What most people miss about marketing | Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, author)

Steve Jobs was not a technologist he was a pitch man he was a brilliant salesman he was a fantastic marketer when products succeed we forget the extent to which marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in their success you once said if you can imagine a stand-up comedian doing a routine about your product then you're on to something you need to preserve slightly odd things rolls-royces were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor famously Verve Cleo it's the one with a yellow L idiosyncrasies kind of count double you need device for early

stage Founders to help build their brand be consistent be distinctive and be famous when you are not famous you have to find all your customers suddenly you reach this magical sort of escape velocity of Fame where people start coming to you today my guest is Rory southernland Rory is vice chairman of ogl UK author of the book Alchemy the Dark Art and curious science of creating magic in Brands business and life and the founder of nudge stock the world's biggest Festival of Behavioral Science and creativity Rory is both an example and a huge proponent of

thinking from first principles through his speaking and his books he encourages people to not think logically when solving problems but to think psychologically using human psychology to inform how you design and build and Market your products Rory is full of Amazing Stories and ideas and examples and inspiration which you'll get a sense of as soon as we start talking I don't even ask him a question and he's already off to the races this this episode is for anyone who wants to think more creatively help their team be more Innovative and learn how to create more

magic in your world Rory has been one of the most requested guest on this podcast and I can now see why if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and followed in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Rory southernland Rory thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast that's pleasure it's a an audience I don't normally speak to and it's an audience which I think is particularly valuable particularly important but also um

actually probably could benefit quite a bit from just a little bit of extra psychology not least not least by the way a very simple observation which is that do not think that good products automatically succeed or that bad ones necessarily fail the other thing I'd say is that timing is so important that don't necessarily reject things simply because they failed in the past one of the best products I've ever worked on in a professional capacity was Facebook meta TV the TV Portal sorry Facebook the Met TV by Facebook and I I I bought it for

about $120 it plugs into your TV it allows you to do obviously WhatsApp or um Facebook or indeed zoom on your television with a fantastic you know face tracking camera I mean it really is sort of $500 worth of equipment which they were selling for about 120 one of the best things I've ever owned I own about four of them when I heard it was being discontinued I bought another one because I think they're so good and yet for reasons I fully don't you know I don't really understand apart from the fact that every single

review said this is brilliant effectively as a product but the first seven paragraphs of the AR weren't saying this is brilliant they were saying who would allow Facebook to put a camera in their home and so there were basically you know it was nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia because you can turn the thing off after all you don't have to leave it switched on okay you know there were but there were nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia basically followed by one paragraph saying as this these kind of products go it's brilliant and yet we still don't

have video calling on TV unless you're willing to plug your laptop in or do something you know pretty fancy and complex that seems really weird to me let me actually read a quote from you around what good marketing often looks like so you once said if you can imagine a stand-up comedian doing a routine about your product then you're on to something the urge to appear serious is in many ways a disaster in marketing I'd love to hear your thoughts on that this episode is brought to you by pendo the only all-in-one product experience platform

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Lenny and put your feedback on autopilot that's cycle.app Lenny fun enough I had a conversation earlier to day with someone who's in the hotel industry and is in a particular without giving away where he works he's looking to reinvent the hotel arguing I think with some reason that it's one of those areas which is actually ripe for you know a good degree of disruption there a complicated thing don't be too weird okay don't you know don't don't be too strange because if the consumer there's a wonderful concept from Raymond ly of course the French designer

called maximumly advanced yet acceptable in other words you know there is a pace of change which consumers will accept and generally they're more comfortable with Evolution than they are with complete reinvention there are exceptions to that e well actually even the iPhone let's face it okay was preceded by the iPod it wasn't a complete WTF moment okay and consumers effectively like to migrate their behavior rather than Reinventing their behavior but nonetheless one of the things I always point out is that idiosyncrasies kind of count double there a wonderful thing actually years ago back in the

1990s ogleby won the Jaguar account and one of the things the creative director in New York said is that you know one of the things you need to preserve is slightly odd things so in a of the 1990s you turned on the light above your head the reading light or the central light with a switch that was actually on the central console every other car you reached up and you flick the switch in the Jaguar you pressed the button to the bottom and the light came on at the top and the creative director said uh

you know keep those things you know actually you know distinctiveness really matters and they were actually really interested because they said oh that's interesting you say that cuz we're actually planning to get rid of it because we thought it was inconsistent for years I don't know if this is still true because I don't drive many rolls Roes but for years Rolls-Royce was the last car now obviously Now cars di their headlamps automatically or you have an automatic setting but for years rolls-royce's were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor perfect for

an automatic not so good for a manual but they had a pedal on the floor where you dipped and undipped your headlamps rather than having a stalk uh you know and those things which I you know I always cite things like the um the double treat cookie when you check in for example I mean a brilliant example of this which when you think about it was extraordinary in terms of the attention it garnered you probably remember MCI the American no you're too young yeah I do of course MCI you do okay they they had the

concept of friends and family where you nominated a certain number of calls a certain number of numbers that you called particular frequently and you got sort of 20% off calls to those numbers I it started off with 10 and I think they eventually ramped it up to kind of 25 but actually most people 90 it's a partic principle most people make 80% of their calls to probably five or six numbers now what was interesting about that was it garnered V it was in a sense irrational okay but it garnered much more interest than if you'd

simply reduced the cost of calls by 15 20% across Ross the port because you had to stimulate Sim you know stipulate your numbers and because you had you know actually things that are slightly weird things that have a little bit of extra friction things that are slightly you know counterintuitive sometimes the right thing to do is to get rid of them sometimes you kind of celebrate them and that's what I mean about the comedian the comedian notices things that are slightly weird notices things and actually there was a great comedy routine when friends and family

came to the UK it was introduced from MCI by a marketer called Ed Carter to BT in the UK there were whole comedy routines about it you know people going you know I suddenly realize you know I couldn't think of the ninth number you know or it's basically my mom and nine adult lines you this was the kind of thing but those kind of things which actually slightly there are slight little Splinter on the attention you know in other words it's something that slightly raises up from the normal shape or it's the step that isn't

quite the Riser if you go down a flight of steps and one step is slightly you know the the sender is slightly out of whack th those things have a place actually I mean famously Verve Cleo the the French champagne house their labels ended up yellow by mistake and I think there was some printing era and they thought uh we okay we have these stupid yellow Leos we will send them to L Ro beef in England we do not want to S by selling them in France and then the Brit said okay by the way

that champagne can you send us more of the champagne with a yellow label it's going down really well and they said okay we're going to make it really yellow now just to you know almost as a kind of wind up I think okay but of course if you think about it the entire identity of that champagne even you know you can't remember the number it's the name it's the one with the yellow label okay you know and so visual distinctiveness and other forms of what you might call ux distinctiveness as I said don't go crazy

weird but there's this concept of Maya which is maximally advanced yet acceptable there's a wonderful phrase which I'll share with you which was there's an English guy who went over from the BBC for BBC 4 which is like it's like the PBS of PBS okay it's the really Niche Niche kind of you know educational kind of you know hardcore factual British TV channel and uh he went to buy um to see if there are any programs to buy from the Danish State broadcaster and he ended up buying a series called The Killing he bought the

first season of The Killing waiting for it for £4,000 so about $30,000 he paid to run the killing which had aired on Danish television about a year and a half earlier and been quite successful in Denmark but nowhere else and he paid £24,000 $30,000 and aired on BBC 4 and then it became hugely popular and then it migrated to BBC 2 and then Netflix came along and bought the rights to the series you'll probably remember this so actually the Danish State broadcaster ended up he said there should be a statue of me outside this dsh

broadcaster because I ended up making them tens of millions of pounds by both selling the rights to the killing the original series and also by Netflix buying the rights to the basic storyline I said 'w why did you do that I said ' whatat made you buy it and he said great phrase he said 'w he said if you're British true also if you're American by the way he said if you're British the great thing about Scandinavians is they're just the right amount of weird okay right so if you think about you know if you

have to watch something set in Denmark and you live in San Francisco it's not like watching something set in Korea or Somalia okay right you're you're not sitting there going what the hell is going on here why is this man doing this basically they're they're they're a bit like us they're enough like us that we basically figure out what's going on but they're they're weird enough to make it just that little bit more interesting and I think you know I think that's part of the reason for the popularity of scandy Noir and scandy crime is

there the right amount of weird and I think I think that's true of product design I think with Raymond lby I think the thing was he made a fan if I've got the story right he made a fad that was insanely quiet and people didn't believe it worked because because it was just too quiet and years later I remember that story because there was a guy who had this extraordinary kind of machine learning and AI device that was being used by engineers and he was producing a I think it was an electric toothbrush it might

have been a razor either a men's razor with an electric motor which was that they could somehow make it insanely quiet by using some weird machine learning algorithm about what caused the noise I said to him look be a bit careful because it's probably a good idea to make a razor a bit quieter but if you make it too quiet we genuinely won't believe it's working you actually it's the crackly noise that when you rub it over your face and it's the buzz of the thing and the vibration of the thing that actually convinces us

it's doing a job and you know you can actually you can overdo this you can over optimize for things I love all these examples you're sharing of ways products stand out sometimes by accident sometimes intentionally if you if to zoom out and try to describe what you encourage people to do you basically are intent on convincing people to think less logically to think less rationally which I think is pretty counterintuitive to a lot of people especially in business where they're told be more rational be more logical I think I think what it is is psychology

is a branch of complexity Theory okay and there are lots of things in it which are nonlinear Butterfly Effects small things that have a huge effect and there are also lots of things which are if you like like Yin and Yang in other words what I say is the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea you know I will say there are two great ways to check into a hotel one of them is insanely High touch and the other way is no touch you it' be pretty cool to check into a hotel

where basically you just walked in with your mobile phone and unlocked your room that would be pretty cool it's also pretty cool if you go to the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong that they take you up to your room show you how to use the television the shower I hope cuz that's always a baffling thing and that actually make you a cup of tea in the room while you're filling out the paperwork at your vast desk you know they're both pretty great ways to check into a hotel they're complete opposites but they are distinctive I

think understanding the fact that what we're trying to do is we're trying to run the world of business entirely to a reductionist kind of maths and physics and finance model you know where everything's kind of and everything works in straight lines and everything's proportionate and the opposite of a good idea is wrong and the past is a fantastic Guide to the future you know we're basing our decision making on kind of high school maths questions it always bothers me by the way that intelligence tests are multiple choice you know the SAT is a multiple choice

in the US I think aren't they very weirdly great aunt of mine actually was who spent some time in the US I think at Princeton was actually involved with the guy who designed those kind of early intelligence tests uh by the way she she had her doubts one of the things she commented on was that basically if they did an intelligence test in which kind of white academics didn't come top they rejected it as a measure of intelligence so they found for example I think that Native Americans and African-Americans were for instance better at memorizing

poetry than white people were okay and you know all credit to my great aunt you know they rejected this then as a measure of intelligence because it didn't fit their narrative but the other thing that bothers me well you know I'm slightly proud of my great aun for spotting this calling this out as a bit of to abut honest um but um the other thing that always bothers me is that by definition multiple choice questions have a single right answer okay theoretically you could have multiple right answers and you simply have to choose one that

is acceptable I guess but basically they got a right answer and three wrong answers that's how you do multiple CH questions but real life decisions aren't like that you can have multiple right answers and also you don't have all the information you need uh to answer the question contained within the question and some of the information you have which you think is important is actually irrelevant to answering the question so we have this kind of you know how when you look at those intelligence test sat measures IQ tests they're all you know two buses leave

a bus station one travels due north they all have you know an assumption of complete proportionality and linearity the buses are all traveling in a straight line you know you have to calculate what time it is when the buses are 100 kilometers a okay and there's a single right answer and all the information in the question is gerain to the answer that you know generally there isn't any extraneous information which you have to ignore and there's a famous experiment actually which I think originated in France where they said you know this ship stops you know

uh you know 27 goats get on three sheep get off then then they add 25 cows how old is the captain of the ship and what they found is actually pretty intelligent kids would not give the answer it is impossible to tell they'd assume that the information in the question because it's in the question had to be of use in formulating the answer and if you can Google it because it then appeared in a Chinese I think a Chinese School exam and it was a very interesting experiment done I think by a French philosopher or

psychologist which is what happens if you actually just give people a load of data and then you give them a question are they so habituated by kind of high school questions to assume that what's in the question must therefore give you you know a single right answer and this is exactly what happened and I you know if you look at real life I business decisions which anything that involves human behavior it's simply you know all those conditions that we we are expected to look for in something when we call it scientific none of those conditions

are met you know single right answer proportionality you know the scale of the input being proportionate to the scale of the effect none of those things are none of those things are met in real world decisions and yet we select and promote people on their ability to perform those artificial activities I'm curious if you've seen a company figure out how to do this better so you clearly are incredibly good at out of the box thinking thinking incredibly creatively all these examples are examples of where something was not what you would expect have you seen anyone

actually Implement a way to operate where they allow their employees and companies to think way just a few really interesting stories of companies which have a much less topown in other words it's a much more you know you know how in evolution there's this theory of multi-level selection which is we don't just select for individuals or genes we select for groups for example two examples I've heard of anecdotally which are interesting there's a British company called octopus energy which also has a software division called Ken which is a kind of it's effectively a way a

way of managing Utilities in a much more sophisticated pricing environment you know and they have extraordinary tariffs where you know if you charge your car after midnight you you know you pay a tiny fraction of what you pay the rest of the time it's very much about marrying supply and demand the way they operate is almost multicellular in that you have lots of small autonomous teams they ultimate brief what the objective of the company is is very very clear but actually they allow people considerable autonomy uh within teams of sort of 10 15 20 people

uh in terms of how they actually achieve their friends uh the second example is Shopify where their customer service teams are in groups of 10 and Toby Shannon who was the chief operating officer of uh Shopify modeled this on sports teams he said if you look at teams of people in sport your typical sport will have somewhere between sort of you know okay rugby might be 15 and soccer is 11 and cricket's 11 but generally teams have those double digit kind of team sizes and he thought there was something meaningful about that and so there

although although it meant a you know in some ways a much less lean structure because in normally in a call center environment you'd have one person managing a hundred people and you had effectively a team leader with a team of 10 and what was interesting that emerged from this is you know although you know he had to fight for this to an extent these people were extraordinarily happy in their jobs and extraordinarily motivated but also kept each other motivated because the teams were small enough where people felt kind of debts of obligation to their other

teammates in other words if you work for an organization of 100 people and you pull a sick day you don't really feel terrible about it okay but if if you're pulling a sick day means the other nine or eight people have to work quite a lot harder because you're not there natural kind of human instincts of reciprocation and obligation don't really scale up you know into you know there's the dunar number famously of 150 people which is the size of sort of military units and Oxbridge colleges and so on and that there's that famous D

danar number coined by Robin danbar once described as the number of people you know where you could join a conversation in which they were engaged with someone else without it feeling weird it's brilliant different most people know about 150 people where effectively you know you're at a party you see friend X who's one of your dumb Bar number one of your 150 people talking to a complete stranger and you can go over and join that conversation without feeling you're a bit of a kind of wallflower or being a bit of an idiot by butting in

and that's the Dunbar number 150 there does seem to be some number around sports teams around 10 so that's a way of Designing for Humanity rather than designing for the organogram and third case would be I talking to someone at some a very successful British online retailer called AO appliances online is what it stands for and he said something fairly similar in terms of you know you know the brief to the staff is you know very simple briefs like treat the customer like you treat treat your grandmother and if you look at yourself in the

mirror the shave test and you come home at the end of the day would your mom be proud of what you've done you know they actually said not not those kind of metrics of you know speed and you know efficiency and how many deliveries that you make but the way in which they kind of Define customer service and you know this would apply to call center staff as well is you know you know imagine treat the customer like you're talking to your grand I said there are lots of different ways you might talk to your

your grandmother you've all got different grandmothers Etc but basically everybody knows what that means and similarly you know make your money proud because effectively the brief and I think you know I think undoubtedly you know one of the there are two great virtues to this one of which is that the metrics often actually get gained or they lead to a complete Distortion of behavior the second thing with metrics is that either people gain them to their own advantage or they obey them but find them stupid but the loss of autonomy that results when you're simply

chasing a few metrics imagine what it's like to work in a call center where you're basically incentivized to uh get the get the customer off the phone as quickly as you possibly can okay the loss of autonomy and judgment uh that betokens I think and that that you know is deeply depressing it's deeply demotivating so a final case of that is Zappos we're talking to the Fantastic guy who is uh I think cheap marketing or or operating office of aapos you won't believe this I think that he he refused to make speed a measure in

the call center he said the call is as long as it needs to be to solve the problem and they had one extraordinary outlier which was something like a customer service call which was seven hours long okay now I think it involved a couple of bathroom visits on both sides I have no idea what the problem was that actually occasioned that but that was almost a point of principle that if take s hours to solve the problem that's how long we spend on the line and so this this this business where in the urge for

quantification and the urge for what you might call Des psychologization of problems in other words you define them by entirely objective non- psychological non-emotional measures we actually made we've actually created what I call Soviet style capitalism you know it's deeply demotivating it's all about kind of you know quarterly targets quarterly targets I mean at least the Soviet Union had a fiveyear plan okay we've got these stupid quarterly obsessions with you know revenue for you know meeting our forecast for Quarter Two okay and effectively people feel it's like metropolis and people feel fundamentally dehumanized by this

um and you know and and the the persistent cost cutting has effectively destroyed much of the pleasure of the workplace I think you know because there's no discretion there's no sort of discretionary judgment allowed anymore because someone saw any deviation from this imaginary Optimum as being a cost and you know we we we go into work to some extent to exercise our Humanity you know you know and that would include not only economics or reason or logic if would also include things like ethics for example was fair and you know this attempt the great B

Canadian philosopher I didn't really know much about until I came across him in a festival in Wales where he was speaking called John Ralston Saul who writes he writes actually I wish I'd known about this when I wrote my book because it is kind of uh there's a book famously called Pascal's bastards I think Vol sorry volta's bastards and it's all about how effectively the French in you know the French as distinct from the Scottish Enlightenment basically became fixated with reason which is one of kind of what he calls seven six six human skill sets

I think ethics memory Instinct creativity you know he lists about six human qualities and what happened with the you know effectively with the French Enlightenment was that um they became utterly fixated with reason as a problem solving mechanism to the exclusion of anything else and he said it not designed to be used in isolation you've used this term psychological psych psychology psychology a few times psychologic yeah and psychological yeah in other words there's a different there's a different kind of mechanism for logic and decision making within the evolved human brain which is actually quite a

lot more nuanced and more sophisticated uh than the kind of mechanisms for decision making that econom Ms theorize you know because it has to it has to account for imperfect information it has to account for variance in outcome it has to account for asymmetrical information and it has to account for imperfect trust so you know we've evolved to effectively operate in decision- making under uncertainty as Herbert Simon called it and yet most of the actual design of procedures that we encounter are designed for effectively information uh you know decision-making under certainty and that's a very

special case which actually never applies completely I would argue um but well certainly very rarely actually occurs in the real world it mainly actually is found in kind of economic models you have a really good uh insight into why we think in this irrational illogical way which I love I think you talk about how if we were you know evolving on the Savannah if an animals very predictable and very logical they're a lot easier to catch yeah yeah can you just talk a bit about that cuz I no no no I mean I mean things

like you know the ability to behave irrationally you know okay there's a claim and I by by the way of all the negative reviews I get they weren't where I expected at all there's about three pages in the book where I basically say being a bit Donald Trump has its virtues okay which is that no one's going to dick with you because they're not entirely sure what you're going to do now in mind okay I'm this is this does not mean I'm I'm absolutely an uncritical admirer of the of the Donald okay far from it

but the guy has operated in like the New York real estate scene for quite a long time and one of the things you got to you got to learn in that business is you know no one's going to survive in New York real estate if they can actually predict what you're going to do okay right okay imagine okay that is not a world where being completely consistently logical never losing your temper never walking away from a deal etc you know none of you you have to be able to play the play those game theoretic kind

of moves okay and there were people who basically encountered this thing maybe I should have put it right at the end of the book and I put it somewhere early on who were then driven practically insane by this assertion but the fact remains that you know there are certain circumstances in which the ability to behave irrationally is actually at at The Meta level highly rational uh you know the the fact that you know okay it okay if I'm never going to fight back against anybody who's slightly taller than me very rational but I'm going to

spend my whole life being around by people who are quarter of an inch you know higher taller than I are all right you know very rational okay they're biggest stronger than me never do anything to retaliate okay yeah yeah but no okay we have to have some degree of and Darwin spotted this some degree of kind of random number generator in our makeup and the most classic example of this which is I learned from Robert triers The evolutionary biologist is that when a hair is being chased by a dog it it goes into this incredibly

random pattern of movement where it will kind of Zoot straight up in the air it will suddenly do a 90° turn to the right it will then suddenly double back on itself at huge speed and it appears I don't know how they find this out that it doesn't actually know what it's doing that there's a kind a random number generator and the hairs I think it's called in submarine warfare it's called doing a Crazy Ivan where you just execute kind of crazy Maneuvers it was that Russian submarines when being pursued by American submarines would do

something called a Crazy Ivan and the hair has an equivalent thing which is basically it just enters this random movement high speed mode and the point is it can't consciously know what it's going to do next because the dog would then learn to anticipate what it was doing it has to be random and it almost has to be unconscious because the hair cannot give away any telltale signs of what its next move might be and so if the hair knew what the next move might be it would actually start to reveal Preparatory you know muscular

movements which the dog could learn to read so you know but there are other reasons I mean there are other reasons why we need to be irrational for far less uh controversial you know or far less survival dependent reasons than this for instance the exercise of social intelligence we have two very strong uh inbuilt we don't utility maximize we have two very strong inbuilt default modes in the human brain one of which is habit do what I've done before and the other one is social copying do what everybody else seems to be doing and they

make extraordinary good sense in evolutionary terms because an organism that had to learn everything from first principles would eat a hell of a lot of poisonous berries rather than going look I've always eaten the yellow berries I seem to be fine I don't have the shits let's just stick to the yellow berries well unless there's a massive shortage of yellow berries that's probably a pretty good idea or equally if you find yourself in a new environment or new habitat and all the other primates eing the purple berries and nobody's touching the yellow ones in that

en enironment is probably a good idea to copy them you know because there's extra intelligence there you know in other words I can learn effectively from copying my past Behavior or copying the behavior of others I can I can actually you know it's a fairly lowcost way of discovering low variance you know low downside behaviors by the way very interestingly actually was an AI which actually went into investigating what would be necessary more people to have solar panels and more people to have heat pumps and it is not tell them the environmental benefits it is

not tell them how much money they'd save by having a heat pump no the single thing that would persuade people to have more heat pumps is if three people on their street have a heat pump okay right now to an economist that drives them practically insane because they go no no no the the behavior of your neighbors should be entirely irrelevant you know you should simply do the maths calcul calate how much you'd save compare that against the return you get in a highin savings account and then decide whether the heat pump is worthy of

the investment but that's not how we work we're not prepared to be the first person uh you know with the with the worst solution I mean with electric cars there's probably a very strong heuristic which is every consumer's learned whether it was computers or DVDs or cassette decks or you know fax machines or actually washing machines okay going back okay with anything electrical it kind of pays to wait because they get better very quickly and they get cheaper very quickly so are people wrong therefore not to make that decision well no what they're doing is

they're learning but you know heuristic from past experience which by the way when it applies to anything with a plug um it's been pretty much proven you know I had friends who bought the early flat screen televisions and they PID thousands and thousands of dollars for these things and you go into their house you God that's okay you know so I mean an awful lot of these things are in you know instinctive intuition that we've just learned through experience and we don't know what the future's going to bring but actually you know it's what you

might call decision- making based on a reasonable expectation of something this episode is brought to you by Kota and I mean that literally I use Kota every day to help me plan each episode of this very podcast it's where I keep my content calendar my guest research and also the questions that I plan to ask each guest also during the recording itself I have a Kota page up to remind myself what I want to talk about Kota is an all-in-one platform that combines the best of documents spreadsheets and apps to help you and your team

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with Koda today for free and if you you want to see for yourself why product teams at high growth companies like Pinterest figma and qualtrix run onota take advantage of the special limited time offer just for startups head over to coda.io Lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit that's coda.io Lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit coda.io Lenny why is this so important so you know there's many ways to try to win in business there's you know like the typical approach just let's think a brainstorm would come up with our best

ideas your your basic premise is too many of these are just very rational logical approaches to a solution why why is it so important to think outside the box like this there's a joke in the UK it's it's less true than it used to be because there was a famous actor called jeanclaude vanam who is known as the muscles from Brussels but the old British joke 20 years ago was that there are no famous belgians okay and it's it's a bit weird why are there no famous belgians and it turns out it's a bit like

why there aren't very many famous Canadians and the reason is if you're a famous Canadian everybody assumes you're American and if you're a famous Belgian everybody assumes you're French unless you're a painter from the Middle Ages in which case you're not called Belgian at all you're called Flemish okay there're actually a lot of famous belgians but everybody assumes they're either French or they're called Flemish because they painted in the 16th century or something and interestingly for the same reason there aren't very many famous marketing campaigns to launch new Innovative products because when a product succeeds

everybody forgets the fact that it was the marketing that was instrumental to its success when I say marketing I mean in its wider sense I don't just mean the advertising the communication I mean the positioning we tend to look at Great products we go you know iPhone okay the Ford Model T okay and we tend to go every everything was a bit crap and then Henry F came along or Steve Jobs came along and they had this invention and everybody immediately saw that this was brilliant and they went and bought it I've got advertisements from

1916 advertising the benefits of electricity in the home in fact that was an advertising campaign that went on for about 30 years I spent an early part of my working career in advertising persuading people to get the internet in the late 1990s dial up internet now we forget all that because we when we look back we kind of Constantine a history and we go there was no internet and then Tim bernsley came up with the web and everybody wanted the internet no 20 years okay I mean you know there are I mean okay the mobile

phone was freakish because that was actually driven by social pressure in part you know you had no even people who didn't really want a mobile phone ended up having to get one because you looked like a bit of an arel when people said what's your mobile number and you couldn't give one and also it became impossible to meet your friend right because they said okay I'm not sure which Pub we're going to but we'll ring you on the mobile if you said I haven't got a mobile people will go we'll s you that okay but

but okay most of these things including small pox vaccination okay Edward Jenner who basically came up with the cowpox as a vaccination against smallpox which was the pl you know absolute plague of the 18th and uh possibly came from the new world I'm not quite sure but it was absolute plague of like the 17th 18th century and he comes up with his basic vaccination thing huge opposition unbelievable skepticism massive suspicion if you thought that antio vaccination or something this was on a par with that his marketing coup was getting the British royal family to vaccinate

their children I think okay now so what we're saying is that first of all when products succeed we forget the extent to which marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in that success I mean let's Steve Jobs was not a technologist he was a pitch man he was a Huer I mean this as compliments okay he was a brilliant salesman he was a fantastic marketer the tech people at Apple didn't respect him they said I don't get what Steve even does like he can't even code okay but he was absolutely brilliant in everything from product design

to uh you know to uh to to focusing on a on a limited number to extraordinary taste to giving those presentations and you know selling things as a magician effectively making making everybody believe that Apple was capable of magic and therefore you didn't need the skepticism now so first of all marketing plays and timing and luck by the way let's also include those these other factors play a much greater role in both the the speed of adoption and the success of adoption of anything remotely new or inovative but in in hindsight we we we for

get the marketing and we don't say we never say because of the great marketing I bought that product we go I bought it because it was a great product but we thought it was a great product because of the marketing okay we had to persuade people to get anric we had to persuade people to vaccinate against small poox uh penicillin came up against a lot of you know hostility in very early stages right okay also let's not forget we're only looking at the successes I think they've been great products which genuinely intrinsically a good idea

I mentioned meta portal TV I'd also include Google Glass I'd also include the wine box I'd include the Japanese toilet okay right I'd include the air fryer until recently right these are all utterly brilliant things but it took in the case of the Japanese toilet and the wine box and Google Glass something about the timing or the marketing not the product something was wrong and the consumer basically never bit it never reached critical mass they didn't somehow they couldn't cross the chasm of the early adopter I still think it's barbaric I've got a Japanese toilet

here I don't have one in my other little flat I think it's barbaric that the Western Hemisphere dry wipes right the whole of the Middle East has a bum gun you know in Japan your your laboratory quite rightly cleans your rectum with water as God intended okay and for some reason we in the sophisticated West there with a dry bit of paper scraping it up over our anas this is Medieval okay I mean think about other things right nobody house keys you compare how easy it is to get into your car you've got some keys

somewhere in your person in your handbag in your briefcase you're not really sure where the keys are you walk up to your bloody car and you open the door your house it's 1720 you got to Rattle some metal things to get into the house why house building okay I mean house building the way we build houses will be recognizable to a Roman but the way the Romans never invented the Stirrup would you believe that they they didn't actually have a stirrup for horses so you basically had to cing on with your knees oh my God

how okay so what's so fascinating the wine box by the way really fascinates me because in a logic the Kindle is only really you know it's kind of taken up to I thought with the Kindle and tablet came along I admit this I okay well that's the end of the Flaming line for physical books and fairness I travel a lot so I have quite a lot of ebooks because I can then pack one tablet in my bag and I'm carrying a library around with me which is you know quite a long plane flight it's a

lot better than having to pack eight books and decide which one you're going to read when you get there but if you don't travel very much people seem to prefer physical books for example people like these things actually uh like the what's that funny Scandinavian thing you write on you know that pad thing the remarkable remarkable ta remarkable okay people like that actually because it allows you to do less okay it allows you to concentrate because you don't get emails you don't get distractions Etc but the wine box I mean you know it should have

basically you know we should it keeps for weeks okay it's got its own tap you can have a glass of wine in the evening without opening a bottle and letting the other five you know five glasses go off you're not forced to become a raging alcoholic if you live alone right which you kind of are with wine bottles okay right all of these things vastly better you know keep it in the fridge d d da well you know didn't didn't succeed entirely psychological you know in terms of logical you know products and I was F

I mean the Japanese toilet why the hell is you know I I I looked actually recently at the most expensive flat in London which is some place in Bridge which is going for like $110 million or something right and you got to wipe your own ass okay I mean it's 110 million for this place and the toilets now I imagine if if there's a middle EAS owner they'll go and retrofit some bum guns in there but I mean how how flaming weird is that you know I mean seriously strange and you realize that actually you

know I mean Google Glass I mean it was kind of marketing up they launched a bit too soon then they only gave the bloody glasses to developers now let with the best will of the world developers probably aren't the world's like coolest people okay they're not the people you want to have walking around your bar wearing Google Glass the user imagery wasn't that great and so you have these really interesting phenomena I I I would have bought Google Glass actually even at the insane launch price of about $1,000 because I would really really like being

able to walk around now I don't know what the I'm tring with you now I don't know what the time is I don't know when my next meeting starts I don't know what the weather's like outside if I just had regular in updates a kind of heads up display for that's going on in my life that just reminds me of stuff I easily pay without having to look at a digital watch which I I've bought these buddy both Android and Apple watches and nah it's I might as well get my phone out basically I've got

an ordinary analog watch here but actually having something which you can wear which just goes your next meeting starts in five minutes uh the guy you're talking to is called Lenny you know all that stuff be really really good I have no idea where the meta portal to you apart from this business of the Privacy thing with Facebook but if any product deserved to succeed in the pandemic for crying out loud right it was video conferencing on your TV and yet it just didn't and so you know don't think and the other thing I'd say

is don't think because of products failed in in the past that you shouldn't try again because you know that famous thing you know that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result that's not the definition of insanity that's the definition of a complex system right you know that actually I mean quite a lot of Internet ideas failed I think quite a lot of online ideas failed because they were just mistimed typically you know some good ideas were too early great little thing actually called the chum which

I I had about three of them and they were little Internet connected devices and they just cycled through little screens which would say like little applets like little kind of um you're probably an iPhone user but what we call um widgets okay on the screen and they go the these are trains to your local station they're on time they're not on time they're running late this is the weather this is the latest news flash New York Times and they just cycle through that stuff they'd sit in a little cuddly little thing how how about three

of these I thought they're fantastic but again I mean okay I'll give you two examples of this about timing right it's 199 no hold on it's 1989 okay I sign out a mobile phone it's like a brick it's made by Mo Motorola sign out a mobile phone from the office in 1989 and I because I'm going to a meeting somewhere off site and I need to be contactable so you didn't have your own mobile phone no the office had about eight of them and you signed one out they were kept charging in the office you

sign went out you told your team what your number was for the day and you set out to your trip so I'm walking down Oxford Street with this mobile phone and someone Rings me so I haven't on the I have to answer it okay so I'm speaking on a mobile phone in Oxford Street bu well the business streets in London in 1989 two people shout abuse at me from passing cars for using a mobile phone second case in I let me see if I can date this it would be about 200 oh Cy I guess

about 2003 2004 um there was a company started by some American expats called food ferry in London and I think it was a hybrid CD ROM you actually had a CD ROM of most of the stuff and you went online you ordered your groceries and they delivered them to you and I mentioned to someone in 20 it would have been the early 2000s that I actually ordered my home GR mysteries on the internet and they laughed in my face okay I mean just literally they went over they said hey you'll never get this guy you

know he his Groceries on the internet and that was this is my point I'm saying is that there's this huge huge psychological hurdle to changing Behavior or to getting people to uh adopt Behavior which is slightly unusual there was massive I mean okay one story I I then bought my my own mobile phone this would have been about n this wasn't it was 89 I was borrowing the phone it would have been about 9596 when I actually had my own mobile phone maybe 94 I'm trying to work it out and I'm on the top of

a bus in London and somebody Rings me and they ring me from the states it's my friend Ted who was a biochemist at pen I think at the time and I said something on the phone I'm sitting on the top of a bus and I said something on the phone which made it obvious was speaking to someone in America it was like what time is it with you or what's the weather like over there basically it was obvious I was making an international call on a mobile phone the top of the bus I actually thought

there was a mild risk of physical attack because that was such an extraordinary twatty thing to do and I suddenly realiz it's because I'm old I'm 58 you know I suddenly realize a lot you know a lot of younger people don't have the chronological context they just assume that you know there was no internet and then the internet came along so everybody got it now you know okay the smartphone was Prett the mobile phone itself was not rapid they've existed for about 50 years right you had to be pretty rich and they most mostly were

in people's cars I saw someone with a portable telephone I think in 1984 and that was a really weird thing for someone behal they they weren't fast the smartphone was pretty fast I grant that that was that that was a that was a freak except ception most of these things are really godamn slow and also if you get your marketing wrong or if you miss if you mtime your launch or if you just misjudge some aspect of your launch psychologically you can take something which is intrinsically a brilliant product and it will fail to bite

that's why I think this is really important because we we we have survivorship bias we only look at the successes no one's there going you know I mean certain things like I mean I mean the fact that still open our houses with keys for crying out loud you know all that stuff I agree I'm excited I'm excited for the Tesla version of yeah I completely I completely you've shared all these amazing examples of products that are great but didn't work out many of the reasons that that happens is within a company it's very hard to

share and suggest silly ideas as you describe and you have this actually really cool suggestion that I I wanted to highlight which is first share like The Logical rational typical answer and then think create time to think about the silly crazy idea can you talk a bit about that just how to operationalize this a little bit according to Herodotus writing in about what is it the 6th Century BC it was there about or fifth I should know six um the ancient Persians when they had to deliberate they debated everything twice once while sober and once

while drunk and only if they agreed in both States would they go ahead with a course of action now I don't know whether being drunk is just an opportunity to come up with a better idea okay or whether it's a question of does this appeal to us rationally does this also appeal to us emotionally okay I don't know there's something really really interesting about having what you might call two a two-stage a double lock on decision making which is okay there's this fundamental asymmetry which is creative people have to present their ideas to rational people

for approval okay fine don't mind that never happens the other way around you never get you never get Engineers or accountants saying well I think the answer is 3.75 but before I go and present this I'm going to share it with some wacky people to see if they can come up with a neater more cunning idea so that's one issue I mean the other issue would be I mean talking about you know products that fail by the way Ford and Edison okay collaborated on an early in the I think the first decade of the 20th

century an early electric car watch watch this on Jay Leno's garage by the way I I think that J Leno is a greater philanthropist than Bill Gates okay Bill Gates is quite useful if you're in Africa or if you've got malaria or something but he's not much Ed to me Jay Leno on the other hand takes a vast Fortune buys and restores amazing cars and then shares videos about them on YouTube now that's great if you're in Africa and it's great if you're me okay it's fantastic okay I'm iy door this guy interestingly the electric

car according to Leno and according to other articles I've read was actually quite good it was quiet it was you know unbelievably good acceleration and the range wasn't terrible and for the time the speed wasn't bad what killed it interestingly user imagery right and the user imagery was because it was quiet you didn't have to hand crank it it didn't give off fumes it didn't make a loud noise they were really popular with women and they became stereotyped as like woman's car meanwhile all the people doing the jeloy racing and the kind of customization all

the farm boys were using gasoline cars now fast forward what's so fascinating fast forward to 2025 I'm quite Pro electric cars I've got two well my wife has one of them but you see what I mean and I like them both I wouldn't go back to gasoline because I think they're great okay lovely to drive they're like a limousine and a go-kart uh they have very few moving Parts they're incredibly quiet uh they're just lovely okay I just drive one and you'll see what I mean and I when I write in favor of electric cars

I get all these comments in The Spectator comments below of people who really hate them and when they write to me what it falls down to is they think user imagery okay like Google Glass right and actually there's a problem with All Tech products because the first people to adopt Innovative products tend to be slightly weird okay and weird people do not confer the reassurance of kind of social norms uh in the way that adoption by conventional people does if you if you got your weird millionaire Rich Nutter and he's got you know he's got

a wind farm and he's got a heat pump it doesn't make ordinary people think oh I must do the same now What's Happening Here is that I didn't realize this but all the people who don't have electric cars see the people with electric cars and go smug environmental tosser who's looking down on me because I've got a diesel and thinks he's saving the planet even though you've had to mine all this Cobalt and lithium and whatever to produce the battery what a trap now the interesting thing about this okay is that in very few cases

I can encounter I can remember okay uh is are the electric car owners actually very interested in the environment they're not similarly when you meet environmental people okay they don't have electric cars they've always got some crappy excuse like yeah but my wife needs to do the school run and said we decided we get a diesel right right I don't know why okay you meet these people you go to environmental conferences and you say So you you're really keen on the environment you got an electric car well we thought about getting money meanwhile all the

people in like Essex right you know Jersey right who just really like cars or really like Tech are the people buying electric cars it's got almost nothing to do with environmental um credentials and yet by actually imbuing these electric cars with kind of Prius style you know uh sort of values of smugness it's actually a huge obstacle to adoption because people just I don't want to be that kind of person now actually what okay I when I had an electric car 3 years ago there are fewer charging points than there are now but what I

noticed was really odd okay was that if you wanted to charge in like biler Ricki okay in essic okay imagine New Jersey okay imagine you know Trenton okay loads of charging places there right you went somewhere really woke you know you imagine you know I don't know Cambridge Massachusetts or whatever right nowhere to charge Cambridge Cambridge England absolute desert for car chargers Brighton which is like the most right on City on the south coast of England nowhere to charge at all but you went somewhere you know you went somewhere a bit bling a bit okay

right bang lad of charges what the hell is going on here and to be honest okay what's happened is we've we've we've imbued electric car owners with this holier than thou uh kind of Aura which causes other people to resent them despite the fact that incredibly few of them all right are really doing this for environmental reasons they may be happy to have zero emission cars I would like to get solar panels to charge my car not really to reduce carbon emissions but just to be really cool to have a car that runs on the

sun okay I quite like solar Ps on my house not really something to save the planet but I like at dinner parties to you know or rather lunchtime wouldn't it you to go to a picnic and go look I'm getting I'm getting two kilowatts of my app okay to be honest that's the kind and actually the reason most people adopt new technology is peacock's tail it's showing off the first cars weren't as good as Horses and carts they were done to show off they were done for novelty seeking reasons or for reasons of status display

and that's what rich people are for they provide the early stage funding for promising ideas before they really reach maturity it's famously the argument is that birds evolved wings as sexual display plumage before they became large enough to function as a mode of propulsion so Birds which seem to have evolved from dinosaurs for the most part the logic is that they they first of all got wings as a form of sexual display the peacock got the tail okay but most other birds did the display with the wings to look cool CU I think dinosaurs had

feathers didn't they they think right okay so there was kind of sexual display thing going on and eventually they thought oh actually you know I did this to show off but I can actually get to that branch and so there's that early stage funding argument and what actually provides the early stage funding for new promising ideas is quite often slightly TWY people like me okay but we've got to be conscious of the fact that um and also if you really evangelize new things you know I was an air fryer evangelist literally going back over 10

years 15 years ago I was like the John the Baptist of air frers and you know and i' occasionally say to an audience of 500 people if you got anybody here go n and there' always be six people go yeah best thing I've ever bought okay and it's only occurred to me that actually in a way that that actually annoys everybody else it's not people going cool these people with air frers they really like these air frers maybe I would look at getting an air fryer instead it's like these people are in a cult what

you have to realize working in Market is that people in marketing are very high in openness very high in openness to experience very very keen to stand out very keen to be distinctive the majority of the population are much lower on openness to experience they're much more driven by habit and social norms and largely they want to fit in know they feel comfortable when they fit in with the people around them it's a slightly unusual kind of corporate environment where people actually want to kind of effectively play constant games of one-upmanship with their kind of

workmates which tends to happen in you know marketing and other functions and tends to happen actually at the higher levels of Corporations but it's actually very UNL it's actually slightly an unnatural state so you got to be very careful working in a marketing department or being a person who works in marketing to continually remind yourself that you're an outlier one of my favorite stories from your book Alchemy was the story of the Walkman and how the engineers basically they had the technology to add recording to the Walkman and they're just like hey of course we

need to add this feature we can do it without water it it would it would have cost 50 it would have cost 50 cents because apparently they built they built the first Walkman on the I think there was thing called the Sony talkman which was a dictating machine which had both a speaker and it had a a microphone and it would have cost like 50 cents a dollar per unit of the wman to add recording functionality of course later on they did add that much later on when people were familiar with the concept but I

think it was Marita is I think it was AO Marita the Sonny who was the kind of instigator of the Walkman project and he was the single driver who said no and they all they all got very upset about this because they said it look it cost nothing and it doubles the functionality of the device and Marita said you don't want to double the functionality of the device you want the device to have one function which it performs very well what Don Norman will call an affordance okay you don't want any ambiguity about what this

thing's for what this thing's for is for listening to high quality music uh while you're on a flight or on a train journey um and it's for that it's a personal entertainment device and nothing else once people start going is it a Dictaphone does it have a corporate function you know should I use it to record concerts Etc once it's got more than one function people don't know where where to start and so I thought that was an absolutely inspired thing which is actually you know in many cases less is more you know in other

words Focus attention on one thing the one thing that it does it's really good at that thing you don't have to worry about anything else if you want to do that thing then this is the thing for you and if you don't want to do that thing then don't buy it very simple binary decision the second you introduce kind of complexity into the thing logically greater functionality should mean greater utility which should mean greater value but sometimes you as with the McDonald's menu okay that was an absolutely beautiful case where they realized that okay it's

partly about speed it's partly about Simplicity it's partly about supply chain but it's also about Choice reduction you know do you want a Big Mac don't you want a Big Mac whereas the American Dino which was the kind of preceding thing before the McDonald's Brothers came and sort of shook it all up with I suppose as kind of Detroit model of kind of production the American din was you know how do you want your eggs you know substitutions you know uh you know OV easy Sunny Side Up poach scramble Etc the whole thing was about

customization and so this is what I mean you know sometimes customization is a great idea sometimes it's the opposite I think Tesla's quite clever in that the choice architecture of Tesla's is just the right amount of choice you don't want one color okay and you don't want one battery size but equally they haven't gone silly okay you know they're kind of two Interiors you can choose from two size of Wheels five colors I think five basic colors and two premium ones it's about right you know that's kind of about manageable you know whereas you know

I had a look at customizing the new electric Range Rover today and it's just well it drives you insane because you know you suddenly realize you're going to be spending basically the price of a house by the time you've added all the stuff you really really want you can't actually justify buying the vehicle okay so maybe question we've covered a lot of stuff at this point which makes me very happy I asked people on Twitter what I should ask you when you were coming on the podcast and the most common question came around branding for

startups so say you're a startup you're trying to figure out how do we build a brand for what we're doing do you have any advice for early stage Founders to help build their brand strink get their brand over time something they could do early on very very simple be cons be consistent be distinctive and be famous now the the author we forget this okay have advertising often talks about brand in this incredibly nuanced way about differentiation and this and that and the other you got to be distinctive okay undoubtedly you've got to be consistent for

obvious reasons okay and you got to stick it it visually without around too much but actually the reason advertising agencies never say we're going to make you famous is because it sounds too obvious okay well yeah obviously yeah they's don't talk about it is it's about Fame okay in that Fame fundamentally changes the rules in completely uh nonlinear ways so first of all when you are not famous you have to find all your customers suddenly you reach this magical sort of escape velocity of Fame where people start coming to you and they start saying have

you thought of using this for this or actually you didn't think of this as an application for your product but I've actually got this you I actually use it for this okay and then then you reach sort of there are kind of levels of Fame and and they compound over time it's not linear it's not attributable you can't really say you know I I joke about this okay there are people who can attribute their Fame to one single event with Monica Lewinsky perhaps being a good example okay or serial killers all right okay yeah if

I hadn't killed all those people no one would have heard of me okay okay there are people people for whom Fame is like attributable but for most most people it's a whole what you might call amalgam of different activities you know going back years and actually in many cases we ask consumers how did you hear about this they don't actually know they'll always put TV or something or online but actually they don't know how they heard about they just kind of heard about it and we know that people's brains react completely differently in terms of

their level of comfort with things they've heard of before versus things that are completely new it's always similar to the kind of puristic of you know is everybody else eating this have I eaten it before and have I heard of people eating this right okay right that's you know it's it's part of that same package of you know right in the motherboard of human psychology so famous is completely it basically changes the rules for everything you know when your chief executive Rings somebody up they probably call back if you're a famous company if he's heard

of you or she's heard of you she'll call back right if they haven't heard of you they probably won't call back what's that worth it's impossible it's impossible to quantify the value of Fame people come and work for you for less money people actually apply to you without you having to find them people stay longer customers come to you and give you the benefit of the doubt you're allowed to up once okay if you're famous right people you know people will give you if you've got a great brand the best best definition of a brand

is from the guy who's called Eric Johnson I think who wrote the book blindsight and it he's also written a book called brands that mean business it's a great book it deserves to be much more famous actually and his there's a sentence in that book which says having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode and I genu can't think of a better definition than that now the point about playing on easy mode is can you quantify the value of that well no because you don't know what your

score would have been if you were playing on hard mode or psycho mode or I don't I'm not a gamer but you know you know what I mean okay and can you also say which of your various activities contributed to that the building of that great brand well no you can't because it's actually not even it's not even an amalgam of things it's actually a kind of concatenation it's a you know you know there whole through elements here which are catalytic they're not linear and that's the other thing which is that because it's not linear

attempts to evaluate advertising on shortterm transactional metrics will always grotesquely undervalue the contribution of that activity to your ultimate business success it's a bit like okay when I first got a pension for the first few years brand building is a bit like a pension right for the first few years I had a pension I know God I'm paying this guy a few hundred quid a month and look I mean you know half it gone in commission and it was a lot of work and I'd rather have the money to have an Indian meal you know

I don't know why I'm doing this Wast oh look it's hardly gone up at all and what a bore what a waste of time I thought that for about three years I'm 58 now and I got a pension I go where did all this money come from I don't remember paying this it really is like that it's a compounding effect and everybody effectively because we have finance and Roi and all those things everybody's using addition multiplication subtraction and division to try and quantify the value of an activity which doesn't which which actually is about power

laws it's not about that kind of linear okay it's really about kind of power laws and nonlinearities and all this kind of stuff and so you know we're being judged by the wrong kind of maths we're being evaluated by the wrong kind of maths and con and and also we're being evaluated over the wrong time frame and consequently my argument would be that at a very rough estimate an awful lot of marketing activity is in reality four times as valuable four is okay I'm plucking that number out of the air but four seems about is

is right is probably probably four times as valuable as people think it is when they measure its short-term contribution could be more of course I love that because over time it will build and compounds it's like a drip the uh I love the three points you made about how to build a great brand consistency distinctiveness what was the third it was fa be famous yeah yeah I mean I mean cons consistency distinctiveness um probably you Clarity Clarity and just be famous great yeah yeah I you know some sort of some sort of clarity of promise

I think amazing cons I think I think a good brand is a sort of promise but also um the extent to which it contributes to trust okay which is that if you met a celebrity on the street right okay I don't mean a serial killer celebrity I mean a famous actor okay one thing you wouldn't think about is are they going to steal my wallet are they going to mug me are they going to do anything with right they may have lots lots of voices but generally people who have a lot of reputational skin in

the game who've invested a lot in building up a reputation over time are going to be much more cautious about disappointing their customers or risking negative feedback than someone nobody's ever heard of right I mean and let's be honest okay it's even I think it's even more extreme in the United States than is in the UK you know the relationship people have with celebrities is kind of pervy and weird you know they you know they imbue these people with superpowers they're actors right they didn't actually fly through the air but somehow people treat them with

this kind of reverence because they're just famous and the point is it's kind of easy mode you know if you are actually pretty famous you are playing that game on easy mode because so many things which require massive reassurance due diligence checking you take it to the board three people on the board of never heard of the companies they want you to go back and check with and then you walk in and you know and it's kind of your famous the rules are different and when I say there are also these inflection points like escape

velocity I always say about Coke that coke has reached a magical level of Fame where it is your expectation that any shop or bar or cafe or Bean restaurant will stock it okay in other I can ask for this anywhere okay and if they haven't got it it's their fault not mine now that's that's really kind of Mega Fame but equally in B2B there's an inflection point in B2B marketing okay which is that if no one ever got fired for buying IBM right we know the famous phrase if you appoint price W house or ey

or whatever to your audit okay and something goes wrong everybody blames them if you appoint someone no nobody's ever heard of to be your auditor and something goes wrong everybody blames you for not appointing price water house or ey you know it's rather like one of the reasons I fly with you know I wouldn't go on a business trip with Ryan a even though they're actually pretty good they're very punctual right is if the flight gets canceled or delayed and I ring the client and say I'm terribly sorry the ba flight's been delayed okay they

go oh well never mind you did your best right okay right if I ring up and say the riot air flight's been delayed okay it's not quite the same is it right I haven't necessarily tried I've kind of skimped on that you see what I mean yeah and so you know various things it's not just what things are it's what they mean and we use Brands as kind of extended phenotypes to express ourselves in all kinds of ways so this is the other thing with Brands it's not just a simple cons consumer it's not just

a simple business consumer relationship there are all kinds of things what does the brand I use say about me it's do the people who I who who know me know what this brand means it's no good being a luxury car that nobody the only rich people have heard of because in order to convey Prestige it's necessary for you to know that other people know that BMW is a prestigious car brand and so on and so forth so there are lots of things here which are second order third order order nonlinear compounding factors okay you know

we just have to acknowledge this is a different kind of math and yet we're being judged on a kind of you know xus y equals Zed maths doesn't make any sense maybe as a final question is there anything you want to leave listeners with folks that are Building Product any lasting piece of neuger advice try and do the psychological and the technological and economic for that matter you know in other words The Sweet Spot is it works psychologically it it works technologically and it works economically in other words you can make money out of it

people want it and it's you know it it it's it's got an it allows them to do something significantly new by using some clever application of tech try and use those three things in parallel because I think what most businesses do is they try and do things in series and business has borrowed an awful lot from the kind of fordist tailor production line mentality of the process okay and the process we have to pretend that the process is linear but the process of any kind of innovation or development is not linear there loads of products

which by the way have completely failed at first iteration and then someone sold them in a different way and they then turn out to be completely successful I mean you know uh you know I mean the pivot okay is you know an example of that famously Wrigley started off selling soap powder in Chicago then he started giving away baking powder free to sell the soap powder and then realized he'd start making baking powder and selling that and he gave away chewing gum that went on the baking powder as a gift and then people like the

chewing powder a chewing gum a lot more than they like the baking powder so as a result Wrigley became a chewing gum company right okay so but we're always trying to make this thing linear because when we tell stories backwards WE Post raliz and we reverse engineer and we reverse engineer our actions to make it all seem perfectly linear and logical as a kind of sense check the real process is never like that and I think you should have marketing I think marketing and Technology are two sides of the marketing and Innovation are two sides

of the same coin you either as I often say you can either work out what people want to find out a clever way to make it or you can work out what you can make and find a clever way to make people want it and that actually the greatest thing is man to do both simple as that so I don't do it one and then the other don't leave marketing to the last minute but equally well you know work in parallel as far as you can uh work in people find your book and nud point

them real quick nud stock.com the book's called Alchemy and it's got a variety of subtitles depending on which country you're in but if you look for Alchemy by Rory Southerland uh the audio book's probably the best thing to buy because I actually read it myself and I kind of Rift a bit um from that but also available on Kindle and and from all good book shops and quite a few rotten ones and um there's also a book I've written co-written called transport for humans co-written with Pete Dyson if you're in the transportation industry I'd recommend

that one amazing Rory thank you so much for being here thank you for that always a drive thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode