knowledge okay you'd be a bit of an idiot uh effectively losing your taxi
00:07:50
license day one wouldn't you okay you know it's you know in other words it is
00:07:56
to some it's rather like medieval guilds they required extraordinary stringent conditions of entry into the guild but
00:08:03
that was what ensured honesty because uh the cost of being thrown out of the guild given the effort you'd put into
00:08:10
actually being admitted in the first place was therefore made it not worthwhile to cheat you you also say
00:08:16
something in in your book about how making a process more difficult can sometimes make it more attractive to
00:08:23
Consumers so I mean this is known sometimes as the Ikea effect which is that um certainly um cprad who's the
00:08:31
kind of owner and founder of Ikea believes that the fact that you assemble the furniture yourself contributes to
00:08:37
its perceived value in other words you've committed something of yourself to its assembly and creation you might
00:08:43
also argue it d stigmatizes low prices okay so I'll give you an example of that
00:08:49
there's a very big difference between cheap strawberries and pick your own strawberries now picky own strawberries
00:08:55
are cheap but there's a narrative as to why they're cheap which is I put into some of the effort into the harvesting
00:09:00
of the things and I have to go out into a field and pick the things myself cheap strawberries by contrast May create some
00:09:07
degree of uncertainty because you look at the market and go well if these strawberries were really good why
00:09:13
wouldn't they charge full price for them what's wrong with this and so quite often you know sometimes you have to
00:09:19
make things more expensive to make them trustworthy oddly okay you know you can
00:09:24
be too good to be true that consumers won't necessarily trust something that's cheap unless there's a narrative around
00:09:31
it as to where the cost savings are made I mean I think I think a lot of low if you think about lowcost Airlines okay
00:09:38
they spent quite a lot of effort talking about what you didn't get you don't get a meal okay uh you have to pay to check
00:09:45
in your luggage uh you don't get it originally with easy jet you didn't even get pre-allocated seating okay it was
00:09:51
you know effectively like a bus uh you had to book online you couldn't book through a travel agent and those
00:09:57
constraints to some extent were there to make it believable to the
00:10:03
consumer that there was a legitimate form of cost saving going on now if you'd said if you launched EasyJet and
00:10:10
you'd said we're just as good as British Airways were but we're half the price the untrusting consumer is going
00:10:16
to ask how are you doing this okay does it mean you're not servicing the engines all the pilots are all on day release
00:10:23
from prison or something right you're going to start having doubts so interestingly sometimes negative stories
00:10:29
around a product can be used to offset the negatives which a consumer would
00:10:35
tend to imagine if Ikea had ready assembled Furniture which wasn't sold in a warehouse it was sold in a kind of
00:10:41
Posh heels style Emporium we'd think there was something a bit iffy going on so you know and
00:10:48
there's also the wonderful Ikea effect which is the effort of actually going to an Ikea and navigating the maze makes it
00:10:54
more or less impossible for you to go home empty-handed you know you have to buy some tea lights at the very minimum
00:10:59
just to validate your trip now the I suppose the earliest manifestation of this although it's sometimes called the
00:11:06
Ikea effect was a very famous marketing case study um for Betty Crocker cakes where
00:11:12
they had a cake mix where you just added water put in the oven created a cake and
00:11:17
it didn't sell very well and a psychologist came in and said there isn't enough effort involved in this to
00:11:24
make it feel like cooking and so they added the slogan just add an egg the
00:11:29
addition of the egg although it actually imposed a cost and a small degree of effort suddenly made the product much
00:11:35
more popular why now the idea would be that now it was actually cooking you
00:11:40
were preparing something for your family you weren't just cheating perhaps I mean it's an
00:11:46
interesting debate because we don't fully know that this this wasn't tested to an absolutely robust level of
00:11:52
academic uh certainty uh you know um uh but nonetheless it's a very common it's
00:11:58
very popular anecdote within marketing that sometimes the counterintuitive I think that's all you need to derive from
00:12:03
it okay all you need to derive from it in business decision making is sometimes the counterintuitive approach might be
00:12:11
better and this I'm I was thinking then about these modern sort of meal delivery companies so you have obviously on one
00:12:17
end Super Convenience you have Uber Uber Eats Etc delivery and then you have this Middle Ground of where we'll send you
00:12:23
the ingredients and tell you how to put it in the pan and we'll measure so that be gust or hello fresh yeah exactly you
00:12:36
putsy feel like you cooked it's a very strange thing um because uh one of the
00:12:41
founders of Gusto actually met me shortly before lockdown and I was I couldn't really
00:12:47
make sense of the product okay at first and this by the way really interested me
00:12:53
because Bill Gates once said of technology that the problem we have with technology is people don't know how to want the things we can offer them and
00:12:59
one of the things that increasingly fascinates me is products which an economist would call them an experience
00:13:06
good where it's only really possible to perceive their value by actually using
00:13:11
them I have to admit when I was presented with gusto and hellofresh I thought this is kind of dumb I've got an
00:13:17
you know cardo account I can order things from Sainsbury's for click and collect I've got well my wife more
00:13:23
accurately has got 20 or 30 cookery books of various kinds all I have to do is pick a recipe from a cookery book
00:13:29
effectively order the necessary ingredients follow instructions cook at home job done why on Earth would I want
00:13:37
a box with um you know pre-selected ingredients and the right ratio arriving with a recipe
00:13:43
card but anyway I met this guy and he said well I'll send you a free box now
00:13:48
you know I'm not so you know ungrateful and nasty a human being that I go I don't want your stinking box of free
00:13:54
food and I think it was actually towards the beginning of the pandemic anyway so I wasn't entir sure that food was going
00:14:00
to remain abundantly available so I said sure you know absolutely I'm delighted the other thing is I probably ordered a
00:14:06
Gusto box for um the only reason we stopped was actually we had our kitchen replaced and had a period with an oven
00:14:13
but pretty much every week um my assistant Anna who's in the Next Room has also had a
00:14:19
Gusto the majority of weeks for two and a half years ever since experiencing it
00:14:24
you asked me to explain this I mean this is what's So Glorious which is I can't quite explain
00:14:29
why once experience this is such a compelling benefit true um okay um it
00:14:37
possibly is the fact that because these ingredients in the right ratio and have a limited shelf life it forces you to
00:14:43
cook them and therefore it forces you to cook what ends up being a restaurant
00:14:49
quality meal at home with not too much effort okay in by the way a reasonably
00:14:56
healthy quantity as well one of the problems with take away food is if you want variety you end up with completely
00:15:02
excessive quantity don't you you end up either keeping the stuff in the fridge or with an extraordinary amount of food waste because the take unlike a
00:15:09
restaurant where they think well if we give them slightly too little food they might order a pudding or something else
00:15:15
in takeaway food you don't get a second chance to top them up so the great paranoia I think of all takeaway
00:15:20
restaurants is not putting enough quantity in and so you do end up with a
00:15:25
restaurant quality meal at the price of a ready meal um which you have cooked yourself that's very logical though give
00:15:31
me the illogical uh was there something some surprise and Delight in I genuinely
00:15:38
I I don't I've just got one product okay which is the greatest example of a product which genuinely kind of creates
00:15:47
massive contradictions in my own mind which is the quooker I don't know if you've got one of instant boiling water
00:15:52
effectively oh yeah I've got one you got one over there yeah if you want the story of the crooker by the way I'll tell your listeners CU it's fascinating
00:15:58
there were two people I think at unil who were who their brief was effectively to invent CER soup and they did it very
00:16:06
successfully they produced what is a powdered form of soup and one of them said right job done
00:16:12
we've created the cup of soup boil a kettle pour the water on you've got a nice mug of soup job done I'll go back
00:16:17
to the day job and the other Dutch guy basically felt no I've only solved half
00:16:22
the problem here because you still have to wait for the kettle to boil and for whatever reason I mean you
00:16:28
must have been a kind of of compulsive inventor he became obsessed with solving the second half of the cuper souit
00:16:33
problem which is how can we create boiling water faster which was technically off brief but nonetheless
00:16:40
for some reason absolutely preoccupied him and so he effectively ended up
00:16:46
creating what is a Dutch company cooker now okay half of me you know perhaps the
00:16:52
more puritanical rational half is going you've just paid not quite a four-figure sum but a very large figure some for a
00:17:00
very fast Kettle and the other half of me is going I wouldn't go back you know having I
00:17:07
don't know what your relationship is with your cooker but i' find it difficult now going back to a kettle
00:17:12
having experienced instant tea making instant soup making if you want to poach an egg you can fill a pan with boiling
00:17:19
water uh instantaneously you don't have to wait for that to cook up Suddenly of course you discover new and
00:17:25
complimentary uses for boiling water that all seems very logical to me that makes perfect sense yeah I mean the only
00:17:31
thing is I think you've got a lot of products which are much much easier for you to defend or understand or appreciate in retrospect than they are
00:17:38
few to write a check for in advance right I've got you and that's that's a marketing problem the electric car by
00:17:45
the way is I mean one really interesting question I always ask about any technology which I think is a question
00:17:51
that's asked too little people ask what are the unit sales of this technology and how fast are they growing actually
00:17:57
any new technology grows very slowly to begin with it's a sigmoid curve um
00:18:02
nearly anything significantly new starts off fairly Niche yeah yeah and the
00:18:08
reason is that the two driving forces of human behavior are habit and social copying and therefore when you've never
00:18:15
done it before and none of your friends do it doing something is much more difficult to do and I'm old enough to
00:18:21
remember the time when the majority of my friends said I don't understand why you'd want a mobile phone okay I mean I
00:18:28
can actually remember when Mo I I used a mobile phone on Oxford Street in 1989 two people shouted abuse at me from
00:18:34
passing taxis it was like a brick it was a social statement it was my phone it was
00:18:41
we had company phones and we signed them out for the day but just the act of using one of these things in public
00:18:46
would expose you to a general appr probium and it's impossible for anybody now to think back on that because I
00:18:53
don't think anybody knows anybody without a mobile phone the example that I that comes to mind for me and it's Al
00:18:59
to do with a crooker I didn't call it a cooker I just call it the tap but yeah instant hot water instant cold water um
00:19:05
is music and a friend of mine told me the story of standing with the HMV I think it's HMV CEO looking out on the
00:19:11
shop floor at all these people buying CDs and he said to him we'll always have a business because people love music now
00:19:19
what he got wrong is he was right that people love music but they don't love getting in their car driving in the rain
00:19:25
and then getting a plastic seed uh piece of plastic which they can then get damaged very easily they can only carry
00:19:31
a few of them and driving it back to the house people loved music and he only really found they really like CDs I
00:19:38
might make a point by the way that in terms of its if someone has a design sensibility in terms of its
00:19:46
proliferation the CD laughably named jewel case the plastic hinge case in
00:19:52
which the CD came was probably the nastiest single you know manufactured
00:19:57
item in everything from environmental terms to just usability you know the fact that it opened with a horrible sort
00:20:03
of cracking snap now what's interesting is that vinyl has made a Resurgence but I don't see any sign of a
00:20:11
CD Resurgence any more than I see there are a few weird people who are back into cassettes aren't there there but I think
00:20:17
that's fairly nichy yeah that's kind of like lomography and photography it's one
00:20:22
of those sort of weird countercultures but but but I can understand I can just
00:20:28
about understand it's slightly weird when my daughter asked for a a gramophone player for her birthday
00:20:34
because I'm kind of going I you know I was born in 1965 I spent my whole life trying to get rid of the nuisance of
00:20:40
physical music to you know effectively something akin to Spotify and now you're
00:20:45
weirdly reverting to this thing you know it made no sense to me um possibly there's an element that if you're really
00:20:51
devoted to a particular band you want to spend money and Signal your devotion in some physical form I don't know what's
00:20:58
going on there fully I I think is that not just a case of like scarcity yeah I I well I suspect one of the one of the
00:21:05
curses of capitalism is that is recursive fashion exactly uh so um
00:21:11
Jeremy bulmore who's now I suppose in his late 80s wonderful guy who was the creative director of Jay Walter Thompson
00:21:17
he was a director of wpp for many years he made the point and by the way as you get older you realize much more of this
00:21:25
here we go again you know because you have greater chronologic context in which to appreciate it but he made the
00:21:31
point that when he was a child all cheddar cheese came with a rind so most cheese you buy in a shop was cut from a
00:21:37
wheel and it would have either some sort of wax or or else rind or sometimes it's
00:21:42
cloth on the exterior and someone then started selling rindless cheddar and
00:21:47
they charged a premium for it you see because you know oh brilliant I don't have to pay for the Rind and I don't
00:21:53
have to cut it off what a wonderful convenience and then memories being short and obviously some people being
00:22:01
born before they could remember cheddar with a rind anyway about 25 30 years after that people started introducing
00:22:07
Farmhouse Artisan cheddar with the Rind left on and they charged a premium for that so you do have this peculiar thing
00:22:15
where um that's all marketing though isn't advertising because what you're saying that's the real key it's it's
00:22:20
it's human partly human neophilia so that what's different attracts our attention Okay so undoubtedly we
00:22:27
disproportionately pay attention to things which are new or seemingly different and we're novelty seeking to a
00:22:33
great extent what is the story though if I buy that Artis analy the story for me especially being Artisan is this is the real cheese in my head I immediately go
00:22:40
that Supermarket stuff is just fake processed but the Rind signals that this I'm paying for real cheese well I mean
00:22:47
we can look at the we can look at the interesting uh re exactly it's a recursive Trend and of course in fashion
00:22:52
it happens all the time that you know uh that the most bizarre Fashions including sort of flare and um Afghan coats you
00:23:01
know sequins have made a massive comeback and you um and the truth is
00:23:08
that when they come around a second time the context is different so they mean something different you see the same with Brands like fer like these old
00:23:15
brands have exploded Fela is in a good example where it was it became when I was 10 years old re you but if you
00:23:21
bought feler you had no money and you weren cool when I was 20 if you have fer you were the coolest person Burberry had
00:23:28
that as as well they went from being oh if you're if you're wearing bbery you are a bit of a ruy right you're a little
00:23:33
bit rough as a person to this kind of I guess it was a branding exercise where brand bbery then became really cool
00:23:40
again maybe because of part of the term for this is sometimes counter signaling it was a bit like um hipsters drinking
00:23:47
pabs Blue Ribbon ribbon I think it's called Uh which is it was historically down Market Blue Collar American Beer
00:23:54
right okay okay it was down Market of kind of Bud visor and the other you know cause and so forth and this is a really
00:24:01
interesting thing in human behavior sometimes in marketing itself but also in how humans Market themselves because
00:24:07
I I think one of the conclusions we've got to come to and we have to admit and which the better understanding of will
00:24:14
be I think central to understanding um how we solve things like the environmental crisis and indeed overc
00:24:21
consumption is that the human brain itself has quite a large marketing function you know it has an accounting
00:24:26
function it cares about the efficient use of resources it has you know all kinds of kind of algorithms and
00:24:33
heuristics that are kind of in many cases innate and built in but it also has a marketing function it very much
00:24:39
cares about uh image and Status effectively what something you do means
00:24:45
to other people now one thing that is common to lots of animals is signaling
00:24:51
you know the most common example is the peacock's tail elk antlers things you do often costly things you do to
00:24:57
demonstrate that you can do them Ferraris okay um and you know in many Ferraris in London of course you know I
00:25:04
mean the extraordinary thing when you think about it is having a Ferrari in central London is about as deranged A Car Choice as you can imagine okay but
00:25:12
the very fact that it's impractical and ludicrous is almost what gives it meaning okay as I said you know if the
00:25:19
um this is a very mischievous sentence but if people were attracted to people
00:25:24
who drove expensive Vehicles okay then they find Lorry drivers more attractive
00:25:30
than Ferrari owners in many cases because the truck is actually more expensive as a vehicle or a really
00:25:35
Luxury Motor Coach but the motor coach actually has a practical function which diminishes its signaling value because
00:25:42
if you want to show that you really have resources to spare nothing beats waste indiscriminate waste shows that you
00:25:49
really have resources to spare you know or you pursue things that are disproportionately scarce the real
00:25:55
interesting thing with humans though and I don't think there's a case where animals do this is they also practice something called counter
00:26:02
signaling which is showing that you don't have to try because you're confident enough in your other
00:26:07
attributes okay so an example of that would be in Academia a an a professor who's aspiring
00:26:15
to get a let's say a named professorship or tenure will go around in a suit okay
00:26:21
a tenard professor who has job security for life will go around dressed like a [ __ ] you know if you've won Nobel Prize
00:26:29
my hunch is once you've won a Nobel Prize I think famously George stiglets used to actually turn up at the World
00:26:35
Bank with no shoes on okay now interestingly you do that it's a bit like that old joke why do dogs lick
00:26:41
their own balls because they can okay and to some extent people do what they can get away with so you know the the
00:26:48
classic example is you know people who play in very fashionable bands can afford to be extraordinarily scruffy
00:26:55
because what effectively Liam and Noel are saying is that our presence in this
00:27:00
band renders us so unbelievably cool and sexy that we don't even have to make an
00:27:05
effort on the sorial front I've seen this in my own life it's funny just through the Journey of my career in the last 10 years the example I'd give is in
00:27:12
my early career speaking on stage I would try and dress really smart and wear a suit now yeah I think it's much
00:27:18
better that I present myself in the track suit bottom in the tracksuit that I would wear like going around the house
00:27:24
when I speak on stage a because it's more akin to who I am B because I can and see I think the psychological that
00:27:30
I'm not adting because it might make seem like an [ __ ] is it's actually more of a status play to not wear a suit
00:27:36
and to not show off and the same applies for Louis Vuitton like early part of my first five years of my career when I was
00:27:41
just about getting some money I'd buy these designer Brands like Louis Vuitton now I genuinely think if I hold a Louis
00:27:47
Vuitton B bag it makes me look bad so I i' I've like rid myself and when I walk in some I say to my man cuz I've just
00:27:54
got the one left that hasn't managed to break yet I say can you hold that cuz I want to be associated with that level of
00:28:01
signaling if that makes sense I guess no and the argument is that you know you're famous enough now that you no longer
00:28:06
need fashion brands um uh to Accord you know in in
00:28:12
fact the very fact that you were trying um uh given your Fame to actually uh
00:28:19
signal your success through fashion would probably be counterproductive it would stress you insecure or trying too
00:28:25
hard and so that thing of we do what we can get away with to Signal what we're
00:28:30
cap you know what we're capable of so it's a very oblique form of of statea signaling it might be very valuable
00:28:36
environmentally counter signaling might be something you need to harness in other words it's cool you know it's cool
00:28:43
to own less yes because I don't have things I don't have a watch I don't have as I said to you I have an electric bike
00:28:49
which you've just seen like I to be fair I do have a nice Cut um car that they drive me in sometimes but other than that in terms of my own possessions it's
00:28:56
really all about utility and not buying it in excess and I actually think that's a really good point that that can be
00:29:01
leveraged to try and um help the environment which I I think that's happening there's a very interesting
00:29:07
thing happening which is in electric cars and I was speaking to the marketing director of scoda they produced something called the enyak which is
00:29:13
actually it's similar to the Volkswagen id4 but it's very very good electric car and one of the things they're noticing I
00:29:18
migrated from a Jaguar to the Ford Mustang macki um quite a few people on The macki
00:29:24
Forum are actually ex luxury car owners m and quite a few people um the the
00:29:30
scoda marketing director was telling me um that quite a few people who'd gone to the scoda ENC had actually come from for
00:29:37
example Audi Jaguar um fairly premium cars so there is a thing that actually
00:29:42
having the electric car even in a you know a less leather clad you know Walnut
00:29:49
infested form uh that's now the status component it's not the brand of the car
00:29:54
it's the fact that it's electric Tesla's the same I think of Tesla as a big um I don't give a [ __ ] in a weird way I think
00:30:01
it's a big for me it's a um The Journey honestly would be you you get a lamb if
00:30:07
you were insecure and this is what you're into you'd get one of those really fancy Brands and then the next step is saying do you know what I don't
00:30:12
give a [ __ ] which is what you see going on in San Francisco with the billionaires and the CEOs and the VCS
00:30:18
I'm going to be a Tesla person now which is I care more about the environment and other things and I don't really care if you think it's still a premium brand I
00:30:23
mean let's be honest because let's face it any Tesla is probably less than three years old and actually most people don't
00:30:30
buy cars from new ever or only once in their life it's not fancy though but
00:30:35
it's not it's not particularly fancy I mean there's a wonderful piece of Little Alchemy in it of course which is the
00:30:40
invention of the phrase vegan leather oh really if if you think the reason I wrote the book Alchemy is partly to
00:30:47
elevate the status and centrality of marketing in business success that actually what you are is effectively a
00:30:55
product of how you make people feel okay ultimately and that's psychological it's
00:31:00
not technological and therefore if you want to improve how people feel psychology is a better area for
00:31:07
exploration than what you might call rational Improvement don't make the Eurostar faster make the journey more
00:31:13
enjoyable okay put Wi-Fi on the trains serve better food okay it's a cheaper
00:31:19
way actually to compete okay strangely Engineers see it as cheating you see if you have a an engineering or a finance
00:31:26
background you see psychological value is invalid but the vital thing about psychological value is whereas it's very
00:31:32
difficult to perform magic in the world of physics or engineering you can genuinely perform magic in perception
00:31:39
now what is the F what what is the seat covering for the Tesla it's called vegan leather now actually to be honest we
00:31:45
would have called those plastic seats back in the day in my childhood in the 1970s and ' 80s we
00:31:51
G it's got plastic seats okay now I'm sure that vegan leather is better than
00:31:56
the plastic seats which you'd find in a voxal Viva in 1977 okay I'm sure it's
00:32:02
better in all kinds of ways breathability you know cleanliness whatever but nonetheless calling it
00:32:07
vegan leather in other words I'm doing this for the planet rather than plastic
00:32:12
which is in other words what you're doing there is you're making it a choice not a compromise yeah and that's one of
00:32:18
the cleverest reframings you can do an aspirational Choice as indeed so yeah no
00:32:23
and so you know I I ABS you know I look at things like range anxxiety and I get that's psychological okay what's that
00:32:29
okay range anxiety is a big obstacle to electric car purchase oh yeah in the UK in two in two two levels okay one it
00:32:37
prob well three levels one it means that cars tend to compete on their range which in a sense is further emphasizing
00:32:44
a negative to the consumer because if electric car advertising is all about range okay people start to see range as
00:32:51
more of a problem than it is secondly it makes the batteries bigger the cars heavier and more expensive than they
00:32:56
probably need to be so it's interesting because so often I think the obstacles to technology adoption are really
00:33:04
psychological hurdles much more than technological hurdles this is why I think marketing is so fascinating
00:33:10
because there there are these products exactly like Gusto or hellofresh which
00:33:15
once you experience them 50% of people become a convert but the real marketing
00:33:20
challenge is well that's fine that's great but how on Earth do you convert people in the first place and that's a
00:33:26
very interesting case where after the pandemic and this is I think the value I think there's a multiple value to having
00:33:33
occasional disruptions in life one of which is that businesses become much
00:33:39
less risk averse when they're facing a crisis MH it's of necessity is the
00:33:44
mother of invention but consumers also have a narrative for why they're doing
00:33:50
things differently I mean in a way you could if you looked at the whole path of human
00:33:56
history the 19 30s in the United States I.E the decade immediately after the Great Depression was probably the period
00:34:03
of greatest innovation in terms of you know human welfare in everything from
00:34:08
Cars aircraft Etc it was an extraordinary period of innovation and yet it came on the heels of this total
00:34:15
economic disaster and I think there is something there in that idea that um
00:34:20
it's almost like a kneeling when you make a samurai sword you actually bang the thing while it's cooling that
00:34:26
actually um some periods of disruption that some degree of variance and instability in
00:34:34
economies is possibly long-term healthy I mean I I I I I'm a huge Dev more so
00:34:40
than you I I know you've got a very intelligent approach to flexible working which is yeah that's what I wanted to talk about is yeah yeah but but it was
00:34:46
interesting it was interesting that given the fact that the whole promise of
00:34:51
the internet really I mean I think this is in a Douglas Copeland book called microserfs where one of the Geeks
00:34:57
features in this Douglas Copeland book it was written in the '90s I think but he makes a very interesting comment
00:35:03
which is the whole purpose of what you might call Silicon Valley technology is to make location Irrelevant in other
00:35:10
words it's to make where you are irrelevant to the performance of a particular function and by the way there
00:35:16
are negatives to that there were great positives in my childhood to the fact that what you could do was constrained
00:35:22
by where you were so when you left the office you couldn't meaningfully work okay cuz your computer was on a desk you
00:35:29
photocopied in the photocopier room you met in the meeting room you you know you
00:35:35
uh you wrote things at A T at a keyboard where you were determined what you were doing and so a certain Focus arose from
00:35:42
that which I think has been destroyed by the mobile phone to some degree which technically lets you do anything from anywhere I find myself on holiday and
00:35:50
day three worrying about what I'm going to order from a cardo when I get home and I go actually you shouldn't be doing
00:35:57
this another thing it probably does by the way is it encourages us to over plan and I'm a big believer I I've booked a
00:36:03
holiday um in July and August and I'm trying to say to my family no no we're going to land in Chicago we're going to
00:36:10
leave from New York what we do in between those dates we're going to leave open until the very last moment the the
00:36:16
other great problem the internet allows you to do I think with your holiday is to plan it down to a kind of granular
00:36:21
level of detail which is actually anical to having a good time you know a good time often requires spontaneity and you
00:36:29
know my my wife and I discovered New Mexico in just whole American St we knew it existed okay we discovered New Mexico
00:36:36
more or less by accident we were on a driving holiday and we got stuck in El Paso and needed to get somewhere else so
00:36:41
we said well let's try this you know let's L Alamos I've heard about that right okay fairly famous okay let's go
00:36:48
and have a decco absolutely gorgeous State and we've been that back five times we discovered it effectively
00:36:53
through Serendipity so there are downsides to this you can do anything from anywhere but is a bit weird that
00:37:00
you know trillions of dollars invested in the capacity to to obtain effects
00:37:07
remotely hadn't made a dent in the commute all now I'm by the way I'm totally open to people who say entirely
00:37:15
you know okay Airbnb has gone uh effectively remote forever fully remote
00:37:21
forever now bear in mind as a company working as a company the entire company is is going to be 100% remote working
00:37:28
now there are two interesting things going on there one of which is if you're Airbnb and your slogan is be at home
00:37:34
anywhere okay it's it's a bit countercultural to demand that people why weren't you at your desk okay there
00:37:41
may be an element of Henry Ford to it you know that Henry Ford partly created slightly ocal but not entirely created a
00:37:48
two-day weekend for his own workers because he thought if it actually spread then it'll be worth people buying cars
00:37:55
if he could increase the salary for factory work and give people two days of guaranteed Leisure then you had people
00:38:01
who could both afford and make use of a car and with their BNB if you think about it uh they stand to be fairly
00:38:08
major beneficiaries of working from anywhere oh yeah so doing it with their own staff there was a rumor I'm not sure
00:38:16
it's true so for God's sake don't sue me on this there was a famous rumor that unila created uh dress down Fridays okay
00:38:24
and the I to be honest I think it's a conspiracy theory I don't think this happened if it did all credit to them
00:38:30
and the idea was if we could create a social Norm where people went into work in chinos and you know sweatshirts on a
00:38:37
Friday uh we get one extra day of laundry because you dry cleaner suit but
00:38:43
you launder a uh chinos or you launder um you know polish shirt you launder
00:38:48
ordinary white shirts but you launder cotton jackets and you know casual clothes so the argument was it was
00:38:54
actually a laundry maximization Ploy by either PNG or unver not sure that's true
00:39:00
it would be very clever if it were but Henry Ford undoubtedly did write about this that creating leure was part of his
00:39:06
strategy for selling cars now that's interesting because most businesses
00:39:12
nowadays don't have that Vision to say actually we don't necessarily have to
00:39:19
optimize what we do for Imagined static human economic behavior we can actually
00:39:25
change the way people behave we can change what things mean we can change whether something feels cheap or expensive we can make feler a really
00:39:32
cool brand you know and this is why you know I wrote the book Alchemy partly
00:39:37
saying we have a kind of culture in business particularly in the finance function of business which does which
00:39:44
refuses to believe in magic now I'm not saying magic is easy or that everybody can do it all the time it's certainly
00:39:50
not that easy but you shouldn't discount it because there are vegan leather the
00:39:55
Uber map there are magical Solutions out there I had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast what's
00:40:02
this one hule that's hule so do I need to mix it with water or do I just drink
00:40:07
it it's um no no no you wouldn't put it in the water don't put it in the water yeah we'll give you a separate glass if
00:40:14
you want it is a nutritionally complete it's a meal and a drink effectively oh
00:40:21
fantastic this is a this is an interesting brand actually for many of the reasons we've been talking about so
00:40:26
this is the last year the fastest growing e-commerce company internationally and think about
00:40:33
what what what they're doing so H are nutritionally complete convenience um it's basically I think
00:40:39
it's certainly Delicious By the way delicious it's not Nest quick I'll say that so it's not like you know raving
00:40:45
delicious but nor should it be because we wouldn't believe it amen if you made it too tasty we wouldn't believe its
00:40:51
medicinal properties it's exactly like the weird Taste of Red Bull which I was so two lessons are magic is possible in
00:40:59
Psychology even if it isn't in physics and the second lesson is sometimes the opposite of a good idea is
00:41:05
another good idea in Psychology you can actually uh you know there's Dyson and
00:41:10
there's the Henry you know they're both strong vacuum CA brands in entirely
00:41:16
different um uh directions if you like and the point I'm making is that I think
00:41:23
that High School maths encourages us to believe that there's a single optimal answer
00:41:29
uh which comes from resolving a tradeoff and economics economics always
00:41:34
assumes tradeoffs I want to show you this grenade bar it's in the draw down
00:41:39
so this is this shows how what you're saying about that the the Opposites can be two good ideas because this company
00:41:46
run by another one of my friends both these companies run by my friends has taken the complete opposite approach
00:41:51
they are a a protein bar right yeah I've bought them actually tastes amazing tastes as good as a chocolate bar and
00:41:57
I'm I'm going to probably tell a lie here but I believe they are the fastest growing chocolate bar or the most bought
00:42:02
chocolate bar in the UK now they are a protein bar and they focus entirely on
00:42:09
taste and they've just sold to mon delay I think for well I know for several hundred millions so the founder is very
00:42:15
very wealthy now good friend of mine right they went for Taste and they won these have gone for much the opposite
00:42:21
which is really really focused on being nutritionally complete and healthy and I've sat in the it's not repellent it's not absolutely not
00:42:27
quite quite the opposite I would drink this perfectly content but you it it tastes good enough for you to trust it
00:42:33
if it tasted even better I would stop trusting it and having sat in the room with the CEO and the founder we they
00:42:40
brought in these bars that tasted like this what tasted good yeah and there was a small compromise to the nutritionally
00:42:47
complete um um part in these new bars and the founder and the managing
00:42:53
director said no we'd rather have bars that taste worse and protect that nutritionally complete
00:42:59
um sort of philosophy than to have it taste really good an interesting an interesting piece of psychology is that
00:43:05
Diet Coke has to taste slightly more bitter than standard Coke for you to believe it for you to believe it in
00:43:12
other words it's kind of um in other words you have to have that
00:43:17
slight little bit of extra bite because otherwise it does you you it doesn't feel like a diet drink what are you
00:43:23
going to say about Red Bull you were saying about you write a lot about the there's lot about Red Bull because it's this mysterious thing which is so
00:43:29
counterintuitive in that you know it tastes nastier than Coke it costs a lot more than Coke and it comes in a much
00:43:34
smaller can than Coke and part of that is I think it's
00:43:40
not a drink it's a it's a medicine I mean the whole marketing behind it it's it's a drug
00:43:46
it's and actually the promise of psychoactive Powers is delivered much
00:43:51
better by high price and weird taste and small portions you wouldn't really I mean okay to give you an extreme case
00:43:59
there there is a case where they discover that drugs that op
00:44:04
work for relatively minor conditions by which I let let's say as mild asthma
00:44:12
okay also work for certain rare Cancers and apparently when they do this they
00:44:18
exaggerate the side effects because you feel that if it's to be tackling a much
00:44:23
tougher challenge which is cancer you would expect greater side effects I mean
00:44:29
you what you wouldn't want is an oncology treatment which was pineapple flavored and so there's this weird thing
00:44:35
which is you can you can do things which kind of make sense which is we want this to taste as nice as possible and you can
00:44:41
end up being logically wrong rather than illogically right yeah and I think that
00:44:46
distinction is really useful because um I'll give you an example actually nearly
00:44:51
all pharmaceutical companies make the pills as easy to take as possible okay as small as possible
00:44:58
you know and as few needed as possible and so forth and when we heard this both Dan arieli and I who were on I think a
00:45:05
zoom call at the time said oh dear and they said well it's logical you know
00:45:11
we're designing a drug we produce the drug how can we make the drug and we said well when you make something very
00:45:17
small and very easy to take you also make it very forgettable and we actually said there
00:45:22
are you sure we shouldn't add a degree of difficulty should you actually require people to grind the drug up mix
00:45:28
it with water because there are several reasons for that the more effort you put into the preparation of the drug will
00:45:33
probably boost the placebo effect okay uh but the second thing is you'll also
00:45:39
create a ritual which means you'll remember whether or not you've taken it whereas if a pill is literally you know
00:45:44
you have these pills where the biggest problem with treating the condition is not finding the medication it's it's
00:45:50
patient compliance and we said maybe if you had a bit of a Dar ritual around this where
00:45:55
you had to actually grind in the pestel and mortar and add something you'd find much higher levels of compliance and and
00:46:02
a boosted placebo effect as well really interesting that this idea that friction can create create value but it also can
00:46:09
can ingrain something in your routine the other thing that I I I think about a lot sometimes by the way some travel
00:46:14
websites deliberately make the search procedure artificially slow because you value the results more
00:46:21
highly if you've had a screen that says we're now searching EasyJet British Airways Alitalia d
00:46:27
and then 15 seconds later after a load sort of flurry of activity on the screen it delivers you your holiday
00:46:33
results you attach more significance to those results and are more likely to go through and book than if it just goes
00:46:40
bang and gives you an instantaneous result well I think you did a thorough job so I trust you more if I see you've
00:46:45
done you've searched 50 I go okay well I don't need to do that myself then you've looked at them all for me yeah that's
00:46:51
really interesting I now feel scammed well interesting thing is this is the interesting and this is a sort of
00:46:56
philosophic question which is if it makes things feel more
00:47:01
valuable is it a con so okay I mean if you take this whole question of how we
00:47:08
perceive value you could undou you wouldn't disagree with the fact that the nature of a restaurant and how it's
00:47:15
designed or the service adds to the appreciation of food well if it's too quick to deliver me my meal I think they
00:47:20
yeah well that's that's that's a very interesting point yeah if absolutely right um so the way in which the food is
00:47:26
presented it affects your appreciation of the food now my argument is your your job as a business person is to create as
00:47:33
much perceived value as possible and if you okay now I was talking to Jay
00:47:40
Raina the other day and just to be clear on this you cannot create a great restaurant with rubbish food okay yeah
00:47:46
yeah okay that's not going to happen but once you reach what you might call table stakes in terms of food quality the
00:47:52
things that make a restaurant great are often what you might call tangential to
00:47:58
the food or the meal itself magic um or you and it's it's atmosphere Decor you
00:48:03
know theater who the other diners are it can be all manner of different things and so
00:48:10
just as I think you're wrong Running a Restaurant where you say the food is the only thing that matters because you could serve mandard food in a restaurant
00:48:16
that smelled of Wei and nobody would enjoy their meal even though the food was objectively superb um I think the
00:48:23
worst thing you can do in in in both environmental terms and in business terms is to create underappreciated
00:48:30
value is to go to the effort of manufacturing something without actually working out how to allow people to
00:48:36
realize how great it is scarcity in packaging um one of the things that I'm quite I I saw one of my favorite Brands
00:48:43
the other day do a trip around their warehouse showing the warehouse and on
00:48:48
one hand I love seeing the warehouse I love seeing the the craftsmanship that goes into it and then they panned across
00:48:53
to this big Rail and I saw the item that I and I saw like a like thousands of
00:48:59
them and I remember thinking oh [ __ ] and it made me reflect on what Apple do by
00:49:04
just laying out like one of the products on the shop floor and how much how much more that makes me think there's
00:49:09
tremendous value because I just see one iPad and one phone and one watch there is a kind of Genius to that yeah they
00:49:16
will the ancillary products they will show in some sort of bulk won't they and if you're buying Mouse mats or something
00:49:21
they don't mind having 10 of those but the mainstream products there is one of them and the rest of them are kept out
00:49:26
of sight yeah which is very interesting Brands don't do that enough I don't think there is also that interesting
00:49:32
question about the tour of the warehouse which is you know how much do you want to let people in on the reality on the
00:49:38
yeah because it can be like it can kill the magic to to a certain point depending on what's going on in that warehouse it all depends I I went out
00:49:44
and when we were working with laa the famous Italian you know lingerie brand and I flew out to the there were a
00:49:50
client of they flew out to Italy to their warehouses and I I I read the story of golden scissors the original
00:49:56
founder would make all of the lingerie with their hands and golden scissors and I saw these women who all have a another
00:50:02
woman standing over their shoulders ensuring perfection in the garments and my biggest thing to the CEO of luro at
00:50:07
the time was like oh my God you've never told the story of golden figures you've never filmed this process you're now
00:50:13
just competing on the High Street against um these sort of uh cheaper
00:50:18
lingerie Brands who are selling at 30s you're selling at 150 and no one knows why no cuz you just haven't told you've
00:50:25
not sort of it's what you said L as a fairly insubstantial product so it's not if you're getting sees it this is the no
00:50:31
so no one sees the craftsmanship I had no awareness of that either there you go and isn't that and I tell you what
00:50:36
happened to laa they went bust and and and when I got when I seen in Italy just
00:50:42
the unbelievable the fact that all of the people hand so they never told that story they never told the story on a
00:50:48
slightly more praic basis I always every time I meet KFC I always tell them to
00:50:54
tell people that Colonel Saunders effectively founded KFC when he was 65 years old you know he had a a convoluted
00:51:01
career but he had spent about eight years perfecting this recipe for chicken and it's an extraordinary story you know
00:51:07
the fact that a multinational corporation was created by someone in there basically at retirement age and my
00:51:13
argument is I can't explain entirely why but it just makes me think of the thing differently knowing the knowing the
00:51:19
foundational story behind it can I tell you a really secret a really easy way I found to do exactly that to instill any
00:51:25
product with a apparent sense of huge value in historic like story is just by naming it after a person so if if I
00:51:33
named if I name if I have salad if I have Italian uh spaghetti sauce which I've just made in a factory and I called
00:51:39
it I don't know la la Bellis yeah you immediately think of a family history that must have been attached to that
00:51:45
product and and years and years of iteration from this family and it was so good that people now Buy on mass and
00:51:50
Tesco and I think that's that for me is such an interesting example where just by calling it after someone who sounds a
00:51:56
Italian yeah implants this whole you know this this story of Heritage what do
00:52:02
you think about personalization and when I say personalization I really mean this the surface level personalization of
00:52:08
tickling someone's ego by yeah I always talk about Starbucks them just writing your name on the side of the cup or the
00:52:13
Sher a coat campaign where they put your name on a that was us actually that was in Australia who instigated that
00:52:19
brilliant idea but um um it's very interesting personalization because it's one of those things you have to be very
00:52:25
judicious about you know it can be spooky okay and you know there are
00:52:30
companies that get it worryingly wrong uh by essentially uh playing back to
00:52:36
people things that they shouldn't know or didn't need to know I've had that and so it's often one of those things which
00:52:42
I think is interesting because it's best done obliquely spooky example give so if you know something about someone in a
00:52:47
personalized letter you say uh you know uh you may be the kind of person who recently did this rather than saying you
00:52:54
did this and it can it can be spooky and it's one of those very interesting things where knowing how to play it uh
00:53:01
is um uh really really critical I'm going to give you an example where I think someone played it wrong because I was thinking about yeah so one of the
00:53:07
this is maybe slightly different but um I went I I registered for a gym on the other side of the world I won't say the
00:53:13
country because they might listen on the other side of the world right and 30 or 40 minutes after registering for the gym
00:53:19
I got an email from the CEO saying hi Steve I've just seen you've registered for our gym um if there's anything I can
00:53:26
do while while you're in town please let me know blah blah blah blah blah now on one hand people might think that's that's great and that's lovely of them
00:53:32
to do but I don't know how that individual got my details so I gave it to an iPad on the front desk to a nice
00:53:38
Indonesian lady right and then the CEO who's a British person is clearly what else did they see of my details did they
00:53:45
see my my password did they see my bank details so it just kind of it hurt me it
00:53:50
I was a bit shook by it I was like how in 35 minutes since I put that details into the iPad has the CEO in the UK
00:53:55
emailed me email not just has emailed my manager and then I'll give you a good example which is I flew to India I got
00:54:02
to a a hotel in India and as I went into the room they had a chocolate Taj Mahal and they had my company logo social
00:54:07
chain and a small rice paper sticker on the the thing and I thought that that made me feel special yeah one of them
00:54:14
made me feel like they'd invaded my privacy a little bit and the other one had made me feel really special and I took my phone out and I do loads of Instagrams about this hotel and this Taj
00:54:21
Mahal rice paper sticker that cost $2 so you're right there is a fine line there and you can I mean it's very interesting
00:54:27
because there's all you've also got to be very very alert to cultural differences so that Germans have a
00:54:32
paranoia about data protection and privacy uh which is an order of magnitude greater than that you find in
00:54:38
say the US where I think most people in the US kind of have the mentality that the horse is already bolted it's too
00:54:44
late everybody already knows all this stuff so leaving aside things like medical data and stuff that is you know
00:54:51
naturally expected to remain secret um it's CU I thought with a machine it's funny cuz when you put your details into
00:54:57
computers and like login forms and registration you assume they're going into some Vault it never occurred to me
00:55:02
that that now because you'd self inputed it yeah um you'd assumed that effectively it was Anonymous yes and it
00:55:09
was going into some vault in a computer yeah that was encrypted and secure so to get an email 35 I go well these people
00:55:16
saying all my dat got my phone number he's got my passwords and that was just felt like a bit and what's interesting
00:55:21
is you you you found it unpleasant another person otherwise demographically identical to you would be cool with it
00:55:27
yeah they put thought it was great customer service generally it's probably it's probably a caution that people who
00:55:32
work in marketing are less um likely to be
00:55:39
sensitized to positive possible negative interpretations of what they're doing sure because people who work in
00:55:45
marketing are high on openness I'll give you a lovely example of this which I I better not name the client but it was
00:55:50
simply there was a special offer by a credit card company and uh the envelope sent out
00:55:59
just said final reminder in red because the offer was about to expire okay and
00:56:05
we thought it was you know reasonably cute you're going to open a letter with final reminder on it and it'll tell you that you've only got 10 days left to
00:56:10
enjoy this particular discount and a significant minority of
00:56:15
people went bananas with this and the reason was do you know what they said
00:56:21
that to a Londoner this is incomprehensible okay if you live in London or you live in a large city my
00:56:26
Postman thinks I don't pay my bills because they'd received a letter with final reminder on the outside of the
00:56:32
envelope now most people in London don't really know their postmen and they certainly wouldn't worry about their
00:56:37
postmen going around and gossiping about them because in a place like London there's a l of anonymity if you live in
00:56:43
a small Country Village totally different matter because the postman drinks at the same Pub as your friends oh yeah of course and that's one of
00:56:49
those cases where no nobody working on the thing had had any consideration
00:56:54
because londoners wouldn't be bothered by by that equally as someone who shares a doormat with five other people might
00:57:00
be bothered by that let me give you let me I want to get some real um some advice from you then so I'm I'm
00:57:06
launching a uh a brand soon and it's an apparel brand and we've been working
00:57:11
very hard on it over the last year or so maybe a bit too hard on it when when it comes to delivering that apparel brand to the world and making it um It's
00:57:18
actually an extension of this podcast it's called doac D CEO um what advice
00:57:23
would you give me as it relates to delivering that product to the world to make sure that it is inherently valuable
00:57:28
and that people you know uh one one piece of advice in any form of uh etail
00:57:34
two two forms of advice actually uh the two M and by the way I think marketers
00:57:40
spent too much time focusing on the addition of positives when a lot of time needs to be spent on the removal of
00:57:47
negatives uh one thing is answer the phone okay and do not hide your phone
00:57:54
number I I that so what seems to happen in most e-commerce is you have what you
00:58:01
might call the sales area which is everything that happens up to and
00:58:07
including a point of purchase and everything there is glorious and attractive and you know and
00:58:14
Slick okay assuming by the way you don't have a weird question to
00:58:20
ask um but I would argue one um what then happens is if something goes wrong
00:58:26
with your experience either the delivery of the experience or you need to cancel something as soon as you deviate from
00:58:33
that very narrowly preconceived sort of purchase funnel you enter a world of pain okay and the two things which are I
00:58:41
think grossly under underinvested in uh in terms of e-commerce are one giving
00:58:47
what what tends to happen is once once the marketing job is done because the person has clicked
00:58:53
by the responsibility for that customer is now hand it over to people whose metrics are anything but customer
00:58:59
satisfaction their cost reduction how can we make sure that nobody phones us up how can we make sure that every phone
00:59:04
call is as brief as is feasibly possible and how can we minimize the cost of delivery and distribution now one of the
00:59:11
things I think is a grotesque mistake that most e-commerce providers make not all of them but many is not offering you
00:59:17
a choice of delivery couriers for example okay now I know why they do that
00:59:23
they want to put everything through one delivery Courier so can maximize their rebate through through volume economies
00:59:29
of scale actually I think I you know I think many me two two problems happen there one if you don't get to choose how
00:59:36
your item is delivered if anything goes wrong you blame the company you don't blame the delivery company or yourself
00:59:41
if I had chosen to have it delivered by Royal Mail and it went missing I blame Royal Mail if they insist that I have it
00:59:48
delivered by you know without singling out UPS dpd whatever and it goes wrong I blame them MH um secondly you know
00:59:56
people have various preferences you know uh your liking for ivery used to be
01:00:01
called um uh Hermes okay varies enormously depending on which postcode
01:00:06
District you're in because if you have a very good local driver it's incredibly good and if your local driver's off sick
01:00:12
it's a disaster in some cases okay um and by not not respecting the the fact
01:00:19
that the person is paying for the delivery should choose who delivers it yeah yeah strikes me as a fundamental failing the business of hiding the phone
01:00:26
number so that anybody who has a problem is effectively treated like a second class citizen so you have this very
01:00:32
characteristic thing which I think is a problem with e-commerce which is when it goes well it's miraculously good okay
01:00:40
but the second anything out of the ordinary happens you enter a world of pain you know um and I think that is
01:00:48
that's a fundamental failing this is a customer service point the importance of customer service right a few people I
01:00:53
mean selfes do selfes do it pretty well okay um other things I do is I would offer a
01:00:58
kind of Amazon Prime equivalent where if you pay a few pounds for delivery you get free delivery for a year that seems
01:01:04
to be a you know fairly obvious and brilliant idea because why should loyal customers pay you know inordinately more
01:01:10
for you know delivery than one off customers do um I think you know I I think you can
01:01:17
make an effort around how the thing is delivered and packaged and presented which some people do well and some
01:01:22
people don't bother to do at all what do you think the secret is there to doing a good job with pack um possibly there's a little bit of
01:01:28
costly signaling involved I mean if you order something from selfridges um the
01:01:33
uh inside of the box is actually yellow with the self's logo on a kind of shiny
01:01:39
backdrop and there's a little bit of tissue paper okay so you're never left
01:01:44
um that will have a halo effect on your perceived value of the product by the way you I know we don't like it but
01:01:51
actually packaging is to some extent packaging is where a product first becomes a brand
01:01:57
it's where it first takes on a personality an identity uh you know
01:02:02
um you know a kind of an implied target audience and so in in this thing now the
01:02:09
interesting thing is how are you going to uh what's your stick do you have for
01:02:14
example scarcity is the clothing available in a limited so limited runs we we actually we actually sold some
01:02:20
before when I did a tour of the UK and you had to come to the tour to buy it and every single night on the tour we did nine nine nights three nights at the
01:02:26
London plaum took it up in another country it sold out every single night every single item to the point that we sold the ones on our backs yeah and well
01:02:32
gave them away but um every single item sold out in every single size on the tour so this is like the second drop of it everyone's well aware that the first
01:02:40
the first run of it all sold out um we have a very limited line uh we have a
01:02:46
limited amount of items again this time and I think the key thing with this um
01:02:51
release is we've just agonized over the story of the piece so it's like it really looks more like art than it does
01:02:57
clothing and we've worked with artists and there's this big movie that I'm releasing with every single item to explain the meaning of the piece and
01:03:03
then we've put a lot of effort into the packaging the bo unboxing experience so it is limited it will honestly probably
01:03:09
sell out in the first day and um I don't even think we're going to make money from it but that's not really why I do
01:03:14
it it's more because I just love the I love the process but um probably will you probably will make money I mean
01:03:21
merch is um I'm just really not bothered by making money from it it's not the thing in my life I same with a tour like
01:03:27
I spent every penny I could on on the bloody tour because it wasn't really why I was doing it there's probably more of a br a wider brand play yes to doing it
01:03:35
which is like it's it's bringing our audience closer to us so it's maybe a lost leader in terms of the financials
01:03:41
but in the broader engagement to no I mean this is this is actually the great curse of a lot of modern business given
01:03:47
the title of your um podcast which is that people generally over obsess about
01:03:54
things which are immediately quantifiable and
01:04:03
underinvestment or loyalty of course I mean it's worth noting that customer loyalty is much much slower to measure
01:04:11
than for example conversion yeah and so the extent that money is invested in Performance Marketing or the bottom of
01:04:17
the funnel relative to let's say wider brand Fame yeah uh it's a widespread problem in the whole business World
01:04:24
which is that the money isn't necessarily being spent in in the in the channels it is because it's more
01:04:31
effective there but simply because it's more it's easier to prove that it has an
01:04:36
effect the truth of the matter is the world will always be too uncertain for us to know who our customers are in
01:04:42
advance and therefore since you know 97% of the potential customer base aren't in
01:04:48
Market at any given time and therefore won't being covered by search or you
01:04:53
know uh remarketing or whatever spending money on the 97% of people in
01:04:59
advance ahead of times is still a very effective thing to do the reason people
01:05:04
do too little of it is that it's hard to quantify on that particular point then having worked in the advertising
01:05:10
industry this is a conversation we have all the time with clients which is you'll meet a certain type of client who is very uh who who's they're religious
01:05:17
about the bottom of the funnel they're if it if I can't track it and I don't know exact I won't do it then you'll
01:05:23
sometimes meet the opposite which is who just loves to spend on brand and I don't
01:05:28
NE they're both wrong I don't think they yeah I mean I mean Mark riten very good marketing Professor always talks about
01:05:34
the importance of both ISM and he says it's vitally important that when I actually speak about the importance of
01:05:39
brand marketing that you do not interpret this as denigrating digital marketing in fact I go a bit further and
01:05:46
say the bottom of the funnel in many respects is the thing you have to optimize first because there's no point in
01:05:52
actually uh if there's a a bottleneck at the bottom of the funnel if there's some constraint or a problem or a failing uh
01:05:59
you know if you have very poor conversion okay there's no point in spending money on Advertising because you'll just introduce more people to a
01:06:05
disappointing experience you're wasting money so youve got to get the back end and I would argue the first thing in
01:06:10
theory you should optimize if you're being an absolute purist is repeat purchase um because having gone through
01:06:16
the expense to acquire these customers and actually that's the that's the metric that always fascinates me because
01:06:22
we were talking earlier about electric cars and I said the question about Electric carss isn't how many people are buying them okay it's not what
01:06:28
percentage of the new car market in the UK in July were plug-in
01:06:33
Vehicles now only question worth asking really in the long term is does anybody
01:06:39
who buys an electric car go back to buying a gasoline car because if the answer to that is
01:06:45
hardly anybody then okay you don't know the exact shape of the S curve but you know the growth is going to be pretty
01:06:51
spectacular and so the thing to understand I think in a market is to what extent does your uh product
01:06:57
actually convert someone to something and then the lifetime value so You' start with repeat purchase then you go
01:07:03
to conversion and then you'd work your way up but what tends to happen is that when people are OBS are obsessed with
01:07:11
quantification of everything okay it's worth noting by the way that all big data comes from the same place the past
01:07:18
all right so there's a limit to how much big data particularly if you've had some major event like a pandemic in between
01:07:25
how much big data can actually tell you about the future in any case um as David Ogie famously said you're not
01:07:31
advertising to a standing army you're advertising to a moving parade people are coming in and out of Market all the
01:07:37
time um and so uh you're absolutely right you get some people who are just Fame junkies and by the way I suppose
01:07:44
there are brand categories where that's appropriate if it's sold through retailers you know in other words if
01:07:49
it's mostly sold in the physical space you might you know you might argue to an extent you know for let's say a burger
01:07:55
or McDonald's that's not a totally crazy position although it is now because suddenly they got to think about
01:08:01
delivery and and whether people order through the app or order through an intermediary because it has a major
01:08:06
bearing on their business but but at the same time yeah I mean the tragedy is
01:08:12
this idea of this false dichotomy between brand advertising and what you might call Performance or digital
01:08:18
marketing as if you have to be in one camp or the other where is the balance though and how does one go about is it
01:08:24
just in is it just there are figures on this so if you look at the work of um
01:08:30
Les Benet for example and Peter field uh the ratio shifts a little bit but
01:08:36
generally they'll stipulate a figure around about the 6040 Mark in favor of
01:08:42
what you might call Brand mass media uh expenditure because they have a a
01:08:48
mutually beneficial relationship top of the makes the the first 20 years of my life I spent in direct marketing and
01:08:54
actually you know because direct marketing was unfashionable we spent a lot of time denigrating advertising
01:08:59
spend because they got much bigger budgets than us not necessarily rightly but they were also you know much more
01:09:06
indulged than we were because they didn't have to prove Effectiveness down to the same sort of level of statistical
01:09:13
significance but we came to realize pretty quickly that actually um first of all there's nothing harder than direct
01:09:19
marketing a product that nobody's ever heard of yeah and that every time just to give an example every time American
01:09:24
Express went on television or advertised big in mass media uh the response rates
01:09:30
to direct mail would not quite double maybe but they increased pretty significantly you had to work less hard
01:09:37
and you had to work it's that wonderful phrase which comes from a book by uh let me get his job right uh his his his name
01:09:44
right um I think it's Matt Johnson who's just written a book called um uh brands that
01:09:50
mean business and his wonderful line is having a great brand means you get to play the game of capital m in Easy Mode
01:09:57
yeah so true and that's and what what is true is is Fame to some extent brings a
01:10:03
load of benefits which aren't necessarily sales related so for example you can [ __ ] up and your customers will
01:10:09
be more forgiving okay uh take the example of Apple I mean on a couple of occasions Apple has produced products
01:10:17
which had Fairly major flaws which might have proved pretty fatal to lesser
01:10:23
Brands you know the famous f where if you held it in the wrong way it didn't make phone calls for example and um
01:10:30
given the reality Distortion field around the Apple brand people have passed over those incredibly rapidly and
01:10:36
so there you know people are less price sensitive that's not easy to measure by the way as well it's very easy to
01:10:43
measure the the extent to which something has an effect on sales but the effect to which something has an effect
01:10:48
on price elasticity and the extent to which you can command a premium because it's a great brand because it's a great
01:10:54
brand is harder to measure because you don't have the counterfactual you know when you sell something the counterfactual is that you
01:11:01
assume that you wouldn't have sold it otherwise but if you sell something for a high
01:11:06
price you can't in fact determine that without your advertising you wouldn't have sold it yeah for you know for that
01:11:13
for that premium price so it's it's to some extent this quest for perfect
01:11:18
measurement to to reduce marketing to a kind of Newtonian physics is a bit of a false god Fame you about Fame there Fame
01:11:26
can also be applied in the topic of personal branding as well obviously social media has allowed us all now to
01:11:31
build our personal Brands you've got the Gary Vaya Chucks of the world who have built you know you know their companies
01:11:36
are famous because they've they've branded a person at Ogie and within your
01:11:41
sort of your your marketing what kind of shift have you seen in the desire for people to become Brands themselves and
01:11:47
how valuable do you think that is I think advertising always had those
01:11:53
personal Brands and if anything it's slightly diminished actually really um
01:11:58
uh campaign magazine always did a very good job of you know making sure there
01:12:03
were 30 or 40 sort of famous names within the within the business that that
01:12:09
just happens in a different medium now right it happens on LinkedIn with yes I I agree I mean you know so I mean one of
01:12:15
the greatest things for example there's a wonderful wonderful guy who now must be I don't want to name his age but you
01:12:21
know his you know past retirement age called Dave Trot you probably know okay uh he'd be a brilliant interview by the
01:12:27
way on the show absolutely fantastic but what has been absolutely fantastic is that um uh you know he's a glorious
01:12:35
advertising mind I mean just an absolute ornament to the industry and he through Twitter and through uh
01:12:42
blogging has had a completely new lease of life and influence to a completely new generation of people um and has been
01:12:50
you know hugely valuable as a teacher what's interesting about that actually is that of course uh he does that
01:12:57
unpaid and one of the things that is complicated about this new world okay you know the most valuable thing I often
01:13:04
do in the course of a working week is either to give something away or to put somebody in touch with something else
01:13:11
neither of which you know that kind of barter um neither of those things is in
01:13:17
any way monetizable is it well reciprocity would say otherwise I know I suppose you've just got to rely on a
01:13:22
high degree of reciprocity in some respect I mean it always it always bothers me about this which is that we're in a business advertising which is
01:13:29
paid by the hour which is a terrible way to pay for ideas yeah because the value of something has no relation to the time
01:13:37
uh devoted to its Inception and um it it is genuine I mean you know I
01:13:44
always joke about this the most valuable thing I probably did was almost accidentally my working life which was to go to the government's behavioral
01:13:50
insights team and as a sort of fanatical Vapor I'd been a longtime smoker and had
01:13:56
a been able to quit for the first time successfully by switching to vaping it took me a little while but once I'd made
01:14:02
the switch I've never gone back um and I went to the government's
01:14:07
behavioral insights team and I said look um these things are coming over from both Japan and the United States they're
01:14:12
electronic cigarettes I think there are two things you need to be alert to in Psychology one of which is that um
01:14:19
because they actually replicate the habit of smoking not just the nicotine uh they are a major kind of what you
01:14:26
might call a gateway drug act they're a major source of harm reduction at the very least uh it may help people to quit
01:14:33
uh at the very least it'll help people to shift to something a much less harmful delivery device versus patches
01:14:38
versus patches and guns and things like that which didn't replicate the behavior and then the second thing I said is the
01:14:44
second thing you got to be alert to is that because of peculiar human psychology half the people in the what
01:14:50
you might call the health and anti-smoking Lobby will be fanatical about banning electronic
01:14:56
cigarettes and all credited them the behavioral insights team um under a guy called David halpen I think they went to
01:15:02
the Cameron government and said favor here can we have a light touch on vaping regulation please and you know various
01:15:10
parts of the EU have gone for much stricter regulation there were some countries which were more or less Banning it the US has banned jeel for
01:15:17
some reason bizarre on that on that point of personal branding though do do you think building a personal brand is
01:15:22
important yeah um it's very interesting I mean you have a personal brand whether you like it or not but that's one really
01:15:28
important point about branding which is that everybody you know and and that's
01:15:33
by the way why I think marketing is so important because it's not the brand is not the heated steering wheel of the
01:15:39
marketing world you know the optional extra that you can do without but is quite nice to have people are going to
01:15:45
perceive you in some way regardless of anything you do okay they're going to
01:15:50
form an impression of you they're going to form an impression of what you're worth what kind of business you are um
01:15:56
you know and they will use all manner of kind of inferences and heuristics to arrive at this
01:16:02
conclusion and in many ways I suppose this is why I argue that marketing isn't an optional extra it's an essential
01:16:08
because the worst thing you can do is build a great product and fail to
01:16:14
present it in a way that is convincing appealing attractive or which confers
01:16:20
status on its users and the same applies for your personal brand and the same yeah the same you're going to have a
01:16:25
personal brand whether you like it or not so you might as well try and have a good one I think it probably is true to
01:16:31
say that the personal brand requires sacrifice you know that old that old saying that strategy is the art of
01:16:38
sacrifice but way not totally true I think there are win-wins you know what is the sacrifice of a penel brand but
01:16:45
well I I suspect you don't need to suspect you
01:16:50
got a personal brand yeah you you have to have weaknesses as well as strengths now interesting ly for example one of
01:16:56
the things that will be part of my personal brand is I I'm not a CEO I have no aspiration to be a CEO and I know
01:17:02
enough about myself to know I would not be good at that job okay there are certain forms of uh of ambition and
01:17:09
aspiration which you know constant with with a personal brand that I have uh are
01:17:14
basically there avenues that are closed to me I'm not very good at Administration I'm very bad at making
01:17:20
difficult decisions self-awareness is a personal brand strength yeah I suppose but I'm I'm know I'd be useful I'd be
01:17:25
useful at making oblique or unusual suggestions I'd be useful at getting
01:17:31
people to consider the same thing in five different ways or uh promoting a counterintuitive thought I might be
01:17:37
useful at suggesting somebody you know you I've got fairly good personal roller deex you know before you run off and do
01:17:43
this on your own why don't you talk to this guy at this University who's been studying this for the last 15 years when
01:17:49
you think about why you were successful in your career and why you know you're very very well known in the industry and
01:17:55
people speak very highly of you why in hindsight do you think as you look back and connect those dots you were
01:18:01
successful um I think um and by the way this is also an argument for you know
01:18:08
ethnic cognitive all kinds of diversity I really really love the Avatar and
01:18:13
marketing industry I think it's a source of endless Fascination I think it's much much more economically important uh than
01:18:21
is recognized uh in the contribution it makes to uh Innovation to progress uh to
01:18:28
human flourishing actually uh so I tend to take a fairly positive take the only
01:18:33
the only thing I'd say is I've always had half one foot out of the industry I
01:18:39
haven't entirely bought in you know I never I I half bought into the awards
01:18:45
culture let's say but retained a degree of skepticism you know I half buy
01:18:51
into purpose but but you in other words haven't become ideological about
01:18:57
anything to some extent I'm ideological about not being ideological um you know human psychology
01:19:04
is immensely complicated okay even at the level of the individual at the level of individuals interacting with other
01:19:11
individuals it is immensely complicated I don't think it's something you can generally pronounce confidently about
01:19:18
all you can do is start by asking better questions and perform better experiments I think and I think that's to some
01:19:25
extent why entrepreneurs are so essential uh in Innovation bit of it a bit of it is the
01:19:32
one disadvantage big companies have in innovating is that it's very difficult to get the timing right and if you think
01:19:38
about it while one big company has one shot at an idea 15 entrepreneurs will
01:19:45
launch at 15 different times and one of them will get the timing right just by the law of averages okay so the timing
01:19:51
is one issue but the other issue is that maybe the really Innovative product
01:19:58
require some component of nonsense I don't mean nonsense but I mean nonsense
01:20:04
you know there's a degree of uh either sort of counterintuitive or seemingly
01:20:10
illogical quality to them I want to know about you though okay why you were successful so you said that sort of
01:20:18
unconven maintaining unconventional thinking and it even actually struck me because when you said you went to this bug convention giving yourself another
01:20:25
point of reference to inspire creativity or out of the box out of the industry thinking is quite clearly a huge
01:20:30
Advantage yeah c i curiosity is probably the kind of table stakes in in this business if you're generally curious
01:20:37
what about what else about you though um I can I has it a guess I'm quite okay
01:20:43
I'm quite good at the Spiel you I'm quite good at my feet which I don't know where that came from uh you know growing
01:20:49
up in Wales is a bit of a bonus the Spiel what you mean well you you grew up in Plymouth okay okay yeah
01:20:55
now without without disparaging people in the southeast of England okay in the west of England and in the Celtic
01:21:02
Fringe people talk not just to convey information but to prove they're good at
01:21:08
talking there's a kind of musical quality to Celtic Irish Welsh conversation which is it's a form of
01:21:16
kind of regardless of the actual information it contains people enjoy seeing it done really well why do they
01:21:23
why do you think people enjoy hearing talk because I would agree I think that you're a very very good talker oh one
01:21:29
thing um by the way which Nim Talib very interesting on this Nim Talib always
01:21:34
says you should Mumble or you should speak very fast and his argument is that
01:21:39
if you make it slightly difficult for people to comprehend what you're saying either by speaking very fast or by
01:21:45
speaking slightly indistinctly they pay more attention to what you're saying I think I think there's an interesting
01:21:50
thing just from hearing you speak today where um you you're actually you're a very engaging speaker because when you
01:21:56
introduce a point you introduce it with a compelling slightly ambiguous story so even you'll you'll start it with that
01:22:04
and then the next sentence leads me up to you're almost making me a promise that of of what you're going to reveal
01:22:09
to me in that story and then you deliver upon that Promise by telling me a story
01:22:15
and certain I have I see it a lot with people when they're speaking and also there's other things like your tonal fluctuations so if you and also your use
01:22:21
of pausing but your tonal fluctuations actually do keep maybe a Welsh thing by the way I don't have a Welsh accent but
01:22:27
some people have said I I've kind of got Welsh intonation I've sat here with authors before and they they're so smart
01:22:33
but honestly I just can't I can't stay with them because it's always like this the whole to of the conversation is like
01:22:38
this so you just really it's F really you know what I mean yeah and it's just that it's so but you yeah see you can't
01:22:44
you can't accuse the Welsh of not adding a little bit of musicality to uh it's just interesting when you look back in
01:22:49
hindsight because I genuinely believe having spoken to you today your delivery of ideas and stories and it's funny that
01:22:55
I even use use of the word stories is such a huge part of why you've been able
01:23:00
to rise above the crop and I actually think about it with myself it's it's it's all good having talent and genius
01:23:06
and smarts which you have and a lot of people have but then the ability to liquate it and articulate it in a way
01:23:11
that's captivating I think stories are the PDF files of human information okay
01:23:17
so they're they're the vehicle we use for storing information and the vehicle we use for sharing it it's a universal
01:23:23
format like the f file you know it doesn't matter what Hardware the recipient's got they can read the file
01:23:29
okay you just did it again okay so you said you introduced a really compelling idea that I'd never heard before I think they are the PDF file of human
01:23:35
information I like what and then you have me and by a lot of people don't do that a lot of people don't introduce the
01:23:41
first concept in the sentence as being something slightly ambiguous and unusual which inspires curiosity via engagement
01:23:49
so it's it's an interesting it's probably a habit that you have but I think it's a very useful one if for people to try and learn so class IST at
01:23:54
University whether I learned it a bit uh I mean doing I'm a big fan of Classics in schools by the way because I think
01:24:01
first of all I don't think you can actually decide as an English speaker which language you should learn in advance so learning a language which
01:24:08
allows you to learn other languages more quickly may not maybe the best approach for modern languages ironically is to
01:24:15
teach dead languages I German might be an alternative because that at least teaches you how language sort of works
01:24:21
um didn't you say something actually in this book about this about how making something ambiguous is actually
01:24:27
sometimes more effective because yes the the idea that Trump was quite a valuable deterrent I'm not sure that they would
01:24:34
have invaded the Ukraine if Trump had still been president because uh this is this comes down to the realm of Game
01:24:40
Theory which is that being irrational uh in some senses is is
01:24:45
actually an intelligent strategy because no one's quite sure what you're going to do in response yeah that the that once
01:24:51
you're rational you're predictable and once you're predictable you can be hacked and so having some element of
01:24:58
this is where probably the need for human temper and anger arises you see if you had someone who would never lose
01:25:05
their temper and lash out even at some risk to their own safety okay you could
01:25:11
dick around with them almost endlessly couldn't you if you had someone who is 100% docile and would just roll with all
01:25:18
the punches and would never lose it and would never retaliate simply because it wasn't rational to retaliate against say
01:25:25
unsuitable odds I mean there probably were people like that but they didn't have many descendants I think from a
01:25:31
darwinian point of view no you're right and actually entirely rational people wouldn't have spawned many descendants
01:25:37
because their behavior would have been too predictable it been very easy to trap them I just think there's a broader
01:25:42
Point here which in which is it's I mean it's Central to advertising as well which is people Overlook the importance
01:25:47
of communication hugely in in in overall outcomes and even when I sit here with
01:25:54
people that can speak well and tell stories well and convey ideas well I don't even think half the time they realize that that's such a huge part of
01:26:00
their Brilliance over the course of a lifetime imagine imagine the opportunities you'll create the ability
01:26:06
to sell yourself the ability to push your ideas forward whether they're right or wrong the ability to inspire others
01:26:11
and I I honestly think I well actually one of the things that's most painful to me about watching The Dragon's Den is
01:26:18
now I I occasionally watch Shark Tank or whatever the American equivalent okay now Americans have this tradition of
01:26:23
show tell don't they where even when you're at primary school you have to go up and give a talk about something MH
01:26:29
and generally I find most Americans are pretty good at you know at giving an
01:26:37
account of something 100% And one of the painful things about the Brits on Dragon's Den is sometimes I can see the
01:26:44
people have actually what is a pretty good idea but they're telling the story from like the wrong end of the telescope
01:26:49
completely I'm I'm going this is this is actually painful to me because you have this fantastic idea now you know okay
01:26:58
this is okay slightly unethical but in a few cases I just go look if you just
01:27:03
invent a story about how you came up with this okay now apparently the whole eBay story about pezes was never really
01:27:11
true you know that his girlfriend wanted to trade pezes but they felt they needed a foundation myth for how eBay got
01:27:17
started you know and you I I bet I wonder if it's actually true that that Uber came up with a map when
01:27:24
I see it all the time in the see these wonderful stories come up just come up with a you know you know a great story
01:27:32
but also the way in which they um the their ability to generate perceived
01:27:39
value through narrative um is their greatest weakness and I I I'm watching this I'm get this
01:27:46
is just painful you know I mean actually schools should be teaching this yeah that's what I'm saying should I mean how
01:27:52
it leads you to worry you know are there people out there and by the way I'm sure this is you know this is true there are
01:27:59
there must have been people out there who had extraordinary inventive skills whose complete lack of marketing skills
01:28:07
effectively meant they died in obscurity just even their complete lack of simple communication skills yeah like not even
01:28:12
Mar marketing is maybe step two but just being able to tell someone else like an investor or a potential co-founder about
01:28:20
their ideas in an inspiring way that will Galvanize them and get them in to join the mission yeah I I I honestly I
01:28:26
think the most important skill in the world that that you could you know give gift to a child or anyone is just the
01:28:32
ability to uh communicate effectively tell stories and what which is ultimately what we call sales yeah and
01:28:37
you do it when you're meeting a girl in a nightclub or whether you're inspiring employees or investors or you're building a personal brand or you're
01:28:43
talking to customers the ability to understand how to keep people um well I got an idea I want to propose to the
01:28:50
government that I mean I think that if we take Mar thinking and alchemical
01:28:55
thinking we can also deploy it within politics and government and and um uh
01:29:01
public sector decision making you know I think the NHS could
01:29:06
actually create massively greater patient Satisfaction by deploying certain you
01:29:12
know behaviors and techniques just for their meaning not for their objective medical value
01:29:18
okay but um like what well I
01:29:25
I'll give one example I think you could actually reframe waiting time for an operation in some cases as preparation
01:29:30
for the operation so if that time can be put to good use actually losing weight in my case if I ever I had to have
01:29:36
invasive surgery okay if they said okay the operation's in six weeks that means you've got six weeks to lose so many
01:29:42
Stone and this is how we're going to do it and so the time is actually spent improving the odds of the operation rather than just waiting secondly you
01:29:49
could probably borrow a tip from Uber and you could continually remind them of of the date remind them of Milestones so
01:29:56
they didn't feel that part of the reason they're terrified of it being six weeks away is because they think it's going to shift by another six weeks you know it's
01:30:04
a bit like there's a very big difference between waiting for a pastel to arrive which you can track and waiting for a
01:30:10
pastel to arrive that you can't track yeah so you know making making things sort of trackable in some sense to
01:30:16
reassure people I think there are a lot of psychological uh things you know just as actually Dume ingeniously if you have
01:30:23
to Q for Dum they come out and make you chai okay and they serve chai to the
01:30:28
waiting Q now that's very clever because that act of generosity inspires reciprocation so you're much less likely
01:30:35
to quit the queue I think another one i' do is i' I'd reduce student loans
01:30:41
significantly if people had worked for one or two years before they went to University I think that I think that
01:30:47
could be a major major game Cher because at the moment why why would you do okay
01:30:52
right what what happened okay this is one of those invisible effects which nobody notices when I went
01:30:59
to University in 1984 okay okay you know I I had a private education not a you know very
01:31:05
good one actually and I I I went to Cambridge in 1984 Okay then if you had a
01:31:11
degree from let's say a Russell group University it was um sufficient to get
01:31:18
you a reasonably good starting job but it wasn't necessary what happened when we expand expanded higher education was
01:31:24
a degree became necessary but not sufficient mhm okay and so you have a
01:31:30
bunch of people who might be better off or happier going straight into the world of work who are now required to get a
01:31:37
degree in order to start work at a kind of level in which they can reach positions of reasonable reward okay now
01:31:44
it wasn't like that you could you could go into you know well-paid work without a degree in 1987 you can't do that now
01:31:51
okay very easily now I think if you reserved a whole load
01:31:57
of University places or you discounted University places for people who'd worked somewhere first some of these
01:32:03
people may well find out that they love the business so much they wouldn't bother going to University at all but you'd also create a social Norm where
01:32:10
there was nothing weird about not going to University before you started work so
01:32:15
you'd break that assumption that University automatically comes straight after school but the third requirement
01:32:22
would be if we're going to educate people it's not a totally crazy requirement of them to make them prove
01:32:28
that they can actually function in the real world with other people because I'm not sure I was bit I'm a bit sad that
01:32:35
kemy banock was just knocked out of the conservative leadership thing because a she didn't have a degree in PPE from
01:32:42
Oxford which is a positive in my book but also she worked in McDonald's now I'm not sure genuinely that in terms of
01:32:50
tacit knowledge understanding of the world I'm not sure that I wouldn't have
01:32:55
been better off with one year less at Cambridge and one year more working at McDonald's I you know we forget this we
01:33:01
have this extraordinary narrative that education adds to people's human capital
01:33:07
okay and that somehow the second you start work you know you become just you
01:33:12
know you learn nothing this is completely the opposite of my experience you know I learned just as much to my
01:33:18
first three years in Ogie as I did at three years in University the idea that
01:33:23
working isn't educational and that there's that the only way you can add to human capital or value is by putting
01:33:29
people through these incredibly artificial sort of oblique intelligence tests which aren't really very good
01:33:35
you're looking at a Dropout so I I the interesting thing the interesting thing which must be true statistically and it
01:33:41
must be true simply because simply because of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg is that the average Harvard
01:33:48
Dropout is almost certainly much richer than the average Harvard graduate because even Zuckerberg and Gates on
01:33:54
their own would make that a statistical necessity yeah I yeah and I I would not be surprised to hear that because I
01:34:00
think it also points to another characteristic that those individuals have that is conducive with success we
01:34:05
do have a closing tradition on this podcast which is the last guest writes a question for the next guest yeah um and
01:34:12
this guest has written a question for you now their handwriting is not good so this is I've been staring at this for
01:34:18
about 15 minutes trying to figure out what it says but here we go um if I asked you at the age of 16 who in the
01:34:23
world you would have liked to be what would you have said and has
01:34:31
your answer changed uh probably not it probably
01:34:36
would have been someone like John C um I venerate commedian the comedian John C
01:34:41
of of the Monty Python okay and Faulty Towers it probably would have been
01:34:46
someone like that I think because I venerate comedians because they bring
01:34:52
this extraordinary fresh I got to use a fancy epistemology
01:34:57
you know their way of perceiving the world is in and this is why I'm very much against politically correct um uh
01:35:04
sort of political activists uh trying to effectively censor comedians because what you're allowing there is for a
01:35:10
group of people who have an incredibly narrow unsophisticated and moronic epistemology to legislate on people who
01:35:19
have a spectacularly sophisticated and nuanced and um uh and complex uh sense
01:35:26
of perception it's completely the wrong way around you know comedians should be able to ban political activists for
01:35:31
being boring in a healthy world not the other way around um so yeah i' I I
01:35:37
venerate comedians to a particular degree I think um so your answer would
01:35:42
have been um yeah I think I think it would have been some kind of comedian uh I would have you know whether later on
01:35:49
it might have been the not the 9:00 news team I didn't know who he was at the time but John Lloyd who is behind a
01:35:55
great deal of actually very successful advertising uh but also behind a great deal of very successful television
01:36:01
comedy has to be considered one of the all-time greats and has your answer changed no not really uh no I still I
01:36:08
still venerate uh those people you know I'll sit down with YouTube and watch you know three hours of Bill Burr and four
01:36:15
hours of Dave Chappelle Dave Chappelle by the way you know as uh in terms of delivery is we're talking about that
01:36:21
whole business of how you speak mhm um I mean I I just sit there in awe you know
01:36:27
um and so no those are the people those are the people who I I kind of can't help but uh venerate first of all I just
01:36:34
want to say thank you it's been a really inspiring conversation and really this book is really great it's really challenging in all the right ways but
01:36:40
it's based on so much truth and experience that I really believe that it's one of those essential books for
01:36:45
people that are working in these industries or just in really any industry because if you're in business the principles within this book are so
01:36:51
applicable to so many things um that I feel like it's a really essential book so thank you for writing
01:36:57
it thank you for being here today it's been a real honor to speak to you um and yeah continue being yourself because I
01:37:02
think the world needs a few more people like you that that thinking the way you do so thank you so much R I'll keep trying thank you very much and keep up
01:37:09
the good work it's been fantastic and an inspiration thank you Rory quick one as
01:37:14
you might know crafted are one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are a jewelry brand and they make really
01:37:20
meaningful pieces of jewelry the really wonderful thing about crafted jewelry is it's super affordable it looks amazing
01:37:26
the pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really wellmade I think I've worn this piece for almost a year it
01:37:34
hasn't broken hasn't changed color cuz it's really really good quality and it costs roughly 50 Quid people will be
01:37:41
surprised when they hear that they'll probably assume that all of my jewelry is like solid gold and cost thousands and thousands of pounds but what's the
01:37:47
point when you can achieve the exact same effect from a piece of jewelry that's high quality and cost 50 quids
01:37:53
that's why I crafted [Music]
01:38:15
[Music]
