What if the problem isn’t the problem… but the way you’re looking at it?

In this episode of JUST Branding, we’re joined by the brilliant and delightfully unconventional Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, TED speaker, and author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense.

Rory takes us deep into the world of problem framing, a powerful technique that flips business challenges on their head to reveal bold, creative brand solutions hiding in plain sight.

We explore:

• What problem framing actually is—and why it’s mission-critical for brand strategy
• How to use behavioural science to unlock unexpected value (think decoy effects, prospect theory, and more)
• How reframing a “bad brief” can lead to brilliant brand-building ideas
• The difference between functional thinking and emotional insight—and why the latter wins hearts (and markets)
• How to embed reframing into your company culture so innovation isn’t just a one-off brainstorm trick
• Why AI can’t replace the human imagination—and where reframing delivers its biggest edge

This episode is a goldmine for strategists, creatives, and brand leaders looking to sharpen their thinking and shift from default logic to magic logic.

Warning: Your brain might never see a brief the same way again.

Listen Here

Love the show? Please review us on Apple.

Play Now

Watch on YouTube

Learn Brand Strategy

Brand Master Secrets helps you become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. And in my opinion, this is the most comprehensive brand strategy course on the market.

The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript

Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode. People inherently trust you more, people are happier basically making an impulse purchase from a brand than they are from someone they’ve never heard of. So a brand has an effect in lots and lots of ways, which I think grow, by the way, exponentially with brand fame. And we shouldn’t be afraid of simply saying a large part of branding is being famous.

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

All right, before we jump in, if you’re serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you’ll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you’re done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That’s joinbba.com. Now, let’s get into the show.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of JUST Branding. Today, we are very, very excited because we have the one and only Rory Sutherland on the show. Rory, if you’ve never heard of him before, where have you been? He is the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, where he spent, I mean, it says down here the last three decades, but he doesn’t look that old, so I’m sure that’s not the case. The last three decades applying behavioral science to some of the world’s biggest brands. You will know Rory from his best-selling book, Alchemy, which I’ve got here, and if you haven’t read that, you definitely need to, his TEDx talks, which have racked up over 15 million views, and his uncanny knack for turning irrational ideas into astonishing commercial results. In our conversation today, we’re going to be focusing in on problem framing and this idea around reframing problems so that constraints become creative springboards that spark different questions and help brands come up with more valuable answers for their consumers. More on that later. Before then, Rory, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Ah, it’s a pleasure. What a joy. Really happy to be here.

Firstly, just to give us a snapshot of, for those people that maybe have been living under a rock and have never heard of you, give us a bit of a snapshot of your journey and how you became sort of focused on behavioural science.

Very simply, my first job was other than driving a forklift truck at the Ribena factory when I was a student and working for my dad who was self-employed. My first sort of full-time job was in what was then called Ogilvy and Maither Direct, now called Ogilvy One, which was the direct marketing wing of Ogilvy and Maither at the time. That was in 1988. And it was an incredibly lucky and fortunate place at which to start work because, of course, it was that part of advertising which was measurable. By the way, you know, there was a downside to that. And I’ll come to that later, which is the good thing about measurement is you can compare what’s working and what’s not working and what’s working better. The bad thing about measurement is you’re never allowed to do anything you can’t actually measure, which is, if you like, it’s a double-edged sword. However, what we were doing was effectively behavioral economics avant la lettre. We were performing enormous randomized control trials of both creative and media and targeting and measuring the comparative effect of different changes, which very, very quickly caused you to realize that what motivated people to do things, what was important in terms of a marketing communication, wasn’t necessarily either what research would tell you was important or what rational economic models would tell you was important. So you would repeatedly find utterly bizarre effects. One of the earliest ones was a simple test for what was then called British Telecom, where if you sold a product and you allowed people to respond by phone, you got a 2% response rate. If you allowed them only to respond by post, all other things being equal, you got a 4% response rate. And if you gave them the choice of both, you got a 6% response rate. I think I’m 0.1% off on a few of those figures, but I haven’t got the data anymore because this was 1989. But that’s the kind of thing that you’d find. Now, an economist would accept the fact that there’s something called transaction costs. You know, people are happier engaging in one, responding in one medium rather than another. And therefore, that’s not going to be negligible. But that finding that 2 plus 4 equals 6, that effectively every additional channel of response you offer creates more response, is something which has… I always argued then, look, these things… I said, there’s a science here for which we have no name. In other words, really understanding what it is that drives people to change their behavior, as opposed to falling back on rational-seeming theories about what matters. And it was only years later when I discovered accidentally the existence of behavioral economics, nudge theory, Kahneman, Tversky, Arielle, Thaler, et cetera, Sunstein. It was only then that I realized that there were a tiny group of people engaged in this thing, and it did in fact have a name. And I always thought it had a vastly greater importance. David Ogilvy would have been the same. David Ogilvy always said people should start by working in direct response advertising because it gives you a effectively an instinctive feeling for what works. And so that was the thing that really… And of course I was in the right place at the right time. You know, I already knew quite a bit. In fact, when I eventually met Thaler and Kahneman and people like that, what was quite surprising to me is I had interesting things to say to them, and they were interested in what I had to say, because I was party to all kinds of experiments which weren’t in the academic literature because they were in the commercial field.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, you’ve sort of touched on it there, this idea of problem framing, because this is something I know that you speak a lot about in your book Alchemy, and it’s kind of a key thing that we want to tuck into with you today. So perhaps before we get into some details, let’s sort of start high level for folks, perhaps, who are just kind of grappling with this for the first time. Well, how would you sort of describe problem framing and specifically, I mean, our audience are all trying to build brands or involved in brand building strategically somehow. How is problem framing helpful for, say, somebody who’s trying to build a brand to think through?

Okay, I’ll reframe this, which is only appropriate.

Go for it.

Which is to say that how is not problem framing an issue in business and indeed governmental and institutional decision making. In other words, if you don’t spend time, famously, I think Einstein said, if I had something like an hour left to save the world, I’d spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute solving it. It’s understood in mathematics, obviously. Mathematicians would understand this instinctively, that if you can redefine the question, you’ve given yourself a second chance at solving it. And not doing that by effectively saying, we have to solve every problem through brute force methods. And if you rewrite the brief or redefine the problem, you’re cheating. That is hugely problematic because I think that’s an instinctive thing which has come to us through our educational system, which is, I’ve been given a problem, the problem contains all the information that I need to solve the problem, and there’s a single right answer. That’s your typical high school multiple choice maths question. All right? I mean, interestingly, by the way, a few people I know have had an issue with IQ tests because they say an IQ test to make it easy to mark is multiple choice, and when you have multiple choice answers, by definition, the questions can only have one right answer. And so there is this fundamental tendency where I think we take the problem as it is currently defined, we work on it using the approved sequential logical methods for proceeding from that definition of the problem. And whatever is our best shot at it following that process, we then deem to be not only right or interesting or worth testing or worth exploring, we deem it to be the only right answer. And the point I’m making there is that actually, in many cases, the problem isn’t as currently defined, or by describing the problem in a different way, you arrive at a completely different avenue for exploration. Okay? So two things that are problematic there. One, people have this instinctive feeling that if I redefine the problem or rewrite the question I’ve been given, I’m cheating. Okay? That’s true in a maths exam or whatever. You’re not allowed to do this in, you know, history 101. I don’t really like that question about the Norman Conquest. So I’m going to answer a question about the Roman invasion. Okay? That’s obviously a con. But actually, in real life problem solving, that’s exactly what you often need to do. That’s the first part. The second point is, and this is a really important one, particularly in any institutional setting, okay, is that if you want to signal that you care about a problem, you naturally want to tackle the problem head on in the most obvious way possible, okay? We have a problem with not enough luggage going through X-ray machines in airports. Therefore, we must hire more security staff. And it’s a very, very fashionable belief, which, you know, and generally it involves the trade off or there’s a cost attached. And it’s a very, very logical way to solve that problem, okay? Because you’re doing what effectively is a direct head-to-head conflict, with the problem as currently defined.

With all the parameters that are already in place.

So I’m going to give you this example. When you go through airport X-ray machines, one of the most common problems that happens, and it’s interesting who notices this and who doesn’t, is that people start taking their jackets and belts out of the trays as soon as they emerge from the X-ray machine, okay? The problem that creates is that they’re effectively holding up their tray so that no future trays can be scanned. Now, what you’ll occasionally notice is that there’s a shrewd person who understands the sort of systems thinking who stands close to the X-ray machine and whizzes the trays along the conveyor belt to the far end, so that there’s the maximum buffer available for trays to come through and be scanned, and then five people can be removing their belts and jackets and bags in parallel, rather than one person doing it in series. Okay? Now, the way, you know, before you hire more X-ray staff or spend another two million pounds on an amazing scanning machine, maybe you ought to be just instructing the staff who are currently there to actually whizz the trays along to the end, so that the retrieval process can happen in parallel rather than in series, so the throughput of the X-ray machine without any expenditure on money or staff can be trebled. Okay? And so, that will be the typical example I’d give, where it’s very, very easy. One, people think they’re cheating if they change the question, but actually the only thing that matters is the objective, not really the question, and even the objective is open to debate.

Okay?

When you have a proxy objective, generally, it’s quite arbitrary. Okay? You know, we need to make this brand appeal more to young people. Well, you know, it would be an absolutely, you know, almost stereotypical form of client paranoia. And therefore, the natural thing to do is to do ads which very explicitly say, hey, young people, you love this brand. Quite frequently, because of the fibles of human psychology, what that creates is a kind of reactance. Okay, which is you’re trying too hard, disco, vicar, you know what I mean? You know, it’s the whole thing of, you know, you don’t look now, but your strategy is showing. Yeah. Now, there may be lots of ways you can appeal more to young people. I once had this thing where we noticed, you know, we don’t, you know, we’re not selling that much to the young. And I said, young people have yet less money than old people. Why don’t you just try offering Klarner? So, you know, what I’m saying is that, and I think it’s really important, because one of the things that really bothers me about this whole business is, ever since the advertising business was paid by the hour, it lost something, which was, first of all, clients didn’t engage you very early on because they didn’t want the meter to start running. Whereas when you were paid on commission, they got in touch with you day one because after all, you were free until they actually bought some media. All right? The second thing is that consequently, because of that general impatience and the idea that efficiency is on time and in budget, that’s the kind of goal. We’ve lost what I call the exploratory phase, and we’re more and more inclined to rush into dumb execution. One of the daft things I think we’ve also done is create a planning department, which instead of working in parallel with the creative department, works in advance of it. Howell-Henry spotted that this was a fault, and they created a kind of five-person team that worked on the whole problem from soup to nuts, which always struck me as a fundamentally useful idea, which produced, by the way, very, very interesting advertising. You know, it was empirically quite a successful approach. But for whatever reason, nobody’s actually, you know, nobody’s really replicated this.

Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it? Because one of the things that I like as a sort of a solo consultant is that I get to do that. You know, I kind of, people will approach with, as you get this idea that we have this problem. And I always say to my clients, look, you know, it may well be that we have, that is the problem that you’ve discussed. But before I just take that and start trying to solve for that, can I interrogate it a bit? I want to go talk to some customers, talk to your staff, talk to your leadership team. And then we’ll settle on that, you know, and then we’ll explore a solution further once we verify that that is a problem to attack.

So Roger L. Martin talks about this sort of very narrow island of factual data surrounded by a sea of uncertainty. And for some reason, we feel we have to start the journey from that island, even though it’s a very restrictive and narrow place from which to start. The analogy I use, which is where I think people get it right, and where I think people, sometimes highly intelligent people get it wrong, is if you look at police work, they accept if you’ve got a criminal you’re trying to catch, they accept that there are two phases to the investigation. There’s the investigative phase, and then there’s the evidential phase. Eventually, you’ve got to prove the guy’s guilty, right, in a court of law. And to prove the guy’s guilty, you’re not allowed to use anecdotes, you’re not allowed to use entirely circumstantial information. But you are allowed to use that information in the investigative phase. So the standard police question would be, if someone’s weirdly found dead in a downstairs basement flat, would be to go next door and to ask the neighbors, did you notice anything unusual between the hours of, you know, 9 p.m. and 1 a.m. on, you know, on the third of whatever. Now that’s a totally open-ended question, okay? The answer could be literally anything. And it’s almost certainly not going to have any evidential value. I heard a scream at 11.30. Well, that narrows down your time of day, possibly, if you believe they’re telling the truth. I saw a strange man in a white van drive up repeatedly, and he kept driving back dozens again. You can’t imprison someone for life for driving a white van in a funny way, although, probabilistically, it wouldn’t be a bad approach, actually, given the serial killer’s love of the white van. But you can’t reasonably, you know, imprison someone for that. That has no evidential value, it has a minor evidential value. But it really tells you, let’s look at the CCTV and see if we can see any white vans that re-appear more than once and find out if the person driving said van is somehow a bit iffy. Now, again, we’re not yet in the evidential phase, we’re just in the exploratory investigative phase, but we’re allowed to use information there which isn’t entirely robust. And that’s only correct. And similarly, you know, what you will probably do in the course of investigation is you will redefine what you’re trying to do several times in the course of that investigation. You know, first of all, it’s find something unusual. Secondly, there’s a line of inquiry around white vans, okay? Thirdly, you would probably, if budget allows, you’d also say, let’s also proceed on the basis that the white vans are relevant, because we could be missing something here. Okay? That could be coincidence and it could be meaningful. And so the whole thing is an iterative process. And what we’ve tried to do is turn it into a linear process because, and I’ve got a theory about this, which is one of the reasons why ad agencies don’t experiment very much with their process, is because we’ve got to justify our activities to some procurement department, who want to know what we’re doing for every second the meter’s ticking. And we have to maintain the pretense that every single step of this journey is a sequential stepping stone towards this somehow singular and miraculously perfect solution. Consequently, if you come up with an interesting approach like Howell-Henry, with five people working in parallel, procurement probably won’t accept that because they’ll say, we need to be able to compare your costs on a like-for-like basis with every other agency that’s pitching for this count. So innovation is not allowed because it destroys our ability to compare on very narrow cost metrics. It strikes me that a lot of these supposedly well-intentioned parts of business actually have extraordinary dangerous unintended consequences because when you take a business and you optimize for only part of it, and you do so basically with the aim of self-justification, it’s highly likely that you’re over-optimizing what you need to lay claim to and under-optimizing other important facets in any decision. There’s a great book now by Margaret Heffernan, which is called Uncertainty, I think. And it’s basically a plea for people and organizations to accept existing in a state of uncertainty. Because what we do is a large number of people find being in a state of indecision or uncertainty deeply painful.

Yeah, it’s like a psychological…

It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I desperately need to pretend I know what’s going on here. Or I desperately need to pretend I can make a plausible story up to explain what on earth happened here. And therefore, we rush to kind of what you might call pre-rationalization.

Yeah. I once heard it. It’s like, you know, in the ancient maps, where, you know, they sort of hadn’t explored areas, they would like just draw a little dragon in the corner.

Here be dragons. Here be dragons.

It’s that sort of idea, isn’t it? It’s like we don’t like being in the dragon pit. Like we want to be in a land where we know for sure where we are. So, yeah. Jacob, do you have a question to lead the conversation forward?

Yeah, Rory. So, hi, Jacob here. I want to jump into some practical tools and examples that we could use. So, if a team is feeling boxed in by a brief, like what’s an exercise or something you would do to shift their mindset? Is it like a question or a template or how do you start that shift?

Well, it doesn’t have to shift their mindset at all. You could shift their behavior and then their mindset will follow. So, actually, we know this from quite a lot of evidence in brain science that quite often attitudinal change actually lags behavioral change. In other words, I like this because I do it as opposed to I do this because I liked it in advance. And by the way, there are rational reasons for this, which is once we have experience of something, we often like it more than we expected. Okay. And the classic case of behavioral change versus attitudinal change, which I think is relevant to the electric car industry as well, is I don’t know how this applies in Australia, probably exactly the same way. British people for years were hugely resistant to automatic transmission in cars. Oh, no, no, no. I like, I like that. The sense of control, that’s something Americans have. No, no, no. I can’t stand the idea of an automatic car. Okay. No, no, no. I like the feeling that I can change, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da. And they all came up with these after, and you couldn’t change their minds, really. Okay. Until they drove an automatic car, at which point nobody ever went back. Okay. Don’t get me wrong. Okay. If I moved to the north of Scotland and I lived sort of half a mile from the A9, and I had rolling highland roads with no traffic on, and I had the joy of double-D clutching, okay, I might, might go back to a manual car. But for all practical day-to-day purposes, once you’ve had an automatic, you never go back. And once you’ve had one pedal driving in an electric car, you never go back. Driving a car is just mildly irritating. So it isn’t necessarily the job of assuming you have to change someone’s attitude to something in order to get them to do it. Sometimes you get them to do it in order to change their attitude to it. Now that strikes me as hugely important. And I’ll give you another example of this. So one of the things that does is it does actually change our attitude to sales promotion. Not necessarily to boring money off sales promotion, which I think can be good, can be bad. It’s not inherently bad, but it should be the, the last resort should be bribing your people to buy your product, okay? But it does, for example, when we talk to Great British Railways, one of the things we’d say is, look, there are something like 70% of the population are what’s called rail rejectors. Some of them have good reasons. They live in a part of the country which is totally all served by rail, for example. Okay, fine. But there’s this huge percentage of people who don’t like railways because they never use it, okay? And there’s a famous joke line about Guinness, I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it, okay, right? And in a sense, those people are caught in a kind of mental loop of they don’t use the railways, so therefore they’ve never had any incentive. Why would I have an incentive to have an opinion that conflicts with my existing behavior? So in Denmark, what they do is they give everybody free rail travel on their birthday. Now, I would argue there’s a whole chunk of people. One of my ideas was increased car tax by 100 pounds a year, but give every person who taxes their car 150 pounds worth of off-peak rail vouchers to use whenever they like on any off-peak train, i.e. train that isn’t already crowded. I mean, those journeys are more or less free anyway, because you’re moving trains around the country full of fresh air. And so the incremental, the marginal cost of an extra passenger is zero. And my argument for doing this is that if you make four train journeys a year, next time you have to make a journey, at least rail is in your repertoire. It’s in your consideration set. Not saying you’ll go, I’m not suggesting people will go, oh, this is total epiphany. I’ve seen the lights. I’m selling my car and I’m going to go everywhere by train. It’s simply the fact that they will now consider the train as an option because they’ve had experience of using it under reasonably benign circumstances. They can see the benefits of the train and they can see the downsides of the train. Whereas people who only use a car just have imagined downsides of the railway. Also, the first time you use a train is a painful experience because everything is unfamiliar and you need to work out where to park and where you buy a ticket and how much it costs and where you stand and all that stuff, which when you’ve used a train five or six times, then becomes system one rather than system two. It becomes then relatively instinctive and a bit painless. So I wouldn’t even start from the assumption that you’re trying to change someone’s attitude. I’d just say there is somewhere there is a behavioral bottleneck in the system, which we need to use whatever tools are available to address. Then you have to ask your secondary question, which is, is that the real bottleneck? Which is there’s no point in getting people to think differently about something if it doesn’t translate into behavior. So if the real bottleneck is, you know, so this is really important, by the way, because you can identify what appears to be a pinch point in your business. But if there’s an even worse pinch point upstream or downstream, I’m a big fan of that book by Eli Goldratt called The Goal, which is all about bottleneck theory effectively, which says that in any system, that the performance of the system is usually constrained by its narrowest point. Now, that originated in what you might call manufacturing processes or chemical processes. He’s a, Goldratt was a hard-hitting physicist, you know, a serious guy, right? And then people realized that actually also applies upstream to demand. It’s not just a question of manufacturing and production. There is probably one thing, which is the single point at which it pays you most to intervene. Now, at which point, if you free up that bottleneck, a bottleneck may appear somewhere else. So you have a very weird thing which happens in, I think, the electric car market, which is the first bottleneck was there was huge demand for electric cars in the very early days from earlier doctors, techno geeks, etc. The bottleneck was you couldn’t produce enough cars, and so there were waiting lists. Then about 10 electric car companies came on stream with massive production of electric cars simultaneously, and the problem was there was a glut. Okay? So, you know, you literally have those issues where, at any one time, where the bottleneck lies may actually change.

And therefore, framing the problem, because it’s important to consistently kind of evolve as you are sort of solving one bit or reframing one bit. It might pop open another bottleneck somewhere else, I guess, is what we’re saying.

Absolutely, yeah. So what I’m saying is there’s no point in widening a road if there’s a badly phased set of traffic lights 200 yards further on. All you do is you move the traffic jam somewhere else on the road, and you don’t actually increase the throughput of cars at all.

So Rory, let me ask you a question. So let’s bring this down into your world in Ogilvy or in terms of what you’re doing. Can you give us an example or just sort of maybe it would help if you could kind of show us, say maybe where you got a brief through or something through where there seemed to be problem A, but by reframing it, re-exploring it, it changed the outlook and changed the outcome of the project.

So Say Mate to a Mate, which is a campaign for the Mayor of London, which created a lot of controversy. And actually the controversy was interesting because a lot of people said that by proposing a relatively small intervention, we were making light of a problem. Okay, but let me explain the logic here. We did huge numbers of interviews with people in the kind of target audience. And what we found is that it was designed to effectively diminish or provide a reasonable solution to what you might call male-on-female misogynistic bullying. Okay. Now, what emerged from that is that that kind of behavior where people are casually misogynistic, either in the presence of women or in their absence in some cases. Okay. Most men don’t like it, but they didn’t have a mechanism for criticizing it in their friends without coming across as holier than that. Without coming across as patronizing, because what you can’t do if your friend engages in casual sexism, some shape or form, most men don’t support it, don’t agree and regard it as bad behavior, but you can’t suddenly read out a Guardian editorial, okay, to your friend because your friendship has an inherent value. Quite often, we tolerate quite a lot from our friends because that’s what friendship means. And so the whole idea which embraced, for example, comedians talking about it, it embraced a whole lot of a poster campaign, it embraced every form of medium suitable was actually involved in this. Okay. Now, I think it’s particularly important because you could argue it’s a version of broken windows theory. Look, it’s not going to stop. This campaign is not going to stop Fred West, okay? It’s not going to stop Peter Sutcliffe in his tracks, okay? But you could argue that those behaviors start somewhere and they start small before becoming bigger and bigger. And so the whole point about MATE is it’s a form of censure or criticism, which doesn’t actually make the person you’re criticizing. It doesn’t actually, effectively, it’s a corrective. It’s an internal corrective from a group of friends who would prevent that. Because some of that misogyny is probably performed for bravado, okay? They think they’re impressing their friends and their friends aren’t actually impressed. And so it’s interesting because some people said, no, no, no, we need to spend the money on street lighting. Well, arguably, everything starts somewhere. But secondly, the whole point was, it was very interesting that two people who supported it, I think, were, interestingly, Piers Morgan and Caitlin Moran, were two people who said, I get it, that works to me, that makes sense. And actually, two people who, whether you like them or not, I think are astute. You can say whatever you like about those two people. But they’re highly astute and they’re not formulaic thinkers. They will actually take a completely kind of a bleak opinion on things. They were two people who actually supported the campaign. The people who disliked the campaign were people who effectively felt that the only solution to any problem had to be head-on. And actually, human psychology, in many cases, keep off the grass is not a very effective communication. You know my story about, please turn off your mobile phone on entering the restaurant. We immediately think of reasons why it shouldn’t apply to us. Whereas the brilliant restaurant in Santimedia, which had a sign ostensibly aimed at people leaving the restaurant, but actually visible to everybody walking in, which said, please remember to turn your mobile phone back on when leaving the restaurant. By effectively suggesting a social norm rather than by imposing a rule, okay? The emotional response to that message, although both of them are in service of the same aim, the emotional response to the message is completely different. Now, you know, if you’re a hardcore person who says the only way to stop people turning their mobile phones on, okay, is by a direct instruction. Or an economist would say you have to fine people, okay, for using mobile phones. But actually, there’s a perfectly gentle way of doing this, which is just to say that if your mobile phone goes off during the meal, you know, in this fancy restaurant, or, you know, it might be considered a bit of a faux pas by the rest of the diners. And therefore, it’s a question that you’re actually, the notice is saving you from embarrassment rather than issuing an edict. And consequently, our emotional response is very, very different, even if the ultimate intent of the message is exactly the same.

So going back to that brief for the mayor of London, then, how did that go then? You know, I know it was controversially received, but like, do you know of the data of the outcome of that campaign?

I will seek to find out. It will take time because that’s, that’s one of my criticisms I will make about one of the problems working in direct marketing and one of the problems about this false claim of quantification we’ve made about marketing is a lot of the value of marketing takes time to emerge.

Definitely.

It’s exponential. The value of fame, for example, is really a compounding effect. It’s more like a pension. You know, as you become more famous, it becomes easier to become more famous. Okay. So these things are not linear and they’re not immediate, but we will measure it as far as we possibly can. By the way, I mean, you know, we ought to remember that there are some things which are very difficult to measure. If you obsess about the speed of measurement, and it’s worth remembering there’s a double problem there. Things you can measure very fast tend to be acquisition focused, bottom of the funnel. Okay. And because you can measure them fast, you get results very fast and the level of attribution is very precise. Any investment in customer service is likely to be slow and less attributable. Consequently, one consequence of this is that almost all companies, I would argue, that are obsessed with justifying their own existence in the marketing department are over invested in acquisition and under invested in customer experience, loyalty and retention and repeat purchase.

Right. Because it goes back to that point you were making earlier that if you’ve experienced a train ride and you’ve know that that’s going to take some time.

So, you know, yeah, absolutely right.

It takes time for them me to get on the train and then have a couple of turns on that. I have a good experience. Then I, you know, tell someone else about it and then start actually planning that into my behavior going forwards. It does take behavior change takes time.

Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. And so it’s slow, you know. And so if you think about it, any significant behavioral change involves someone, A, in the early days, it involves people breaking with a habit and doing something altogether unfamiliar. And B, doing something which other people aren’t doing. Now, there is an interesting issue, which is sometimes called crossing the chasm, which is there is a group of people in any particular field who love doing things that other people aren’t doing. But there are a minority of people and they aren’t necessarily where the market value lies. And so you could argue that this very early group of people who are obsessed with buying electric cars, who were both novelty seekers and very high on openness, and to some extent perhaps slightly more individualistic. They want to stand out rather than fit in. Okay. Those people create an early ground swell of uptake for electric cars, which then doesn’t cross the chasm into the mainstream in part sometimes because the user imagery of early adopters might be quite strange. Okay. So a classic case of that was you had early people who bought Apple Vision Pro, okay, who then started walking around the streets of Manhattan wearing an enormous pair of goggles. It happened apparently famously with Google Glass. They only gave Google Glass out to developers. So the earlier adopters became known as glass holes. And what you need to do is you need to mainstream something. And sometimes the enthusiasts who are your first customers are actually in some ways almost negative ambassadors.

Interesting. So how do we do that then, Rory? How do you mainstream something in that regard? I suppose you’ve got to normalize it somehow, haven’t you?

Yeah. I mean, okay, with electric cars, one of the things I’ve made this point repeatedly in the hope that the industry picks it up, it’s a lot easier to reduce anxiety than it is to increase range. You know, increasing range, you’re dealing with the laws of physics, which are quite difficult to, I mean, there are wonderful ideas in chemistry and battery chemistry, which I’m sure can further increase the energy density of batteries. I’ve got no doubt about that. And indeed, it’s worth spending billions and billions of dollars looking for exactly those ideas. But at the same time, it’s a lot cheaper and quicker just to make people with a car with a range of 170 miles, say, or even 120 miles, stop feeling so goddamn anxious.

So how do you do that?

Well, two obvious ones. There are more, okay? One of them is you reduce any legal restrictions within reason on signage directing people to electric car chargers. So if you need planning permission to put up a sign that says car charging, okay? That’s a problem because electric car chargers are literally only 5 percent as visible as petrol stations are. There are actually more rapid chargers. By the way, Jacob, slight apologies for this because I accept the fact that in Australia, or in certain parts of Australia, this situation is different, okay? Because Australia is what geographers technically call very, very big. In fact, I think you’re in the 30 countries in the world with the lowest population density, aren’t you, in Australia. So you have massive cities separated by enormous distances. You know, that’s like the US similarly, Canada similarly, okay? I accept the fact that what I’m saying, so I’m just going to, you know, but in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, okay? High density population countries that are, you know, relatively small in size. Range anxiety is, I think, a virus we’ve caught from the United States, where it’s a rational fear out there. It’s not really a very rational fear in the UK at all. Because, I mean, apart from the else, in the US, they need 100 and I think that the statistics I went and found is, in the UK, we’ve got eight and a half thousand gas stations to serve a population of 60 million. And in the US, they’ve got about 350 million people, which is five times as many. They actually have 116,000 gas stations. And the reason is they need gas stations to serve a geography, not just a population. With the possible exception of the far north of Scotland, there’s no where really in Britain where you’re 50 miles from a place of major habitation. Okay, I mean, literally, there’s, you know, there are still black spots, by the way. I mean, those need to be ironed out. But one of the things would be you can just go to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay and just say, can you just add for anybody driving an electric car, a little panel that says nearest high-speed charging five miles ahead. Next, three available out of five, you know? Okay, just continue to reassure people. The other thing is you don’t need the bloody battery to say, your battery charge is 87%. Okay, I do need, when I get down to 11% charge, I need individual digits. 80% plus would be fine. I don’t need to be made conscious of the fact that I’ve lost a bit of juice when I’m at 80% already and I’ve just taken the kids to school. I don’t need that to factor into my thinking any more than I did when I had a petrol gauge.

Yeah, because petrol gauges don’t give you the percentage, do they?

No, it’s just three-quarters full, full, half full, eight full, the light’s gone on. That was it. That was the level of granularity we needed. There are lots of ways in which you can stop. The other one, by the way, is very simply, I hate to say it, but if you have extended test drives for electric cars, people can basically get addicted because once you’ve driven one, you’d have going back to petrol field stupid in a weird way. Nothing to do with environmentalism, by the way. In fact, I think the environmental message might have actually set back electric cars by five to 10 years because a lot of people interpreted them as an unfortunate compromise that was being forced on them by tree huggers, rather than the first major step forward in automotive traction in 90 years.

If you’re building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live master classes and a crew of brand builders who’ve got your back. Get on the waitlist now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show. Yeah, Rory, everything you said here resonates because I bought an electric car a couple of years ago and have experienced all of these things, just the…

What did you buy, by the way? What did you get?

It was a Polestar. So, yeah.

They’re very good. I hired one of those in Italy. I thought they were excellent.

We had a good fun. And yeah, we have a petrol car as well. And going back to that, it’s like you don’t want to go back. And it’s just sluggish, loud. It’s like, why would you?

I mean, the thing that happened was interesting, is the intention was always, I’ll get an electric car, my wife will get a petrol car, so we’ve got one of each. And then basically, once I got the electric car, we liked it so much, we ended up with two electric cars. Her car is Mini, it’s a Mini Cooper electric. It’s only got a range of, it’s one of the earlier ones, so it’s only got a range of about 110 miles, slightly less in cold weather. But actually, for all practical intents and purposes, it has proved that has been an issue, i.e. the need to recharge en route happens about once every, twice a year, something like that, no more than that.

Yeah, I’ve only charged it once on the road and I’ve had it for a couple of years. I’ve never really experienced it.

But actually, by the way, I think the government and various people unfairly vilified hybrid cars, because they didn’t understand the fact that the hybrid, for someone who’s an Australian, the plug-in hybrid, I mean, is not a bad thing because 99 percent of your journeys are taken care of by plugging in and getting 50 miles, 60 miles of range. I mean, sometimes the great is the enemy of the good. That’s another issue I’d raise with things like, an example of that would be heat pumps. People come to you and say, we’re going to have a perfect heat pump solution. Now, and I go, well, look, if I can reduce my gas consumption by 70 percent, and it costs me 4,000 pounds and I can do it one stage at a time. Okay, that’s pretty good. Okay, I’m not Greta Thunberg, but I’m doing a bit and it’s all in the right direction. What that probably means is I install four air conditioning units, which you mostly use as air to air heat pumps. I don’t know if you do that in Sydney. If it gets cold in Sydney, do you reverse your air-con so it warms the house?

Yeah, we do.

Yeah. Now, it’s actually a super-efficient fan heater, probably when it’s super hot outside, sorry, when it’s super, actually in Sydney, it’s going to be perfect. It’s not going to be that cold outside, right? It’s not like Canada, okay? Actually, it’s like a five times efficiency fan heater. So it probably takes in two kilowatts, it could be producing eight, okay? Something like that, okay? When you reverse your air-con. Now, in the UK, we don’t get any subsidies for installing air-con, even though my father, in his nineties, he was a bit frightened of a heat wave, understandably, because they kill you in your nineties. You know, if you can’t cool off, it’s really, really risky. So we bought him, my brother and I bought him an air conditioning unit for his main room. He didn’t want one for his bedroom or anything like that. Actually, because he’s actually in very hot weather, he’d sleep downstairs where the air-con was, right? One air conditioning unit. Now, you don’t get a subsidy for that because they go, oh, no, because you might use it for air conditioning and it’s actually creating new energy consumption. Mate, he lives in Wales, right? Okay. Heat waves in Wales are going to be about five days of the year at most, maybe 10, 95 percent of the time, my dad was using that air conditioning unit as an incredibly efficient way to heat his main room. As a consequence, he had a gas heater in the room, which he never used. Great. Well done, dad, okay? But no, because it’s not perfect, and because for five days of the year, he was committing the absolute sin of being a 90-year-old using air conditioning to stay alive. Okay? Right? So these people are not looking at this problem holistically. And so you have this problem. I think there are some areas of activity where we should be increasing carbon consumption. For example, if you can produce steel using coal to produce the blades for a bloody, you know, obviously, they’re not steel. Okay. But, you know, what I mean is to produce the blades for wind power. And that’s the best way of producing wind turbines or the belt, you know. There are cases where we should be perfectly happy with carbon use. Okay. The UK has already done really quite well. I mean, I think we’re just beating ourselves up now.

We do have a major problem with this, don’t we, in the UK? We do beat ourselves up loads. And this is a major topic for international listeners in the UK around steel, because all are still working on closing down in the name of green energy. But the problem is, is then we still we haven’t all agreed to not still use steel. So we’re importing it, which therefore is actually, I mean, I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination. But my understanding is, it’s actually causing more of a problem with the carbon footprint, importing it all. So we kind of shot ourselves in the foot kind of thing with this.

Also, the legislation is such a blunt instrument compared to marketing, because the great thing about persuasion is that you’ve got a good reason not to be persuaded. You can ignore it, right? Legislation or economic incentives impose themselves on people who should not be affected by them. This is my great argument for marketing as the first port of call for problem solving. So let me give you an example of this. If you are a retired person who’s got an 11-year-old petrol car, which is reasonably economical, okay? And about three times a week, you drive to the shops, and once a year or twice a year, you drive to see your cousin at Christmas, you know, or whatever, you know, 120 miles away. But your annual mileage is like 1500, 2000 miles. You should not be in any way encouraged to buy an electric car. Because a battery that could be used by someone who’s actually driving 10,000 miles a year, namely me, is now sitting outside a cottage somewhere in the middle of the country. Okay? Doing absolutely soddle for 99% of the time. So the fundamental point is that, I’ll give you an example of this. It’s a good idea to put, for people to put their tumble dryers, washing machines on late at night, because there’s less pressure on the grid. So the electricity produced at 11 o’clock at night is probably cleaner. Although there are other arguments, it can be Sunday lunchtime. But let’s not worry about that. Okay? Now, if you say it’s a good idea to do that, do that if you can. Lots of people who find it easy to do can do it. Everybody else goes, well, as it happens, I can’t do that. Now, the first thing, if you create like really expensive, becomes really expensive to use your tumble dryer, okay, until 10 p.m. or 9 p.m., okay? The first call you’ll get if you instigate that legislation is from the London Fire Brigade, who will say, people who work nights will now feel compelled to put their tumble dryer on and leave it in an unoccupied house, where they are a not irrelevant fire risk, okay? Tumble dryers catch fire, particularly old ones, particularly the least economical ones, okay? They catch fire. Secondly, you’ll be encouraging people who live upstairs, their kitchens upstairs from their next door neighbors’ bedroom, to put their washing machine on at 11 o’clock at night, so it hits the spin cycle at two o’clock in the morning and their neighbors come and beat them up, okay? The great thing about persuasion is if you’ve got a good reason not to be persuaded, you ignore it, okay? That’s why persuasion is organic and legislation and economics tends to be physics, okay? Right? One of them is organic change, the other one is kind of what you might call Newtonian change. Input here, output there. And actually the only way we’re going to solve this problem is organic change unless you’re happy to live in a country which is literally so oppressive that you spend 30% of your time doing utterly stupid things because you’ve got no choice.

This is what you’re talking about, unintended consequences, isn’t it? You know, in all of these things, you’ve got to think that through across everything.

And I think this is really important, because I think there’s an awful lot people can do voluntarily. I mean, there are a whole lot of things about solar panels, okay? Okay, now, I imagine you’re in Sydney. Someone in Germany has obviously got this right in some way, because Germans are using solar panels all over the place. Okay? Now, one of the things you could simply do, okay, is simply describe the value of solar panels to people who have investments using the language of APR. Okay? Now, admittedly, it’s not a compound effect, but if you spend a thousand pounds on solar panels, and they save you 18% of the amount you spend is saved on an electricity bill every year, there’s not much in the stock market at the moment that’s going to give me a guaranteed 18% return in terms of a dividend, right? Okay? So if you basically say this is an investment with a really good dividend, and actually a lot of pensioners who can, now in the UK, you can take a lump sum out of your pension tax-free, and arguably 10% of this, one of the things I say is actually you can take a further 10% out of your pension tax-free if you spend it on renewable energy. And then you’ll get a load of oldsters, often in big houses, which they are effectively saying, okay, that’s actually a way I can make my pension go further, is basically by not having to spend very much on electricity, on heating. Right.

And they do that voluntarily, you’d imagine, rather than by…

Yeah, but it’s still voluntary. So incentives, by the way, incentives can be voluntary. We’ve got to be careful about that.

Okay.

Because an example would be, nobody… We’ve got a housing crisis. There’s a very reliable bit of data which shows that nobody downsizes voluntarily, unless they do it by the age of about 72, 73. Once people hit 73, they just stick in their house, for whatever reason. Even if their house is much too big for them, even if logically they know they should move. And I think there’s a reason for that. I think when you’re 73, you’re not confident enough in your future health to say, well, if I move now, I’ve definitely got another eight years in my smaller house. You think, oh, I might spend all this cost of moving, all the cost of moving, and then I’ve got to move into sheltered accommodation three years later. I can’t be bothered. I’m going to eek it out as long as I can. Okay. Now, probably what you should say is that if you have a couple with nobody else living in the house and they downsize when both of them are below the age of 74, you should say, no stamp duty, okay? If you’re buying a less expensive house and you’re selling a more expensive house, then basically you’re excused stamp duty on the new house you’re buying. And then you say, but there’s a window of opportunity, which is if you leave it until you’re both 74, windows closed. Now, that’s an acceptable, okay, it’s not a nudge because it is actually an economic incentive, okay? But it’s an economic incentive being used to its maximum psychological effect.

Rory, can we switch gears and talk about the future a little bit? You know, AI is a hot topic, so let’s dive into that. So like AI and data-driven tools, they’re taking over marketing is like heavy lifting. So where do you see human reframing adding the most value brands?

Okay, this is the first time I’ve said this, but I’ve been thinking about this a bit over the last few weeks. Now, this already happened in the UK in the 18th century with the Industrial Revolution and the capability to mass produce things at scale at vastly low expense. So the pottery industry, for example, or operated historically a bit like Fabergé eggs. You went along, you said, I’m an immensely rich person, and I would like to commission an egg. And Fabergé would go and produce an egg, and hopefully you said, ooh, Carl, that’s a really lovely egg, and then you pay him a stack of money for it. Or you might argue about the egg for ages and go, no, that’s not the egg I meant at all, go and make another fucking egg.

Right?

Now, when Wedgwood, and it’s worth noting that the Industrial Revolution sort of started in things like pottery and textiles, you know, in other words, you know, but the mass production of both furniture and pottery. So Chippendale, in the case of furniture probably, Wedgwood, that was when modern marketing was invented because you suddenly said, well, we can produce so many effing plates. There’s no point in us waiting to be asked. What we have to do is produce a load of plates in advance and go out and find if anybody wants them. Okay? You reverse the direction of travel. Now, it occurs to me that in creative agencies, what we should do if we’re using AI correctly is we say, we can now generate interesting interventions and ideas and effectively mock them up to a high level of finish, much, much faster than we could previously. Now, we will still need judgment. It wasn’t that Wedgewood just produced random plates. Okay? They had very, very good designers who went and produced a very good plate design, usually based on some Chinese theme. Okay? And then bang them out in huge quantities. And then you made more of the ones people liked and less of the ones people didn’t. I would argue that the ad agency, the creative agency is still operating like Carl Fabergé. They’re waiting to be asked. They’re waiting for a client to come along with an RFP. They’re waiting for clients. And the reason I partly started the behavioral science practice is I said, look, the fundamental problem of this business is nobody’s got a budget for a problem they didn’t realize they had. And so a large part of what we do in Ogilvy Consulting, I would argue, is diagnostic. And actually, in nearly every case, we find something a business is doing, that if they just stopped doing it or did more of something else, they would be much better off. I think we’ve got to change the whole way the ad industry works, so that you actually produce advertising campaigns and ideas and ads and everything else. You produce them and then you find a market for them. I think we’ve got to reverse the direction of travel, because otherwise, if we’re still waiting to be asked, all we’ve done is commodify ourselves, okay? No one’s going to pay us any more money because they go, well, look, we know you can do this in three days, so why should we pay you for 15 days work, okay? It’s going to be a fucking disaster unless we actually reinvent what we do, and that requires a fundamental creation of a different kind of ad agency. Now, that’s one possibility. The second possibility is even more extreme, which is that when everybody you’ve ever met or had any commercial contact with can generate enormous amounts of sort of mere content at almost nil cost, then the competition for individual human attention, when you remove that level of friction that was involved in content creation, simply becomes intolerable to all consumers. The only way you do it is you do an advertising agency backwards, which is the consumer appoints an advertising agency to keep them informed of interesting and stimulating things. And so you reverse the direction of travel, which is it’s the consumer appointing an agent on agentic AI to go and look for goods and services, rather than the goods and services looking for the consumer.

Love that.

And I can see now that that actually, to some extent, goes back to the early days of the Internet when it was predicted, but never happened, OK, with things like the Clutrain Manifesto, written by Doc Searles, markets the conversations, OK, was one of the, was effectively one of the sort of axiomatic points made in, in the Clutrain Manifesto. And there was a prediction a long, long time ago, using a phrase which I haven’t read in print or pixels for 5 or 10, 15 years, the infomediary. In other words, it’s an agent, an informational agent operating at the behest of the buyer, effectively, looking for people who might sell to it, rather than the seller looking for people who might buy from it.

That reminds me of something, Rory. So these days, there’s agents on job boards. So you’d hire an AI agent to go find an agent. So it’s getting quite meta rather than a person. It’s kind of what it reminds me of.

They will be having conversations with other agents, I suspect. And then the whole question. I mean, it’s a strange thing if you think about it with the property market, that the property market only works in one direction. Typically, there are exceptions. You can appoint a buyer’s agent, and that happens at the level of very rich people. Okay.

Just before we close, Rory, question. If somebody is building brands, thinking through a problem and listening to this podcast, what would your top three tips be to somebody in that state where they’re grappling with something? What would you recommend for folks to think about? I’m thinking three quick fire tips from Rory on problem reframing.

The first thing is stop talking about what a brand is and talking instead start talking about what it can do. Because one of the problems I think and one of the reasons I think we undervalue brands. And Matt Johnson, who wrote a book called Brands Mean Business, a fantastic book, he’s a neuroscientist. His phrase is, having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode. In other words, people inherently trust you more, people are happier basically making an impulse purchase from a brand than they are from someone they’ve never heard of. People are happier working for that company, people work longer and probably for less money for that company, that company that embellishes people’s CVs. When the company CEO rings somebody else up, they return his call. So a brand has an effect in lots and lots of ways, which I think grow, by the way, exponentially with brand fame. Okay, and we shouldn’t be afraid of simply saying a large part of branding is being famous. It can be being niche famous or it can be being broadly famous. Depends on what kind of business the brand exists to serve. But the first point I make is that one of the things I think we tend to do is we tend to have a very Newtonian approach to investment in brands, which is we define what the brand activity is supposed to do very narrowly, and we then measure the value of that activity only to the extent that it obtains the objective we defined in advance. So all other positive spinoff benefits of that investment in branding, of which I would argue there are almost certainly many, okay, all of those get lost because we’re defining in advance what we want that this thing to do. We also, I would argue, also tend to measure the value of a brand relative to competing brands, okay, Samsung versus LG, okay, when the real value of a brand consists in having a brand at all, okay. So all of you, both of you, I think, if you went to buy a television and there was a television from Samsung or LG, you would pay a couple of hundred bucks more for that television than you would from a television from a brand you’d never heard of, right?

Equity, yeah.

Just because they’ve got reputational skin in the game, you know, they have more to lose from selling a bad product. They have, you know, they are reputational fragile. There’s a limit to how bad any of their products can be. You know, I bought lots of things from Samsung. Some of them are good. Some of them are very good. Never bought anything from Samsung that’s terrible, right? Okay. Now, all of those things effectively allow you to command a fairly significant premium in the marketplace. But what we’re doing is you’re often comparing one brand versus another competitor brand, whereas, of course, the real value of the brand consists in the fact that you are actually famous, okay? A lot of that is hard. It’s harder to measure the effect that a brand has on price premium versus sales. So, you know, in many cases, we’re looking for brand value and completely the wrong place. But the other thing is, don’t ask what a brand is, ask what it can do. And actually, then you realize that you can use your brand in multiple ways, okay? And I would actually argue, there’s a very, very astute guy who is called Dale Harrison on LinkedIn, who’s a B2B marketer and an absolute genius, in my opinion. And one of his points is, it’s completely wrong to measure marketing investment on the basis of ROI. Yeah. He says, there are lots of areas of business expenditure which you engage in. So he said, if you were building a factory and someone said, we need to put a roof on the factory to stop the machinery getting wet, nobody would say, I need you to give me the ROI on the roof, okay? It is just a necessary component of whatever it is you do. Okay. And consequently, this ROI thing, we effectively thought, wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t it make our lives so much easier as marketers if we could actually quantify the value of everything we did? Well, unfortunately, the downside of this is that in the act of quantification, we’re almost certainly undervaluing or misrepresenting the value of everything we do. And we made it impossible to do anything that you can’t measure. Back to my initial point about direct marketing, you’re never allowed to do anything you couldn’t quantify. Yeah. And so you go, hey, I think it would be great. Okay. I think it would be great if we sent our customers a birthday card or a Christmas card. How will we measure the effect on that? Well, you could measure the effect on it. Obviously, you could take 50% of your customers and not send them a birthday card and see if there was any. One very interesting thing, which I don’t think has been experimented with nearly enough, by the way, is there’s a small business I buy from in Kent, occasionally buy clothes from. And I suppose I’m quite a regular customer of theirs. And at Christmas, they literally sent me just a box of goodies. It was probably 20 or 30 pounds worth of goodies. Now, to be honest, if I’m being really cynical, it might have been stuff they weren’t going to sell or they weren’t going to sell very quickly or whatever. But it was nice stuff like water bottles. And actually, you know, I gave some of it to my kids. I kept some of it myself. Now, it occurred to me that I don’t know if they’re testing that to see what effect it has. But it’s interesting to me that one thing I would like to test for a lot of brands is an act of fairly extreme generosity. Now, obviously, it has to make economic sense over time, okay? But if that means I order four times from that brand every year rather than twice from that brand every year, they’re in quite a high margin business, to be honest, okay? It’s sort of relatively expensive clothing or things of that kind. Then actually, that 30-pound investment, which to me was the most amazing bit of marketing I’ve received in about, you know, 10 years, is actually not particularly expensive. You know, it occurs to me that the finance people are going to hate this idea. I think there are a whole load of things in marketing which we’ve never tested that might really, really work. And the reason we’ve never tested them is not because they don’t work, because it’s too hard to prove that they do, or too slow to prove that they do.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a major… We are obsessed with ROI, aren’t we? Absolutely, in this game.

Okay, the other thing is we’re obsessed with data, but as Roger Martin says, there’s no data about the future. And strategy fundamentally is about the future.

Definitely.

There’s data which is indicative of possible futures, okay? But there’s no data about the future. And so this quest for certainty and our obsession with avoiding ambiguity and avoiding being in a state of uncertainty and ambiguity is really, really critical because everybody effectively in business now is involved in an arse-covering exercise under the guise of rigor, to be honest.

We’re back with the dragons.

Yeah. Yeah, we are. Yeah.

Brilliant. Well, look, I know time is virtually up, Rory, and I just want to thank you personally for… It was great. We met last year in Manchester, and it’s so kind of you for agreeing to come on on our little show. Final kind of question, if folks want to connect more with you, understand more about your thinking, follow you in any way, like how can we digest Rory Sutherland’s content? Where do we go to?

I mean, YouTube appears to be the repository for most things. TikTok is also searchable if you want short form at me. I also write an article, Fortnightly and the Spectator, which I’ve done for about 15 years. So if you go to spectator.co.uk, you can search by author and you’ll have effectively, two hardback books worth of various spectator writings over the last 12 or 13 years, quite heavily on behavioral science and technology. Because the interplay between them obviously fascinates me because when you think about it, okay, the most interesting thing you can imagine about the mysteries of psychology is, a company as rich as Apple and as intelligent as Apple, can produce the Apple Vision Pro, okay, and literally launch it with absolutely no idea whether the thing is going to be popular or not. Now, I would argue that the only answer to that question of what is, you know, and by the way, I have a very, very interesting take on a lot of those technologies, which is, if you read a book by Andy Clarke called The Experience Machine, his hypothesis is that most of what we perceive is a prediction, and we simply use our optic nerves and our auditory function and smell and everything else to revise for prediction error, okay, very much like a JPEG, you have an expectation value for each pixel, and you only use data to the extent the pixel differs from the expectation value, okay? And that means you need much less bandwidth to actually construct a view of the world, okay? Because you don’t have to look at everything in raw mode, afresh every millisecond.

You can’t, it’s impossible, right?

It’s impossible, impossible. You couldn’t process it, it’d be a totally inefficient use of bandwidth and data, okay? So instead, we’ve got a JPEG, Consciousness is an SNMPG, you know, at some level, okay? By the way, I think that probably explains why magic works, by the way, magic tricks, why they work. It also, there are some other wonderful demonstrations of things which, there’s a particular sort of noise, which is totally like white noise, until you put the text underneath and then you can hear the whole sentence, okay? You know, it explains Mondagreens, you know, how you mishear. Have you ever heard, it’s a Brenda Lee and it’s a Christmas song, and almost everybody British hears the lyrics as, Later, we’ll have some f***ing pie and do some caroling. It’s actually pumpkin pie, but my hunch is that because British people aren’t really familiar with pumpkin pie, we actually hear, I don’t know whether there’s a transatlantic difference in terms of that mishearing, but it’s a prediction, right? What we’re perceiving is a prediction, right? And so sometimes you want, sometimes I would argue, you want to optimize for surprise and sometimes you want to optimize for predictability depending on what you’re trying to do. But what was I going to say there? Oh yeah, that once you understand that, you’ll have to look at what we do differently, fundamentally. The reason I bring that back to Apple Vision Pro is I don’t think 3D vision is actually much of a thing. I think most of the 3D-ness in our environment, if you close one eye, okay, it’s not like you lose that much perception about your environment. I’ve now got my right eye closed. My right eye is a bit f***ed anyway because I had a detached retina. But with my right eye closed, I can perfectly well see where things are placed in relative. I wouldn’t be very good at putting a pen top back on close. And I probably wouldn’t be great at catching certain cricket balls because of that. I’m not saying that 3D vision is irrelevant. I’m saying it doesn’t play that bigger part in our perception. And consequently, actually, I think augmented reality, I think they need to… If you notice, 3D cinema becomes a thing about every 35 years. And that’s because a generation grows up who’s never learned to find it uninteresting. And then it becomes a novelty and then it dies off. And 35 years later, someone else goes, we’ve got to do this 3D. Now, there is an Apple thing called Google Starline, Project Starline, which is 3D video conferencing one-on-one, which is interesting because it may have psychological effects where it’s less tiring, whatever it may be. I don’t know. But my argument is that 3D is just not that big a deal in terms of human perception. And actually in a weird kind of way, we don’t want it. And I think the only way to understand that is understanding Andy Clarke’s notion that it gets into really deep stuff like free energy principle, which I don’t know what to think about. I can’t understand it. But ultimately, I think Andy Clarke’s book is really accessible and it makes its case very, very well.

Amazing. Amazing. Brilliant. Well, look, Rory, thank you so much for giving up your time for coming on. We really appreciate you. I would also add to your comment that folks should get this book, Alchemy, which Rory has written and it’s fantastic, full of amazing insights around behavioral science and these sort of weird, quirky things that we all do and, you know, irrationally, but actually there is some rationale behind it.

No, no, no, there is. Once you understand what the person is trying to do. Once you get it, yeah. The point is, we don’t always understand what we ourselves are trying to do.

So it feels irrational, but there is rationality.

Absolutely.

So get hold of that book. And Rory, I guess that just leaves us to say thank you and have a lovely rest of your day.

Absolutely. Same to you.

Source link