The Power of Surprise - Part 2 (with Rory Sutherland)

One of the many incidental pleasures of taking the Orient Express is the details in each carriage of the history of that particular carriage. Usually built in the 1920s, somewhere in the North England, they all had very colorful paths, perhaps beginning for instance as part of the Rome Express, being commandeered by the German High Command during the war, becoming part of a completely different service in Scandinavia for a while, and ending up in the cotton of an eccentric schoolmaster before they were reclaimed, reconditioned and returned to service. The carriage I was in had been part of something called the Doval Express, which I've never heard of before, but has become one of my favourite examples of brilliant innovation thinking, because the Doval Express was the train that scandalised Paris. The Doval Express was launched just over a century ago to encourage wealthy prisons to visit the coastal casino playground of Doval that we can't. It was a Friday afternoon train journey from Paris to Doval, and it only took an afternoon, so laying on and using the service was relatively easy. But the marketing challenge, if you like, was twofold. First of all, how could they not only just launch a transfer service but actually offer an experience as you left Paris that brought to life the promise and the pleasures of Doval? And secondly, how could they get Doval and that afternoon train to be the talk of Paris? And the solution was brilliantly simple. Even though, as I say, it was only a two-hour trip in the afternoon, even though it was a daytime train, they added to the seated passenger carriages for additional ones, booker sleeper carriages with full dampeds. The respectable prisons of the 20s were shocked by the implications of this detail of the train. The newspapers of the day wrote about it, people talked about it, they wanted to know who was booking those Friday afternoon train beds and who were they taking in them. They're spouses or their lovers, because whatever they were doing in them, it obviously didn't involve sleeping. And Doval and the train that took you there was suddenly the talk of the town. And all it required was taking something, a sleeping carriage, that would have been perfectly instant in one context as a night service and putting it in an entirely different context, one where it's present-stripped with suggestion. And as we saw in the last episode, making something more interesting doesn't necessarily mean the drama or the character that you wrap around something powerful though there's can be. Sometimes it can be as simple as changing the context. The Doval Express is simply an extension of Rory Sutherland's contention in this episode, really, that the way in which you present information fundamentally affects the way you think about things and the way you emotionally respond to things. So today, Rory comes on to talk about why he believes we are thinking entirely the wrong way about the payback from marketing and perhaps more generally in business. Instead of expecting a steady stream of predictable results from marketing, we need to think that there's been more like in the film business or the pharmaceutical business, where some bets have disproportionately valuable returns for us. And that's what we need to help the business understand as well. And as I was listening to him lay it out, I wondered whether that on even payback was how he should be thinking about the return on our own efforts to make things more interesting for audience as well. How when we produce in Mass Farahale's words, situations to really engage the people we want to engage, we want that to be a course of general raising of our ability to engage and hold attention of course. And at the same time, some of these productions will also have a disproportionately larger influence than others in ways we can't necessarily predict. So listen to what he's talking about with that in mind as well and see if it seems true to you or not. Before we start, there are two simple concepts that Rory refers to in this conversation that are important foundations for us and so briefly worth setting up here before we start. You may be very familiar with them but they were new to me. The first is the exploit explored trade off. Essentially the exploit explored trade off is about the choices that we make as individuals and as businesses in any given situation. Do we choose to exploit what we've done in the past? pursue the tried and true strategies we relied on up to now, which have the benefits obviously of being more efficient and where the results are relatively certain, but also won't take us anywhere new and may have a timely to diminishing returns. Or do we choose to explore rather than exploit to be choose to explore new options knowing that in doing so we will have less predictable returns and it may take more effort. But could bring with it new types of solution and new scale of result. So the exploit explored trade off lies in trying to find the optimum balance between these two different strategies. The second concept to briefly mention is the distinction economics between the thin tails and fat tails that he talks about. Thin tails and fat tails refer to the distributions or outputs created by the actions that are taken whether by us as individuals or at a more macro scale really an industry perhaps. He talks about subprime crisis as an example of the consequences of the ways and thinking behaving that an industry took for instance. So a thin tail distribution sometimes called a Gaussian distribution is one that has a lower probability of extreme events occurring. I mean that it's more predictable and reliable in its outputs. That's a thin tailed distribution. A fat tailed distribution on the other hand has a higher probability of extreme events making it more unpredictable and risky. The key difference is this likelihood of extreme events. Fat tails mean rare but impactful events are more common. Adversely impacting predictability but are potentially offering bigger upsides as well. Whereas thin tails keep most data near the average, making them more reliable for planning purposes. As he says, CEOs have been CFOs before gravitates what's thin tails. But is that really how marketing works? The conversation starts by exploring one of his great loves, behavioral science. So coming back to nudges and coming back to behavioral science. One of the things that strikes me about my own rods of prasay experiences of it is how very often the nature of the nudge can be in a surprising form. So typically obviously the thing about a smiley face was more influential on you reducing your road speed than rational stuff. Also my fun was one of my sons that me a thing about stoplights in Iceland now being in the shape of red isn't the shape of heart for instance. So it's just a small change but it's just an interesting thing about okay so like being stationary rather than stationary being a bad thing. It's just an interesting shift isn't it in nudging your behavior? The first more perception doesn't have a sense of proportion. Okay so it isn't necessary to assume that the things that are huge interventions that are costly necessarily work decisively or have a huge effect. And it's not safe to assume either that things that are inexpensive to do will only have a small effect. Okay. A lot of people use this excuse to say we never need to do anything expensive that is necessary true because things that are surprising tend to be discretionary and they tend to be the thing that the finance director wants to kill off first. Double tree cookie you know precisely because people aren't expecting a cookie you don't have to provide them with a cookie and the finance person is going to go well this isn't in our service level agreement no other hotel provides a cookie when you check in. So this is the first thing I'm going to cut for the budget but it's also the only thing that people notice and remember many cases. So to to that point I remember talking to somebody at Virgin Atlantic about the little rubber duck I'm really used to get a rubber duck and they said that was fine while we were to playing three planes for base five play that came a point where we were spending 300,000 pounds a year on the rubber duck. At that point it comes to the finance director attention he said and he started calling it the 300,000 pound rubber duck at which point you know it was dead and buried effectively. But that was such a telegraphic and wonderfully distinctive emblem of everything that's of the joy of Virgin Atlantic that it was madness to cut it. Yes also the correct way to describe the price is the price per noticing passenger. Fantastic. Not the overall price because let's face it finance director spending a fortune on the fucking engines and no one no one getting off the plane can tell you whether they were general electric or rolls rice. So the price per attention quotients that's a really, really cheap thing to do. John Roberts who runs a when I last spoke to him a just written a check for about a million pounds for teddy bears which they give out to people when they deliver to a home with kids. So he's still doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's another point which I think we have to make because I think the whole marketing is being the devil by this. I mentioned the fact that the the efficacy of different interventions is not necessarily proportionate. It's also not only predictable. Okay. Consequently, I think there's a terrible mistake every single person in marketing is making which is massively exacerbated by the false gods of quantification sold to us by our tech lords and masters. Which is the idea that marketing should be a proportionate exercise. Okay, now the same tell it. I know quite well he's on record is saying marketing is fact-tailed. Now what that means, okay, so there are Gaussian things where most things are kind of average in their effects and you get a very small number of extreme applies. Did you have a photo? fat tails distribution where there is a much higher chance of extreme offense. And I would argue, okay, that marketing, if you are a marketer, let's say you work on, I don't know, Gordon's Gin for 10 years, okay? Probably in the course of your 10 years working on Gordon's Gin, 50 to 60% maybe more of the value you create will probably reside in three things you happen to do. Okay? So the relationship between time spent, effort spent and budget spent and overall effects is much closer to treasure hunting than it is to mining aluminium ore. But which I mean, is that you will dig a lot and sometimes you'll come up with almost nothing and sometimes you'll come up with a load of treasure, okay? And digging in the right place with a trial is actually better than digging in the wrong place with a mechanical excavator. Okay? So in other words, the payoff in marketing is this is similar to the film industry, okay? It's similar to venture capital. It's similar to pharmaceutical drug development where your 304 really big successes effectively pay for all the other activity. Now let's not say the other activity isn't profitable or worthwhile, but it's disproportionately less important than two or three small things you happen to do, which just have disproportionate kind of 10X effects. Okay? And therefore the way in which we're currently measuring and evaluating marketing and the way in which we're currently evaluating and measuring the time spent in marketing and advertising agencies, which is to demand that for every quantum of effort there is a matching quantum of revenue, okay? Is fundamentally wrong headed? It's the wrong maths. Roger Martin would say the difference between a good CEO, one of the most important requirements of a great CEO is they accept that business is probabilistic, not deterministic, which is why CFOs often don't make very good CEOs because they come from a world where the entire business is uncertainty reduction and they have to move into a role where to some extent what you're trying to do is actually increase your probability of serendipitous experiences, okay? You go through a world where you want to be certain to a world in which to some extent your job is to maximize the chances of getting lucky. This maths is really important because the financial crisis of 2008 basically happened because people were using a Gaussian distribution to calculate the probability of mass defaults in the housing market, okay? When they should have been using a fat tail distribution because at the tail, tail events go from being unbelievably unlikely to actually probable or highly possible, okay? And I would argue we might be making exactly the same mistake in marketing, which is by demanding a kind of proportionality of reward to effort from our marketing activity, which is fundamentally the wrong mindset. It should be a much more entrepreneurial mentality, which is I'm going to do this because one, the chance of success is by naming scarring teed, but if I do succeed, then the rewards will be disproportionate, okay? So fundamentally, I would argue that I would argue that a really good advertising agency, you wouldn't give the creative people much to do for a couple of days a week in the hope that they come up with something spontaneously. As it is, the entire advertising agency has run for the purpose of maximizing utilization. Okay, so coming back to surprise, there's two factors, I guess contextual facts to discuss. One is the predictability of the algorithm and personalization, and the second is the notion of frictionlessness. So let's talk about the algorithm first. So clearly, as the world moves supposedly towards personalization, algorithms feed us more of what we supposedly want, and therefore removes actually surprise from our lives. Do you think then actually, therefore the way that we're going in marketing and just the fact that the way that company is going to suffocate surprise, generally? Or do you think that there will be some kind of reckoning and people wake up and realize that that I think the reason that I'm weirdly famous on TikTok is because I'm a fat 59 year old man. Genuinely, so no one's sitting down, no one's sitting down and they'll be saying we'd like a TikTok presence, but it gone, hey, Rory, he's your guy, right? By the way, I like, I went to a conference last week, organized by the wonderful people at A-Win who do affiliate marketing. I like affiliate marketing because it provides something which digital advertising is mostly lacking, which is context, which is the context of the person doing the recommendation. And I think, you know, fundamentally a lot of research shows that an ad in the spectator is not the same as the same ad in the daily express, okay? But you know, fundamentally we interpret information with a very high degree of contextual sensitivity. And most digital stuff is served to us context free on the basis of, you know, an algorithm which we don't understand necessarily. And I think that affiliate marketing, it's un-necurd to me, is disproportionately rich because it has two components to it. It's the message and the messenger, okay? And the messenger has become detached from most digital advertising. So it basically floats around in the ESA, okay? Rather than being rooted in some medium or other, okay? Which gives us a frame of references to the significance and so forth, and likely target audience of the product being advertised. So that, but to get back, sorry, I'm not, I'm slightly ducking your question there, but I think that the algorithmic echo chamber, a really good algorithm would understand the explore, exploit trade-off. Just as a really good property algorithm would show you world card properties. I mean, obviously it depends what you're optimizing for, but I would argue that if you optimize for, let's say, I'm quite into trends, okay? And I quite like quite a bit of train content on a tick-tock, okay? But if you over-optimize for that, I'll find tick-tock actually, okay, enough of the trains already, even for someone like me who's very interested in trains. Okay, so the explore exploit, which isn't a trade-off, it's actually two mutually reinforcing parts of the same circular process, okay? The explore component is fat-tailed, the exploit component tends to be thin-tailed, okay? Exploite is very comfortable, comfortably sits within the realm of finance people and efficiency optimization merchants, the set of both. Explore, looked at in the short term, looks like an inefficiency, because it doesn't deliver predictable returns. Now, you need a good exploit function in order to prevent it to be worthwhile exploring. But at the same time, if you don't explore, you'll end up overexploiting the same thing to a point where you actually, in time, you become over-optimized on the past and you actually lose relevance. And you are vulnerable to someone who's got a much higher explore element to them and- I would argue there, if you only exploit and don't explore, which I think is what most companies are doing now, by the way. I think they're so interested in shoveling money into the more of the shareholders that they've actually neglected to invest in the future of the business. And so this is the B thing, I'm sorry to, because I always talk about this, and I always feel sorry for people who follow me on social media or, you know, because- but you have bees who basically follow the waggle dance, and that's a simple cost, you know, double entry bookkeeping thing of energy collected from going to known sources of pollen must exceed energy expended in the act of collection. Okay, that's double entry bookkeeping and it's fairly straightforward. It's a cost-benefit of analysis as it were. Okay, then there's exploration, which is fat-tailed, and along the journeys are a waste of time, one percent of the journeys may deliver 70% of the value. You're basically trying to get lucky, okay? If you don't do that, in the short term, you'll do very, very well, because you collected a lot of pollen by getting 100% of the bees all following the waggle dance. In the medium to long term, what goes wrong with that approach is threefold, okay? You can't adapt to changing circumstances, and you're over-optimised, you're trapped in a local maximum. You can't adapt to changing circumstances, so if the pollen you know about starts becoming depleted, you'll keep on trying to exploit it for too long. Two, you can't grow because you are constrained in your energy collection by what you already know. But three, in patissues, is the most important, is you can't get lucky. There's no upside, okay? You literally, you've minimised the downside to a point where you have no upside, and I would argue that since in marketing and in innovation and in business and in branding, okay, Serendipitous Lucky Accents, probably account for disproportionate high amount of growth and reinvention. If you cut yourself out off from the chance of actually making a lucky discovery, you will therefore be unlucky. A good example of a lucky discovery that you've been involved in in your own explorations. Quite often, and I'm sorry to keep gambling on, but he's much better than me, and I just trying to make him famous. Roger Martin would say, he argues that if you're looking for a creative strategy, there are three places to look. Analogy, anomaly, or the creative resolution of an assumed trade-off, interroute of thinking. So you take a trade-off that everyone you just assume is a given. You can't do both. You use an analogy which goes, that's funny, airlines do this, but hotels don't, for example. And we call it in the Bavril sounds practice, we call it lateral category analysis. And the third one is anomaly, which is literally that's funny. I never would have expected that. I wonder what it means. So that's quite, in some ways, that's quite serendipitous, but all of them require a measure of creativity, and a degree of being comfortable with uncertainty, which you don't find in the people who are only comfortable with exploit, not explore. Because the exploit people would rather have perfect prediction and measureability and no negative surprises. And they're perfectly happy to achieve that level of artificial certainty in sacrificing the opportunity to get lucky, which brings us back to that whole thing of, do I spend my whole life in a dark and rub? To minimize surprises, or do I have to have a healthy optimal, well-calibrated appetite for a certain degree of surprise in my life? I completely get that. And so, so when you when you are working with a client, do you try and encourage the client to go on this journey with you, or do you think this is up to the agency to do this on behalf of the client because they are being over-optimised themselves? Generally, I think you just have to create the environment, which probably means people from the agency and people from the client are not necessarily just people from the marketing department, where you maximise the chance of serendipitous insights. And this is where against vital, the people when those serendipitous insights occur are in the right mindset to appreciate their possible value and significance. The argument I'll make is that if you start a meeting from a mindset of scarcity and efficiency optimisation, you will never have a lucky idea. Because the boring idea, the benchmarked idea, the benchmark against our competitors idea, will always have a degree of kind of predictable, you know, cost savings are quantifiable and immediate opportunity costs are deferred and nebulous, okay? You will always focus on what is not what is. If you start with a scarcity mindset, and I've written about this in my new book actually, Mads Think, which I'm plugging, but you won't come out for fucking years because writing a book is a pain in the ass, okay? And AI can't do it. Okay, but my point I'm making here is that one of the most discussed appalling decisions of all time in business was Decker's decision not to sign the Beatles, but to sign Brian Poole and the Tremolo instead. A decision I'd establish part of the influence by procurement because they thought the Beatles who came from Liverpool would be more expensive in terms of travel costs whenever they want to record with them. Where Brian Poole and the Tremoloes came from barking, so it was practically just a travel card for those guys to see, not procurement's finest out. However, I said they realized something when I was writing a, well, we were thinking about it, which is, no, that wasn't a mistake. The mistake wasn't the Simon Brian Poole and the Tremoloes. They're good, but they're still operating, okay? You can still go and see, I think Brian Poole hived himself off, but the Tremoloes, I think these two years, he was still playing, right? Their audition for Decker's 62, generally the first 62, they're still playing. They had a few number ones. They're a good band, okay? No, no. The mistake was the assumption that you had to choose one or the other. And that was given to Mike Smith by his boss, which is, you can't have both. You can either sign the Beatles or you can sign Brian Poole and the Tremoloes. Actually, Brian Poole and the Tremoloes were exploit and the Beatles were explore. Right. Yes, that's interesting. And it's just given the choice between a sure thing and a wild card, and you can't do both. And you start from a mindset of whatever I do, I mustn't waste any money here. You'll always sign only Brian Poole and the Tremoloes. That was the mistake. Paul Brifell, sorry for them. There we go. They were perfectly worth signing. It's a band. It was good idea. The mistake was to say you can't do both. Now, you know, one of the things is that everybody in business now starts from the assumption that by maximising efficiency, we maximise effectiveness. That's only true if the future is perfectly enabled here. Yeah. And also if efficiency to our earlier conversation can actually generate attention at the right kind of level. Such an interesting conversation. First, let's reflect on that discussion about Virgin Atlantic's circled £300,000 rub and that still makes me laugh. I really like Roy's broader points both about where the real value in a business like an airline lies in terms of the consumer proposition. And how to frame that in a more compelling way with an internal audience. So I can have the right conversation about it with the people who make the big decisions. And second, I was struck by his thought that we are allowing ourselves to fall in with using what he calls the false gods of quantification and indeed the wrong maths taken from the worlds of CFOs and tech engineers who are brought up on predictable outcomes. Now, I could argue that whether we like it or not, that is the world that marketers have to operate in. So we need to at least be bilingual, but I'm very taken by his bigger challenge to us and have reframing a conversation that just for myself has been a part of my life for over 40 years now. And finally, I like to just thought that if what we need to do is help our team or client get lucky, we need to create the environment that makes that possible and the mindset that allows the value and the significance of those certain dipitasy insights be recognised when they occur. So let's pick it up again with Roy reflecting on his own experience of having lucky accidents. And then you can enjoy Roy starting to charmingly mess with me just for the fun of it, leading to some rather unexpected places. So you ask the question in my own life when I've had a lucky accident. I mean, just every now and then, I try and notice the dog that doesn't bark in the night. I mean, I remember, I mean, in market research groups, I'll sometimes go, this is weird. Why aren't they talking about this? Okay. And I'll suddenly, you know, I'll suddenly go, you know, my idea would be, I'll give you an example. It was a debate recently about Nespresso and they think their brand isn't as strong with like Gen Z or Gen Z, whatever it is, as it is with older generations. And my argument, I don't, I don't know, I won it actually, I rarely do, was to say, you're assuming that people aren't buying Nespresso machines because they don't like Nespresso, but maybe they don't like Nespresso because they haven't bought an Nespresso machine. So I at least said, look, look, we should consider the causation runs backwards. And then if you had, for example, an Nespresso student offer where, you know, as a student, you know, you can get an Nespresso machine for, you know, for, you know, two months of the year, for 50, you know, for the 20 quid, okay, reduced from 120. Students drink a fuck lot of coffee. I think it's going to pay for itself pretty rapidly. Are they okay? All right. Maybe we're trying to change attitude and then hope that behavior follows. Why don't we just change behavior and see if that doesn't change the other? Yeah. So is this probably, because you've talked in the past about, besides sometimes needing to surprise others, you also need to surprise yourself. Is this part of you looking to surprise yourself? You know, I'm going to, I'm going to I'm going to flick this thing and just see where it takes me and see if actually there's something there that actually, if you can present information in a different way in a different context. And so the way in which you present information fundamentally affects the way you think about things and the way you emotionally respond to things. And consequently, you know, if you say that if you convey the same information in two slightly different ways, you'll get a completely different outcome in terms of the resulting behavior. Give you an example, okay? It suddenly occurred to me. There was not the copyrighter, Ogleby, who wrote a direct response acquisition that of a American Express going back to the 1960s. And the opening sentence, "Burnmine American Express" had just launched, okay? "Payment cards were deeply unfamiliar. The Amics card had to be made to look like currency so people could get their heads around the idea." All right? It's not like now where you can produce a plain white credit card. Nobody goes, "Hey, it's a credit card." It was like, "Well, fine." It was actually, I think, a card actually. Okay. Now, they wrote the sentence quite frankly. The American Express card is not for everyone. Okay? Now my view is that was a billion dollar sentence. It made America express a billion dollars, that single sentence. Because with it it was also the positioning of this card is not going to be that it's going to be a universal. This is going to be an exclusive card. It's going to be to some extent a status badge, darling, darling, darling, darling. And from that moment on one step sentence has been written. Okay. A whole load of things, members, it's bloody, bloody, bloody. Okay. A whole load of things all fell into place. Okay. And consequently, I think that the idea that somehow you can produce an innovation and it markets itself is really unsafe. And one of the things that even I used to assume is that the bigger innovation, the less marketing it needs because if it's a really big idea, everyone will just adopt it because it's so obviously brilliant. Okay. Right. And you won't really need marketing. Absolutely not tall. Okay. I suddenly realized that the bigger innovation is the more behavioral change it requires of the people using it. And consequently, the more marketing it requires to make people comfortable with this new behavior or familiar or to make this new behavior seem familiar. Yeah. So one of these examples that I've always loved around that was a long time ago. I did an interview with the CEO of Southwest Airlines and she was talking about the moment very early on in her lies where Southwest had been flying a four plane route with four planes and had to sell one of the planes to pay a legal bill. So now I have to fly four plane route with three planes. And the only way to do that was to his, I think, was a 20 minute turnaround. You know, so that prompted them to abandon allocated seating as well as various other things. And she said for the first two weeks, unallocated seating completely freaked people out because, you know, they were used to being given 14C or that cost. All they did was they said, it's unallocated seating like in church. And everybody went, oh, that's all right then. I don't panic when I get there at 11 o'clock to my local church and think, why the hell am I going to sit? This is going to be a nightmare. Yeah, just I say, oh, that's so different. It's just that very, and it's your point about making things familiar, new things familiar to say, actually, oh, this is a behavior I already have in my life. I just need to apply it in this situation. So that's a perfect case of, I mean, it always fascinates me. One of the things I've just written about in the spectator is just imagine if all those people who are grumbling about electric cars, right? Have you got an electric? No, hybrid. Come on, get me the program. I've got to drop it to my lovely mother in Ludlow. And I just not prepared to, that's not far. Well, it's 187 miles. And I'm just not prepared. I'm not prepared to anyway, anyway, let's not get into consultation. Okay, well, but just a mention for a second, okay, that a parallel universe where all cars are electric and someone comes up with the internal combustion engine. Okay, the person will be denounced as a complete lunatic. Right. So you go, so this this engine of yours, you know, we've got this electric motor. It only has seven moving parts. It doesn't require a gearbox energy in motion out beautifully simple Michael Faraday nailed that in 1822. Nothing to worry about here. So your engine is it more efficient? No, it's quieter. No, it's got better acceleration. No, it actually needs a gearbox because it only really produces proper torque at high revs. Although we'll need lubrication, we'll need air filter, we'll need oil filter. Although it carries around, you know, like, 30 gallons of, you know, not quite, you know, I don't know, you know, 20 gallons of an incredibly inflammable liquid. Can you refuel it at home? No, never fucking ridiculous. Let's know it's going to keep 2000s of gallons of petrol under the house. No, but you'll be able to go to a special petrol station where you can fill up. Okay. Okay, the thing is totally insane. Okay, once you reframe it the other way around, the internal combustion engine is just, it's nuts. Okay, it's an extraordinary achievement that we managed to do it based on the fact that oil had a, gasoline had a higher energy density than batteries did for quite a long time and will do for about 10 years. But overall, it's totally for he nuts? Well, except for the fact that there aren't enough. There aren't enough random metals for everybody's having electric cars. So electric cars are not the answer either. But anyway, let's, let's, let's. Yeah, we, we won't need rare metals. You have sodium. I think, I think they got sodium doing the job now instead of, yeah, the Chinese have created the ashes out of salt, haven't they? Actually, it's completely changing those things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm that, that's the other pipe by the way, which is that the idea that, so what I'm saying is that electric car, what's quite interesting about that is electric car is better than the petrol car on most dimensions. There is one dimension, which is time to recharge and, and, and overall range, which is worse. Okay. Now, an interesting case would be, and this is why I think B to B innovations really difficult, which is that what tends to happen is you have a procurement function, which is setting the criteria for a successful bid. Generally, linked in research reveals that these criteria and procurement tend to be set by the dominant player in the category already, which is a large and incumbent. Okay. Now, most really significant innovations, electric cars included, are like better on 12 dimensions and worse on two. Okay. So I'll give you an example of that. The first iPhone had it been a B to B product would never have gone off the ground because the battery life was absolutely shocking. Okay. Now, people like the first iPhone, so I was, they all took a charger in the office or bought a huge bulbous case with a massive spare battery on the back. Are they prepared to find a workaround just as nearly everybody with an electric car for the next five to 10 years will be happy to find workarounds which actually make charging not that problematic, like having a bike to eat while you're charging. Okay. Now, what worries me about B to B procurement in things like the NHS is that it's impossible to innovate because, you know, the first iPhone procurement would have gone with, you know, the Nokia bid or the Blackberry bid because they go, well, we knocked Apple out straight out of the frame because of its battery life didn't meet our set criteria for, you know, I don't know, I don't know what I mean, 36 hours of uninterrupted use or whatever. Okay. And most innovations are a bit like that. You know, you sacrifice a few little things and then you double down on something else in this case usability. You know, ultimately, nobody was really talking about usability into some extent. In many cases, the innovator has to take the lead. Yeah. I don't think anybody would have designed a Moxie hotel. It's an experience. A lot of innovations are really experienced goods, which is you don't really get them until you experience them. Well, this is goes back to the Dyson view of innovation, doesn't it, which is there are fixes and there are preachers. So fixes are people like himself who say, bloody hell, you know, adrires in lose are no good. Let's fix that right. That kind of stuff. Or preachers who say actually experience based historically believe me, there's going to be fantastic. You put it right. And then I was talking with a friend and I do it. There's a third kind of innovation, which is platform builders, which is what the original Twitter was, for instance, as an example where I don't know quite how people are going to use this in two or three years time. That will emerge, you know, there was one of the founders of Twitter famously said, I thought I'd invented a microwave. And when I turned around, people had made it a toaster or an other way round. So the user will determine that. The great phrase wasn't that the street will find its own uses for things. I mean, one of the things that's fascinating being old is I spend a lot of time, I mentioned my term on American Express, I spent a lot of time working on BT back in the day. And it seems impossible now, but you have to persuade people to get the internet home. You then have to persuade people to get broadband, ADSL rather than dial up. Okay. You had to persuade people to get cyber to the premises. Okay. But the weirdest one of all is you have to everybody has forgotten this. You have to persuade people to get a mobile phone. Now you can just you can just about remember this. Okay. Where there were some of your friends, there was a period where some of your friends didn't have mobile phones, right? And they'd say things like, why would I want to make a phone call on the street? Okay. And literally people would say things like that. Why would I, you know, why would I need to make a telephone call on the street? Because up till then their experience of telephone calls was something that happened at home. It's like, if you if you haven't had an air fryer, you're just used to waiting half an hour for the oven to warp up, whatever it may be. Okay. If you haven't actually experienced it, you're not looking at the right metrics for comparison because your metrics for comparison are all inherited from the incumbent. And then you suddenly realize you go, you know, Japanese toilet. I mean, you've got a Japanese toilet. I got several. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You're not dry wiping. I mean, it's 20, 20, 25. I genuinely am surprised the conversation has gone there. I didn't think we'd be discussing dry wiping in this conversation. But, but it's a complete experience. Good, which is people people, I mean, when you think about it, okay, it's a peculiarity. I've said this, a peculiarity of the West and the atmosphere that people dry wipe. The whole of the Middle East, you have a bum gun in Asia. You'll either have a bum gun or you'll have, they must be don't name to the bum gun. Apparently, bum guns are illegal in the UK because there's some utterly absurd idea that the poo will travel backwards and, in fact, the drinking water. Which, frankly, is incredibly plausible unless my poo is actually motile and somewhere it visits. But by the way, the marketing is fat-tailed. We should literally spend as large percentage of our time, probably more than the 20% that's traditionally allocated, looking for breakthroughs. And failing to some degree on the way. Instead, what we're doing is we're basically looking for incremental improvements. So, is there a slightly shorter route between known pollen and the hive? Okay? I've heard you say in the past, which I really liked, the idea that actually marketing should, in a sense, be as iterative and exploratory as R&D is. It's the same thing. Okay. I mean, we all know that wonderful quote of Peter Drucker's marketing and innovation. Because the purpose of a business is to find and keep a customer. The only two things that add value and marketing and innovation, everything else is of cost. Okay. But I'm not getting innovation. Okay. There are two ways you've added value in a marketplace. You can either find out what people want and work out a really clever way to make it. Or you can find out what you can make and work out a clever way to make people want it. And most successes are actually a combination. Yes. Completely agree. Completely agree. Actually, I look at my time on American Express. Okay. Ten or 12 years working a lot on American Express. Three things we did, interestingly, I'd say that one of them was agency, one of them was a client idea and the other one was half and half. Okay. But those three things made more difference to everything we did than everything else. Which were what? Okay. I'm going to say that up to my book. Okay. But no. Okay. I'll give you a bit of it. Okay. One of them was basically a thing where you wrote to people and said, we want you as a carbon member. Okay. And the other one was a discovery that if you wrote to people offering them aviost points with the American Express card, the response rate was literally nine times higher if the letter came from American British Airways versus coming from American Express. Okay. I spent ages. I'll give you an example of what I consider to be like a game changer. Okay. So when we were trying to sell B.K. broadband, I can never persuade them to do this. I said, look, just don't just put important news about your home internet access or whatever. Put important news about home internet access in Kent. Assuming the people lived in Kent. Otherwise, it would be slightly weird. Okay. Okay. And everybody looked at me as if I was fucking nuts. Okay. But my argument is that if you live in Kent and you see something that mentions Kent, it is inherently not irrelevant. Now, I always believed you might get a two or three times multiplier on the response rate to that letter. If you personalize it just at the level of the kind of size, he's done the depth of it or whatever, if you're in London. Okay. No, you know, right? I can never get anybody to test it because it's seen to them stupid. But in terms of what you might call the assumption of relevance and imports, I thought it was decisive. Yes. Yes. I mean, I'm interested in why you think companies fight that kind of thing. So in the same kind of way, I remember when I started in advertising 42 years ago, even in those days, you know, the expression surprised into how your customers was a cliche, right? It was a completely cliche. But it was an important cliche. I'm just so struck that everybody dropped it out still all the time 42 years later. And how rarely it genuinely happens. I can't, I really can't think of the last time I was surprised and delighted by a customer experience because it because surprise of its nature requires discretionary expense discretionary effort or discretionary time. And the efficiency mindset is trying to get rid of any form of expenditure of time, effort or money that could be possibly eliminated. And do you do you think that actually there's because there's also a thing about frictionless right? So there's a sort of site guys. By the way, frictionless in certain situations, but you tend not to remember frictionless experiences unless that category is full of horror. Also depends on the pump down. So interesting finding when I think the star would then the star would hotel group introduce to system where you could just use your phone to unlock your room. You didn't need to check in. Not many people took it up. Nobody seemed to sign up for this. Didn't seem to have much to be on. And then they looked at the data and they found that nearly everybody in their top platinum group took it up. And that's because if you only stay in a hotel three times a year, the check in experience isn't that burdensome. Okay. Whereas if you if you stay in a hotel as the platinum members would have done, probably for I don't know, 70, 80 nights a year. Then on the 30th occasion, you're checking in, you're stuck behind a United Airlines flight crew or someone who's complaining about their room or whatever. Okay. Right. It just gets really man. And by the way, frictionlessness, I'll give you the perfect example of frictionless surprise. I tweeted actually last week and got a lot of agreement when I said, I didn't think London City Airport fully appreciates how much some people love it in that I would buy London City Airport branded merch and have an I love L I heart LC. I stick on my car. And the reason is, okay, that this is what I mean about that it all depends on time as well as what is what is matters, but when matters. Okay. Multiple dimensions. Now, when I was a kid, the rich kids at school that come back from their fancy foreign holidays, I didn't have that. But the rich kids that come back, they all went and skipped on some amazing about war when they got shocks. They're everything. Oh, there was a cafe. Oh, it's amazing. The airport. You got a Changi in Singapore and then it was Dubai. Oh, it's incredible. You got shops there. There's amazing. And then over time, every sodding airport became like blue water with plates. Okay. And suddenly you go to London City Airport, right? And literally, it's even better now we got from Kent now you got the silver town tumble. Okay. You drive there, you park. You walk about a hundred yards. You go into the airport. You check in your luggage 10 feet in front of you. You go up a thing, go through the security lane. I base here at the gate. And you go, this is fucking brilliant. Now, the point is that's because you had become kind of a nerd to a level of friction of traveling through an airport at Gap to go to Heathrow. Okay. And suddenly the absence of all that shit was suddenly surprising. And so, you know, parking apps were the same. Oh, I don't have to. It didn't really occur to me. Well, I don't have to walk over there and then walk all the way back again and stick something in the wind stream. I just walked towards the station and did all around with the thing while I'm walking. Okay. So, so, so, so, then you can still see, I mean, so sometimes there's efficient surprise, which is I never realized this could be that easy. And sometimes it's something else. But in every case, it's that level of the unexpected. Well, that's, that seems a really good point at which to, to kind of bring it all together. So fantastic conversation. Thank you. Really, really loved it. Lots of things going around in my head. We really do also. We really do have to get, you know, I mean, I'm delighted that, you know, you know, you commercial arts, who joined OgleV has a customer experience. But arm because, you know, most of the advertising industry was kind of modeled on what you needed to do to promote FMCG goods. Okay. Where the experience is in the home and over which you have limited control. But PNG is to cause it. The north moment of truth, the first moment of truth, etc. Okay. But actually, the extent to which consumers' expectation of customer service is now so bad that you don't have to do that much to delight them. And I keep saying this to the NHS. Well, you know, actually, you only have to do one or two cute things. You know, for example, texting you to remind you of your appointment, NHS appointment. Now, yeah, in a logical world, I shouldn't be excited about that. But because it actually defies my expectations. I go, oh, that's good. That she want me to turn up. They're actually, you know, this is, this is surprisingly delightful. It's also why I think you should go up to zoomly well, should you add them? I'm a 16th Welsh, I think, on my father's side, yeah. You're 16th on the Gandhi. They evacuated early. But I jokingly say, but only half jokingly, okay. I always recommend people go on a holiday in Wales because they can use people expected to be a bit shit, okay? And it's actually generally when you go to Wales, it's surprisingly good. In about four, you know, you stumble on a really good cafe. That's a beautiful place. Yeah, that's a very beautiful place. Yeah, no, completely. Well, until points about you only have to do one or two things. I remember EasyJet used to talk about signature moments and the idea that they had three signature moments in the EasyJet experience, which you weren't expecting. You were expecting to be bog standard. You know, I haven't paid very much. It's going to be pretty basic. So three moments where they would surprise you about the quality of the service. And that was enough, you know, to just about you think, oh, wow. Okay. That was quite something. So one of them is probably actually one one's probably online. They did your text or something. I don't even know what their signature moments are. I can't remember it's a while ago. So no, if you're in Dave MacGlia, you probably need to, you'll need eventually. to come up with three new ones. Yes, indeed. You know, it never stops. You know, I've fundamentally, because surprise, obviously, does have a half life. So listen, Laurie, pull it together for us. Give us three bits of advice about how to strategically think in a more surprising way about a familiar problem or brand. I can still Roger Martin, analogy, anomaly, and getting rid of an issue. Assumed trade-off. Which, by the way, you bore the plane, we don't have pre-allocated seating just like in church, is a psychological way to resolve the trade-off. Okay? That's point number one. The point number two is the anomaly one, by the way, and the analogy is, by the way, I'm really useful. It's why, it's why, actually, you shouldn't, you know, in some way, someone who's worked their whole life in one industry, it may be less well equipped to come up with some of these ideas than a dilatant agency person. Who, you know, I always hated when creative people had become like car creatives. It seems to, you know, specializations have actually a weakness there. But the anomaly one is literally, there's a period of strategic thinking, which is, cops have an investigative phase, and then they have an evidential phase. Okay? In the, in the who done it, as opposed to prove they done it, phase, they will ask very open ended questions like, did you notice anything unusual on the evening of the 17th of December, whatever? Okay? Totally open question. I know someone in a white van is to be something in a white van. Yeah. Now, one of the things that worries me is that this actually requires people to spend a lot of time literally in the conversation equivalent of asking around. Okay? Because the open-minded inquiry, what you're doing is you're waiting to discover an anomaly. An anomaly is, you know, like penicillin, which was an observed anomaly, okay? Or viagra, an observed anomaly, or Isaac Newton and gravity, an observed anomaly in a sense, okay? Those things don't come to order. Fantasticly good conversation. Really enjoyed it. Absolutely. Thank you very much. See you soon, too. Those of you who know me will be aware that I am, perhaps, overly fond of an analogy, should we say. And about 20 years ago, I became briefly fascinated by seal skin. I'd read that seal skin has a very particular property to it. If you rub it one way, it stands up and grips to a surface more easily. Rubbed the other way, it glides easily over it. It's full for the seal when it wants to gain traction. And also when it needs to simply glide swiftly away from a predate, for instance. And I was interested in this as an analogy for how brands and businesses created experiences, including perhaps our own personal brand and experiences we create around those. While there was a bigger trend in the world of marketing and business towards frictionlessness, led by tech advances, it obviously seemed important that not everything in our expense was going to be frictionless, otherwise our audience or our customer just isn't going to remember us. And we're not going to be distinctive enough for them. We need selectively to create moments of friction and grip, which is where I became taken by the idea of three signature moments in the experience, which I mentioned in the conversation. And what the role for surprise in each of those might be in drawing attention to them, in creating new kinds of value in them, perhaps through a new frame of some kind, and making them more memorable and talked about. And it's that we spend discretionary effort producing that very precious and very limited discretionary effort that we had. And let's close by thinking about that exploit, explore trade off in terms of our own relationship to producing more interesting situations. We'll need some efficiency in what we do. We'll want to exploit things we've done before in some situations and accept that along with predictability. We might have a slightly more muted impact than we otherwise might. We'll also want to be clear where we can explore either because it's safe to do so with this audience or because it's worth the risk of trying something new, aiming for the chance of bigger result, more of a fat tailed result. So let's perhaps carry that trade off with us over the next week and see how it's useful for us, how can we be more intentional about asking ourselves in what situations, what meetings, what audiences we're going to exploit, what's worked in the past, in which we're going to explore something new. Let's pay really close attention to where we get lucky on what luck looks like. Thank you for listening to Let's Make More Interesting Bapy Fish. I'd like to thank Ruth Mediter, Ross Fyproducer and a big thank you to Tiny Podcasts. See you next time.