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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a711c90aae8ba8dd

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. He once said, If you can imagine a standup comedian doing a routine about your product, then you're onto something. You need to preserve slightly odd things.
Those Royce's were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor. Famously Verve Kleek it's the one with the yellow late idiosyncrasies kind of count double. Do you have any advice 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 Sutherland. Rory is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy 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 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 guests on this podcast, and I can now see why.
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Don't forget to subscribe and follow it 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 Sutherland.

Rory, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
That's pleasure. It's a uh an audience I don't normally speak to.
And so 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.
All the bad ones necessarily fail.
Uh the other thing I'd say is that
Timing is so important that
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 T V portal, sorry, Facebook the metal of the portal.
And I and I I I I bought it for about a hundred and twenty dollars. It plugs into your T V, 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 five hundred dollars worth of equipment, which they were selling for about a hundred and twenty. 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 article weren't saying this is brilliant. They were saying who would allow Facebook
To put a camera in their home.
And so th 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
Yeah, 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 onto something. The urge to appear serious.
Is in many ways a disaster in marketing.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
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I had a conversation earlier today 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
A good degree of
Disruption.
So it's 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 Lurby, of course, the French designer, called Maximally 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, but e well.
Actually even the iPhone, let's face it, okay.
Was proceeded.
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, the
One of the things I always point out is that idiosyncrasies
Kind of count double.
The wonderful thing actually years ago, back in the nineteen
Nineties.
Ogilvy won the Jaguar account.
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 jaguar of the nineteen nineties.
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 flipped the switch.
In the Jaguar you pressed the button at 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 because 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. Uh because I don't drive many Rolls Royces.
But for years Rolls Royce was the last car now obviously now cars dip 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 tree 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 phone No, you're too young. Yeah, I do, of course. MCI. You do, okay. The 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 particularly frequently, and you got sort of twenty percent off calls to those numbers.
I think it started off with ten.
And I think they eventually ramped it up to kind of twenty five, but actually most people ninety it's it's a pareto principle. Most people make eighty percent of their calls to probably five or six numbers.
No.
What was interesting about that was it garnered vi it was in a sense irrational.
Okay.
But it garnered much more interest than if you've simply reduced the cost of calls by fifteen, twenty percent across the board. Because you had to stimulate the simul uh you know stipulate your numbers, and because you had to you know
Hans Leep.
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 rating when friends and family came to the UK. It was introduced
From MCI by market 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 mum and nine adult lines. Yeah. This was the kind of thing.
But those kind of things which actually
slightly they're a slight little splinter on the attention. They're the 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 the sender is slightly out of work.
Those those things have a place, actually.
I mean famously Verve Clique the F the French champagne house, their labels ended up yellow by mistake.
And I think there was some printing error and they thought uh we okay, we have these stupid yellow Lebos, and we will send them to Le Roast Beef in England. We didn't want to 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 gonna 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 you know, if you can't remember the number, it's the 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 four, 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 Wakefred for twenty four thousand pounds, so about thirty thousand dollars 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 twenty four thousand pounds, thirty thousand dollars, and ended on BBC four. And then it became hugely popular, and then it migrated to BBC Two. 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 Danish 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, Well why did you do that? I said, What made you buy it? And he said
Great phrase.
Well 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 it, 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 not sitting there going, what the hell is going on here? Why is this man doing this?
Basically they're a they're they're a bit like us, they're enough like us that we basically figure out what's going on.
But then
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 they're the right amount of weird.
And I think I think that's true of product design. I think with Raymond Lowe, 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 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.
What might have been a razor.

with an electric motor which was th they could somehow make it insanely quiet by using some
weird machine learning algorithm about what caused the noise.
I said to him, but 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.
Yeah. 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 optimise for things.
I love all these examples you're sharing of.
Ways products stand out.
Sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally.
If you if I were 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 like 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 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 Yin and Yang.
In other words, what I say is the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea.
You know
Th I would 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.
It'd be pretty cool to check into a hotel where basically you just walked in with your mobile phone and unlocked your room. That'd 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.
Um
The shower, I hope'cause that's always a
baffling thing. Uh and that actually make you a cup of tea in the room while you're filling out the paperwork at your vast desk.
Yeah, they're both pretty great ways to check into a hotel. They compete 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.
uh uh you know, uh where everything was kind of linear 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. Yeah, we're basing our decision making on kind of high school maths.
Question.
Yeah. It always bothers me, by the way, that intelligence tests are multiple choice.
Yeah, the SAT is a multiple choice in the US, I think, aren't they?
Very weirdly, great aunt of mine actually was
Oh, she spend some time in the US.
I think in Princeton was actually involved with the guy who designed those kind of early intelligence tests.
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 talk.
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 memorising poetry than white people were.
Okay.
And yeah, 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
I'm I'm slightly proud of my great aunt for spotting this, calling this out as a bit of bullshit. 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 choice 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 tests, SAT measures, IQ tests.
They're all, you know, two buses leave a bus station, one travels due north, and
They all have an 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 a hundred kilometers apart.
Okay, and there's a single right answer.
And all the information in the question is germane to the answer, that you know, generally there isn't any extraneous information which you have to ignore.
And there was a famous experiment actually.
Which I think it originated in France, where they said, you know, this ship
Stops.
You know
uh you know, twenty seven goats get on, three sheep get off, then then they add twenty five cows. How old is the captain of the ship?
And what they found I 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 i if you 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.e. business decisions, which anything that involves human behavior
It 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 n none of those things are met in real world decisions. And yet we select and promote people.
On the
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 the 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 this way. In other words, it's a much more
You know you know how an 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. Mm-hmm
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 Craken, which is a kind of
It's effectively a way a way of managing utilities in a much more sophisticated pricing environment.
No.
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
Their 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 ten, fifteen, twenty people.
Uh in terms of how they actually achieve their ends.
Uh the second example is Shopify.
where their customer service teams are in groups of ten.
And Toby
Shannon, who was the chief operating officer of
uh Shopify.
modelled this on sports teams. He said if you look at teams of people in sport, your typical sport will have somewhere between sort of
Yeah, okay, rugby might be fifteen and soccer is eleven and
cricket's eleven, but generally teams have those double digit kind of team sizes.
And he thought there was something meaningful about that. And so there
Although it although it meant uh, you know, in some ways a much less lean structure.
Because in normally in a call centre environment, you'd have one person managing a hundred people.
And you had effectively a team leader
with a team of ten.
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 a hundred people and you pull at 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
Yeah, there's the Dunbar number, famously, of a hundred and fifty people, which is the size of sort of military units and Oxbridge colleges and so on. And that there's that famous Dun Dunbar number coined by Robin Dunbar.
One is described as
The number of people you know is
Where you could join a conversation
in which they were engaged with someone else.
Without it feeling weird.
Mm.
It's brilliant different most people know about a hundred and fifty 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 hundred and fifty 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
But again.
And that's the Dunbar number a hundred and fifty. There does seem to be some number around sports teams or around ten.
So that's a way of designing for humanity rather than designing for the organograph.
And a third case would be uh talking to someone at some a very successful British
Online retailer called A. O.
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
Yeah, 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 mum be proud of what you've done?
You know, they they actually said not not those kind of metrics of, you know, speed and you know, efficiency and how many deliveries did you make.
But the way in which they kind of define customer service
And you know, this would apply to call centre staff as well, is
You know
You know, imagine treat the customer like you're talking to a grand.
I said there are lots of different ways you might talk to your your grandmother. You've all got different grandmothers, et cetera. But basically everybody knows what that means.
And similarly, you know, make your mum proud.
There's effectively the brief.
But 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 gamed.
or they lead to a complete distortion of behaviour.
The second thing with metrics
Is the
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
The tokens, 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 chief marketing or or operating officer for Zappos.
You won't believe this. I think that he he refused to make
Speed.
a measure in the call centre. 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 a customer service call which was seven hours long.
Okay. No, I think it involved a couple of bathroom visits on both sides. I have no idea what the problem was that actually changed that. But that was almost a point of principle that if it takes seven hours to solve the problem
That's how long we spend on the line, but
And so this this
This business where in the urge for quantification
And the urge for what you might call de psychologization.
of problems. In other words, you define them by entirely
objective, non psychological, non emotional measures.
We've actually made we've actually created what I call Soviet style capitalism.
Yeah, it's deeply demotivating. It's all about kind of
Yeah, quarterly targets. Quarterly targets.
I mean at least the Soviet Union had a five year plan.
Okay.
We've got these stupid quarterly obsessions with, you know
Revenue for
you know, our meeting our forecast for quarter two. Okay.
And effectively people feel
Yeah, it's like
metropolis and people feel fundamentally dehumanized by this.
Um
And you know, and and the c the persistent cost cutting.
has effectively
Destroyed.
much of the pleasure of the workplace, I think.
Yeah, because there's no discretion.
There's no sort of discretionary judgment allowed any more 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, right? Uh you know, and that would include not only
economics or
reason or logic
It would also include things like ethics, for example.
What's fair.
And you know, this attempt the great ballad Canadian philosopher I didn't really know much about until I came across him at a festival in Wales where he was speaking called John Ralston Sall.
Who writes
He writes actually.
I wish I'd known about this when I wrote my book,'cause it is kind of
Uh there's a book famously called
Pascal's bastards, I think Voltaire, sorry, Voltaire's bastards.
And it's all about how effectively the French and 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's not designed to be used in isolation.
You've used this term
psychological psychology.
Psychology, psychology.
Uh 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 then
The kind of
mechanisms for decision making
That economists their own.
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
Yeah, we've evolved to
effectively operate in decision making under uncertainty.
Sir Simon Golded, and yet most of the actual design of procedures that we encounter.
are designed for effectively
information.
uh, you know, decision making under certainty.
That's a very special case which
Actually never applies completely, I would argue.
Um
but or certainly very rarely uh 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 in the savannah if an animal's very predictable and very logical.
They're a lot easier to catch. Yeah.
Yeah, can you just talk a bit about that because I No no I mean I I mean things like you know the ability to behave irrationally, um you know
Okay, there's a claim and I I by by the way.
Of all the negative reviews
I get. I they weren't where I expected at all. There's about three pages in the book.
Where I basically say being a bit doubled Trump.
has its virtues, okay, which is that no one's gonna dick with you because they're not entirely sure what you're gonna do. Now bear in mind, okay, I'm this isn't this does not mean I'm I'm absolutely
an uncritical admirer of the
Of the double. 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 gotta you gotta learn in that business is
You know
No one's gonna survive in New York real estate if they can actually predict what you're gonna do.
Okay.
Okay.
And I imagine okay, that is not a world where being completely consistently logical, never losing your temper, never walking away from a deal, etcetera.
You know, none of you you have to be able to play th 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, if 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.
Yeah.

Okay, if I'm never going to fight back against anybody who's slightly taller than me
Very rational, but I'm gonna spend my whole life being dicked around by people who are quarter of an inch.
you know, high taller than life.
All right.
Yeah, very rational. Okay, they're bigger, 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 Trivers, the evolutionary biologist, is that
When a hare is being chased by a dog.
It it goes into this incredibly random pattern of movement where it will kind of zoom straight up in the air, it will suddenly do a ninety degree 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.
There's got a random number generator in the has
I think it's called um in submarine warfare it's called doing a crazy ivory
Where you just execute kind of crazy maneuvers. It was like Russian submarines when being pursued by American submarines would do something called a crazy Ivan. And the hair has the 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 is
cannot give away any tell tale 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 uh there are other reasons. I mean, there are other reasons why we need to be irrational for m 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 maximise. 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 extraordinarily 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 are eating the purple berries and nobody's touching the yellow ones.
In that environment it 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 low cost way of discovering low variance, but you know, low downside behaviors.
By the way, very interestingly, in actually was an AI which actually went into investigating what would be necessary for more people to have solar panels
And more people to have heat pumps.
And it is not telling 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 had a heat bump.
Okay.
Yeah.
To an economist.
That drives them practically insane because they go, No, no, no. The behavior of your neighbours should be entirely relevant to you, you know. You should simply do the maths and calculate how much you've save, compare that against the return you get in a high interest savings account, and then decide whether the heat pump is worthy of the investment.
Mm-hmm.
That's not how we work.
We're not prepared to be the first person.
uh you know, with the with the worst solution.
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, but going back. Okay.
With anything electrical, it kinda 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 will
No, what they're doing is they're learning but you know, a 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 have friends who bought the early flat screen televisions and they paid thousands and thousands of dollars for these things. And you go into their house, you go God, that's shit.
Okay.
Ha
Yeah, so I mean.
An awful lot of these things are in you know, instinctive intuition.
that we've just learnt through experience and we don't know what the future's gonna bring, but actually
It it's what you might call decision making based on a reasonable expectation of something.
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Why is this so important? So, you know, there's many ways to try to win in business. There's you know, uh like the
Typical approach, just let's think and brainstorm and come up with our best ideas.
Your your basic premise is
Too many of these are just very rational, logical
approach us to a solution. Why why is it so important?

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 Jean Claude Van Damme, who is known as the Muscles from Brussels.
But the old British joke twenty years ago was that there are no famous Belgians.
Okay.
And it's it's a bit weird. Why are they 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 are actually a lot of famous Belgians.
But everybody assumes that are the French.
Or they're called Flemish because they painted in the
Sixteenth century or something.
And
Interestingly, for the same reason that
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, everything was a bit crap, and then Henry Ford 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 nineteen sixteen.
advertising the benefits of electricity in the home. In fact, that was an advertising campaign that went on for about thirty years. I spent an early part of my working career in advertising persuading people to get the internet in the late nineteen nineties.
Dial up into that.
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 Bernersley came up with the web and everybody wanted the internet.
No.
Twenty 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 arsehole when people said, What's your mobile number? and you couldn't give one.
And also it became impossible to meet your friends, 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, Well sold you then.
Okay. But but again, most of these things, including small parts of vaccination.
Okay.
Uh Edward Jenner, who basically came up with the cowpox as of
vaccination against smallpox, which was the pl you know, absolute plague of the eighteenth and
Uh.
Possibly came from the new world.
I'm not quite sure, but it was absolute plague of like the seventeenth, eighteenth century.
And he comes up with this basic vaccination thing.
Huge opposition, unbelievable skepticism, massive suspicion. If you thought that anti COVID vaccination was something, this was on a par with that.
His marketing coup was getting the British Royal Family to vaccinate their children.
I think.
Okay.
No.
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 their success.
I mean there's Steve Jobs was not a technologist, he was a pitch man.
He was a huckster. 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 co.
Okay.
But he was absolutely brilliant in everything from product design to
uh you know, to
Uh to to focusing on a
uh on a limited number to extraordinary taste to giving those presentations and you know selling things as a magician.
Thank you.
Making making everybody believe that Apple was capable of magic and therefore you didn't need the skepticism.
No.
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
But in in hindsight we we we forget the marketing and we don't say
But we never say, because of the great marketing, I bought that product. We go, I bought it'cause 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 electricity. We had to persuade people to vaccinate against smallpox. Uh
Kenicillin came up against a lot of
you know, hostility in very early stages, right.
I think
Yeah also.
Let's not forget we're only looking at the successes.
I think they've been great products which are genuinely intrinsically g 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
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. Yeah, I don't have one in my other little flat.
It's barbaric that the Western hemisphere dry wipes, right? The whole of the Middle East has a bun gun.
You know, in Japan your your lavatory quite rightly cleans your rectum with water as God intended.
Okay.
And for some reason we in the sophisticated West are there with a dry bit of paper straping it up over our anus.
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
Back in the seventeen twenty.
You gotta 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 Romans never invented the stirrup.
Would you believe that?
They do.
They didn't actually have a stirrup for horses. So you basically had to cling on with your knees.
So w what's so fascinating the wine box, by the way, really fascinates me because
In a logic well the Kindle has only really, you know, it's kind of taken up to a I thought where the Kindle and Tablet came along, I'll admit this, although okay, well that's the end of the fling 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 carrying a library around with me, which is, you know.
Quite on a long plane flight.

pack eight books and decide which one you're gonna 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 tablet.
Remarkable. Okay. People like that actually'cause 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 uh 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 cut them up with wide bottles, okay.
But
All of these things vastly better.
You know, keep it in the fridge, daddy daddy dad. Well you know.
Didn't didn't succeed.
Entirely psychological.
You know the in terms of logical, you know, products
And I'm always fascinated, I mean the Japanese toilet. Why the hell is that you know?
And I n I looked actually recently at the most expensive flat in London, which is some place in Knightsbridge, which is going for like a hundred and ten million
Dollars or something like that.
And
You better wipe your own ass.
Okay.
Oh
It's a hundred and ten million for this place and the toilets now I imagine if if there's a Middle East owner they'll go and retrofit some bungums in there.
Yeah.
How flaming weird is that.
But you know, I mean
Seriously strange. And you realise that actually
You know, I mean Google Glass, I mean it was a kind of marketing cock up, they launched a bit too soon. Then they only gave the bloody glasses to developers. Now 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 I would have bought Google Glass, actually, even at the insane launch price of about a thousand dollars.
Because I would really, really like being able to walk around now. I don't know what the I'm troubling 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 eye updates, a kind of heads up display for shit that's going on in my life that just reminds me of stuff.
I easily pay without having to look at a digital watch for
I I've I've bought these bloody both Android and Apple watches.
And yeah.
I might as well get my phone ad, basically.
I've got an ordinary analogue 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 Lemmy.
You know.
All that stuff.
be really, really good. I I've no idea whether Meta Portal T, 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.
So
You know, don't think the other thing I'd say is don't think because a product's failed 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.
All right.
You know, that actually
I mean, uh quite a lot of internet ideas failed, I think. Quite a lot of online ideas failed'cause they were just mistimed.
Typically, you know, some good ideas were too early.
Great little thing actually called the chumbee.
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 you're probably an iPhone user, but what we call um
widgets, okay, on the screen. And they go, Th these are the 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 from the New York Times. And they just cycle through that stuff. They'd sit in a little cuddly little thing.
I I had about three of these. I thought they're fantastic.
But again
I mean I okay, I'll give him two examples of this about timing, right?
It's nineteen
N no, hold on. It's nineteen eighty nine.
Okay.
I sign out a mobile phone, it's like a brick, it's made by Mocor Motorola, sign out a mobile phone from the office in nineteen eighty nine.
And I'cause 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 signed one out, you told your team what your number was for the day, and you said out to your

So I'm walking down Oxford Street with this mobile phone and someone rings me, so I haven't on the choice, so I have to answer it.
Okay. So I'm speaking on a mobile phone in Oxford Street, bus well of the business streets in London in nineteen eighty nine.
Two people shout abuse at me from passing cars.
Using a mobile phone.
Second case.
In I let me see if I can date this, it would be about two thousand and
I'm crazy.
I guess about two thousand and three, two thousand and four.
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 C D ROM of most of the stuff, and you went online and ordered your groceries and they delivered them to you.
And I mentioned to someone in two thousand it would have been the early two thousands.
That I actually ordered my home groceries 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, you fucking course.
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 m I mean okay.
One story, I I then bought my own mobile phone. This would have been about nine this wasn't it was eighty nine I was borrowing the phone. It would have been about ninety five ninety six when I actually had my own mobile phone, maybe ninety four.
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 is a biochemist uh
Pen, I think, at the time.
And I said something on the phone, I'm sitting on the self of a bus.
And I said something on a phone which made it obvious I 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 at the top of the bus.
I actually thought there was a r mild risk of physical attack.
Because that was such an extraordinarily twatty thing to do.
And I certainly read it's because I'm old, I'm fifty eight.
You know.
I suddenly realised 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.
That you know.
Okay, the smartphone was pr the the the mobile phone itself was not rapid.
They've existed for about
fifty years, right?
You had to be pretty rich and they most mostly were in people's cars.
I I saw someone with a portable telephone.
I think in nineteen eighty four.
And that was r a really weird thing for some of them.
They they weren't fast. The the smartphone was pretty fast, I grant that.
That was that would that was a f that was a freak.
Exception.
Most of these things are really goddamn slow, and also if you get your marketing wrong or if you miss if you mistime 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 have we have survivorship bias.
We only look at the successes. No one's there going
Yeah, I mean certain things like

I mean
The fact that we still open our houses with keys for crying out loud.

Yeah, all that stuff. I agree.
I'm excited.
I'm excited for the uh Tesla version of Keys.
Yeah I'm completely. I mean 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 s 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 has great 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, I suppose the sixth century B C, or was that there about fifth? I mean I shouldn't know.

Uh the ancient Persians when they had to deliberate
They debated everything twice, once while sober, and
And once well drunk.
And only if they agreed in both states would they go ahead with the 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 a double lock.
of 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's three point seven five
But before I go and present this, I'm gonna 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 f I think the first decade of the twentieth century, an early electric car.
Watch watch this on Jay Leno's garage, by the way. I I think that Jay Leno is a greater philanthropist than Bill Gates.
Okay. Bill Gates is quite useful if you're an Africa or if you've got malaria or something, but he's not much use 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.
I
I mean I'd have seen door this guy.
Interestingly.
I 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.
What?
The user imagery was because it was quiet, you didn't have to hand crank it. It didn't
give off fumes, uh 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 Jloppy racing and the kind of customization were
All the farm boys
We're using gasoline cars.
No
Fast forward.
What's so fascinating, fast forward to twenty twenty five. 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.
'Cause I think they're great.
Okay. They're lovely to drive. They they're like a limousine and a go-kart.
Uh, they have very few moving parts.
They're incredibly quiet.
Uh that they're just
Lovely.
Okay, I mean just
Drive one and you'll see what I mean.
And that when I write in favor of electric cars
I get all these
Comments in the spectator comments below.
Of people who really hate.
And when they write to me, what it boils down to is they think
User imagery.
Okay, like Google lasts.
Right.
And actually there's a problem with all tech products,'cause 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 realise 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.
No.
Interesting thing about this.
Okay.
Is that
In very few cases I can encounter her.
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 so we decided we get a diesel right.
Right. I don't know why, okay. But you meet these people, you go to environmental conferences and you say, So you're really keen on the environment, you've got an electric car. Well, we thought about getting one. Meanwhile, all the people in like Essex, right?
You know, Jersey, right?
Who just really like cars.
Or really like tech.
Other people buying electric cars.
got almost nothing to do with environmental um credential.
And yet.
By actually imbuing these electric cars with kind of Prior 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.
No, actually.
What okay.
I I when I had an electric car three years ago, there are fewer charging points than there are now.
But what I noticed was really odd.
Okay.
With the
If you wanted to charge in like Bill Ricky.
Okay, in Essex. Okay, imagine New Jersey, okay, imagine
You know, Trenton.
Okay.
Loads of charging places there.
What?
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 leads of charges.
Oh what the hell's going on there?
I
To be honest, okay.
What's happen is we've we've we've imbued
A uh electric car owners with its 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'cause it'd be really cool to have a car that runs on the sun.
Okay. I quite like selling the panels of my house. Not really'cause I'm the sake of the planet, but I like at dinner parties to you know
Or rather lunchtime, wouldn't it? Yeah. To go to a picnic and go, Oh no, I'm getting I'm gonna I'm getting two kilowatt.
Oh.
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, and the peacock got the tail.
Okay, but most other birds did the display with the wings to look cool. 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 twenty people like me.
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 airfriar evangelist.
Literally going back m over ten years.
fifteen years ago, I was like the John the Baptist of Airfriars.
Uh you know, and I I'd occasionally say to an audience of five hundred people, if you got anybody here got Mayor and there'd always be six people that go, Yeah, best thing I've ever bought.
Okay.
And it suddenly occurred to me that actually in a way
That that actually annoys everybody else.
It's not people going, Oh, these people with air fryers, they really like these air fryers. Maybe I'll look at getting an air fryer instead. It's like
These people are in a cult.
What you have to realise working in marketing 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.
Mm.
Yeah. 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
that 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 unlo it's actually slightly an unnatural state. So you've 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 a speech or we can do it. Uh what apparently they built they built the first Walkman
On the
I think there was a thing called the Sonic Talkman.
Which was a dictating machine, which had both a speaker and it had a rec a microphone.
And it would have cost like fifty cents a a dollar per unit of the Walgman 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 i is I think it was Akea 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 costs 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 a 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 dicttaphone? Does it have a corporate function? You know, should I use it to record concerts, et cetera.
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, 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 don't 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 out.
With I suppose it's kinda Detroit model.
Of kind of production.
The American diner was you know, how do you want your eggs?
You know.
Substitutions.
You know?
uh, you know, over easy, sunny side up, poach, scramble, et cetera. The whole thing was about customization.
And so this is what I mean. 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 colour.
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 sizes of wheels.
five colours, I think five basic colours and two premium ones. It's about right.
You know, that's kind of about manageable.
You know, whereas
Yeah, I I I had a look at
Uh the customizing
the new electric range over today.
And it's just
Well
It drives you insane because you know, you suddenly realize you're gonna 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 a last 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 your startup
You're trying to figure out how do we build a brand for what we're doing how
Do you have any advice for early stage founders to help?
build their brand, strength of 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 we forget this, okay.
Advertising often talks about brand in this incredibly nuanced way about differentiation and this and that and the other.
You gotta be distinctive.
Okay.
Undoubtedly.
You've got to be consistent.
For obvious reasons.
Okay. And you've got to stick at it.
Visually.
Without dicking around too much.
But actually
The reason advertising agencies never say, We're gonna make you famous
Is because it sounds too obvious.
Okay. Well yeah, obviously, yeah, but then let's sort of talk about f
It is. It's about fame.
Okay.
In the
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 uh actually you didn't think of this as an application for your product, but I've actually got this, you know, I actually use it for this.
Okay.
So 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
Yeah.
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 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.
Yeah, they'll always put T V or something or
online, but actually they don't know how they heard about it. They just kinda 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 almost similar to the kind of heuristic of, you know
Is everybody else eating this? Have I eaten it before? And have I heard of people eating this?
Okay.
That's you know, it's it's part of that same package of, you know, right in the motherboard at human psychology.
So fame is i 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
Well she's heard of you, she'll call back.
Well, if they haven't heard of you, they probably won't call back. What's that worth? Well, 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 cock up once, okay?
If you're famous.
Right.
People you know, people will give you if you've got a great brand. The 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
Rams that mean business.
It's a great book.
It deserves to be much more famous, actually.
And
His prence in that book which says having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode.
And I genuinely 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,'cause you don't know what your score would have been if you were playing on hard mode or
psycho mode. 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 uh
You know.
you know, there they're they're holding some 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 short term 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.
I had.
The first few years I had a pension, I go
paying this guy a few hundred quid a month and look, I mean, you know, half it's gone in commission and there's 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 the waste. Oh look, it's hardly gone up at all.
Yeah.
What a ball. What a waste of time.
I thought that for about three years.
I'm fifty eight now.
And I got a pension.
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 which actually is about power laws.
It's not about that kind of linear
Bullshit.
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 cons and we're 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 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 fake be famous?
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean I mean cons consistency, distinctiveness.
Um
Probably yeah, clarity. Clarity. And yeah, just be famous.
Great.
Yeah, I mean you know some sort of pr some sort of clarity of promise, I think.
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.
Yeah, I I I don't mean a serial killer celebrity, I mean a famous actor, okay.
One thing you wouldn't think about is are they gonna steal my wallet, are they gonna mug me, are they gonna do anything with?
Yeah.
They may have lots, lots of vices.
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 gonna be much more cautious about disappointing their customers
or risking negative
Feedback.
than someone nobody's ever heard of.
Right.
Um I mean and let's be honest, okay, it's even I think it's even more extreme in the United States than it is in the UK. Yeah, the relationship people have with celebrities is kind of
Hervion Where?
You know, they you know, they imbue these people with superpowers. They're actors, right?
They
Sure smart.
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 p take it to the board and three people on the board have never heard of the company, so they want you to go back and check with so and so so.
And then you walk in and you know, and it's kinda you're 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 Beachland style restaurant.
We'll stock it.
Yeah. And I've I can ask for this anywhere.
Okay.
And if they haven't got it, it's their fault, not mine.
That's
That's really kind of mega fame.
But equally and in B to B there's an inflection point in B to B marketing, okay, which is that
If
No one ever got fired for buying IBM, right? We know the famous phrase.
If you appoint Price Waters or EY or whatever to your audit
Okay.
And something goes wrong.
Everybody blames them.
If you appoint someone nobody's ever heard of to be your auditor
And something goes wrong. Everybody blames you for not appointing Christ Waterhouse 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 Ryanair, even though they're actually pretty good and 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. Okay.

And if I ring up and say, The Ryan Airflight'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.
Is your 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 th this is the other thing with brands.
It's not just a simple
Consumer
It's not just a simple business consumer relationship. There are all kinds of things as 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 that 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
nonlinear compounding factors. Okay.
Yeah, we just have to acknowledge this is a different kind of maths.
And yet we're being judged on a kind of
You know
X minus Y equals Z.
Baths.
Doesn't make any sense.
Maybe as a final question, is there anything you wanna leave listeners with, folks that are building product, any lasting piece of nugget or advice?
Try and do
The psychological and the technological
And the economic for that matter.
No, 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, it's you know, it it it's it's got an inter it it allows them to do something significantly new.
By using
Some clever application of that.
Try and use those three things in parallel.
Because I think what most businesses do is they try and do things in series. And businesses borrowed an awful lot from the kind of Fordist, Taylorist 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 are 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 realised 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, but chewing gum a lot more than they like the baking powder. So as a result Wrigley became a chewing gum company.
So but
We we're always trying to make this thing linear because when we tell stories backwards we post rationalise 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 m marketing and innovation are two sides of the same
You either, as I often say, you can either work out what people want and 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 they're and actually the greatest thing is managed to do both.
Simple as that.
So d uh don't do it one and then the other. Don't leave marketing to the last minute.
But equally work you know, work in parallel as far as you can.
Uh where can people find your book and Ned Stock point them real quick. Nudstalk.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 Sutherland.
Uh the audiobook's probably the best thing to buy'cause I actually read it myself and I kinda riffed
A bit.
Um
From that.
But also available on Kindle and and uh from all good bookshops and 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 joy.
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