Rory Sutherland: Why Traditional Marketing is Dead

It's my absolute pleasure to introduce you to one of the most inspiring people that I know, a true GOAT of brands, Rory Sutherland. Rory, it's a pleasure to be here.

Uh, likewise. I'll do a bit of mutual fanboying because I've been, among other things, a Boxpark fan for ages. Partly because, as a fan of kind of evolutionary biology, it strikes me that Boxpark and arcade and food courts are actually the kind of Galapagos Islands of developing, uh, new food concepts and food brands. And by the way, we don't talk about this nearly enough, which is the UK, against all the odds, has become an extraordinary kind of, I jokingly call it, Cinnamon Valley, which is the, you know, the innovation in, for example, Indian food.

Yeah.

Okay. It's been an extraordinary breeding ground for innovation in food tech and food provision.

Yeah.

To be honest, this is a tough one. Is there any other country in which you'd rather live from a gastronomic point of view than the UK? And I'm not sure there is one. Partly because, not having an overweening gastronomic culture of our own, we have successfully stolen from everywhere else, which then creates actually a more interesting food ecosystem. Places like France, it's wonderful for days one or two, but day three you go, "Can I just have a curry?"

Now, Rory, I was worried this was going to happen. I'd asked you one question. Sorry. And literally, you have, you're just, I mean, we've just been chatting beforehand and every bit of it was brand gold, and I wanted to record it. It's almost as though your whole life you want to record. I want to start with Rory. Okay.

I want to know about young Rory. I want to know what you were like at school. And I want to know your journey to this day. Come on, give me some of those milestones. What was young Rory like?

Fairly idyllic childhood. My father was a property developer on the Welsh borders. He did something actually very worthwhile, unfortunately, probably 20 years too early and 150 miles too far west. But he, one of the businesses he ran effectively bought country houses and converted them into apartments.

Yeah.

Kind of actually ahead of its time in a way. So I grew up in an entrepreneurial household, which, by the way, is an extraordinary bonus. I mean...

On the Welsh borders?

Uh, yeah. In Monmouth, between Monmouth and Abergavenny, effectively, is where I grew up. I was born in Ask, actually. I was born technically in Lindbladock, uh, which was also the birthplace of Alfred Russel Wallace, uh, the, um, uh, who was along with Darwin, effectively, the originator of the theory of evolution. Um, and, um, uh, it was a glorious place to it. It does set your bar pretty high for countryside, you know. Uh, you know, it does fundamentally calibrate you to a fairly high expectation of how attractive the scenery should be. Uh, also, very, very nice, very interesting market town. So Monmouth was one of those places which just seemed to attract, they were mostly my parents' age, not my age, but weird people who'd sort of fled London. Blow-ins, you'd call them if you were in a coastal...

In Brighton. We call them DFLs.

DFLs. Yes. London.

Yeah. Yeah. And, um, uh, it's, it's an, and actually, those people were extraordinarily interesting. And so it was a very weird place to grow up because you'd be sitting in a pub with your parents and there'd be, kind of, a guy who was a colonial administrator in the Gambia, bear in mind this is the 1970s and '80s. Uh, you know, someone who, you know, who'd run Oxford University Press, there'd be totally two, two local boozers, and then most bizarre of all, we never really realized the significance at the time, sitting in the corner of the pub was Robert Plant.

Wow.

And bizarrely, basically just went about his business pretty much unmolested. And it never occurred to us at the time that, you know, had he gone to Boise, Idaho, he would have been mobbed. But he was just part of the furniture there. And, um, I went to the school, Monmouth School, which is a Haberdashers' Foundation, which was absolutely excellent. I mean, I, you know, I had a very, very happy time. Grammar.

It was, it was a former grammar school. My, in fact, my brother attended as a grammar school pupil, and then I had to attend as a private pupil because in between 1975 and 1977, of course, most of the grammar schools closed down.

I remember. And were forced to go independent.

Looking back, I mean, my parents were extraordinarily doting. My father, of course, worked from home, so you had both parents present. You know, another, uh, really valuable thing. But also, growing up in an entrepreneurial household, it always occurs to me that if you grow up in a shop or a, you know, in a restaurant, um, it's kind of a free MBA that you get to understand all of the basic principles of business.

Totally.

In microcosm. So it's, you everything from marketing to supply to... What was interesting, actually, is that my father also ran a business which was, uh, water bus trips on the Brecon and Abergavenny Canal, which a coach party of 48 people. So he was plural, undoubtedly. Um, and he actually had a steam tug towing another one as well. So he ran a mixture of a kind of entertainment and tourist business and a property business. And, um, as I said, you get everything in microcosm. What did amuse me when I look back is that whenever we did marketing, it worked very well, but we didn't do very much marketing. And it suddenly occurs to me that if you run a small business, there's a fundamental problem. It's not that marketing doesn't pay or advertising doesn't pay. It's that you always have five fires to put out in a small business, and marketing is always the component you can leave till tomorrow.

Yeah.

Which, which you can't, you shouldn't, but we, but we all do. And I'm completely sympathetic, by the way, with the fact that the great value of marketing is that it's the ability, very simply, it's the ability to see your business as a customer or prospect sees it, not as you see it from the inside out.

It's seeing your business from the outside in. And most businesses don't spend nearly enough time, uh, considering these things. And we were just as guilty of that. I loved advertising as a child. I, I probably wanted to go into advertising, to be honest, when I was sort of 11 or 12.

And what inspired you?

Uh, I can give a lot of thanks to this. Interestingly, um, it was, I mean, John Hegarty always said he was inspired to go into advertising by a David Ogilvy ad that he'd seen because he thought the art direction was so remarkable. With me, it was something later, but similar, which was, it was not fun, partly TV advertising, which was great in the '70s and '80s, but also, um, an agency called CDP, effectively, call it Dickinson Pearce, effectively invented the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. So they effectively went to the Sunday Times and said, "We can find clients who will take large colour advertisements if you can distribute the format." And so the colour supplement, obviously, in countries like France, Germany, you always had those weekly publications like Paris Match, VSD, uh, Punch, obviously being the most famous. Okay, Britain didn't really have those, if you think about it. And so these people set about creating it. Rather than starting a magazine from scratch, they persuaded the Sunday Times...

Because they had the audience.

Uh, but they already had the distribution and the audience. And the ads that very largely, I think CDP produced to go in the first few pages were generally so good that my brother and I would fight over who got the Sunday Times Colour Supplement first.

Really?

And a principal reason we were fighting over it was for the ads, not for the articles.

But what drew you?

Admittedly, growing up in the Welsh borders, we were probably relatively starved of stimulation, perhaps. But that's how exciting it was, genuinely. And you're talking about print adverts.

Yep. Absolutely. So, I mean, examples would be fantastic. Examples for Clarks shoes, a brilliant ad for...

Um, quite a lot of them were long copy ads. Some of them, I subsequently discovered, were Ogilvy ads.

Yeah.

Um, but the kind of, I, I mean, one I can remember making us actually burst out laughing was it was an ad that just had a double-page spread of cut-out lemon slices printed on the page. Okay. And it basically said, "If you can't be, you know, if you're not prepared to pay for Smirnoff vodka, why waste money on real lemons?" Okay. And the idea was that you cut out these lemon slices from the page. That was the kind of thing which was mischievous, playful, um, engaging. And it hasn't disappeared from the advertising industry, but it's in remission, I have to say.

Yeah.

Uh, and that bothers me. And actually, one of the things that bothers me about all office life is that that sense of mischief which used to prevail, um, nobody really plays practical jokes on each other at work anymore. I noticed.

Well, we used to have some rock stars in the, the advertising industry. I remember there was a, a guy called Graeme Fry.

Do you remember, didn't he famously throw a TV like, certainly out of a room?

No, no, no. And, and, and deservedly so. And then what happened, unfortunately, I think, is we went to payment by the hour.

Um, and payment by the hour fundamentally rewards mediocrity.

Yeah.

So what would happen is every great agency was really, um, what you might call an amplification of five, 10, 15 really, really remarkable people with a large number of support staff around. And that's just how it is. You know, an architecture practice would be the same, really, if we're being, if we're being realistic. Okay, there are 15 remarkable people, then there are another 15 people who are going to be remarkable one day, and then there's the people who help them make it happen. And actually, that fundamental recognition of that fact, I think, I think got diluted, um, uh, in the sort of when we effectively took on the payment mechanism of lawyers, accountants, and management consultants. And it's a different kind of business, hell, yeah.

Fundamentally.

Yeah.

So, come on, let's. So, did you end up going to university?

Yeah, I went.

What did you study and where?

So, I, I went to Cambridge. I studied Classics at Christ's College, Cambridge.

I knew it. Be something like that.

Um, uh, funny enough, I, I want to go into a bit of family history here because it's quite interesting in the sense that if you look at the pattern of immigrant behaviour now in London or the UK, which is broadly speaking, you move, you open a shop, you educate the [ __ ] out of your kids. Yeah. Okay. That was exactly the pattern on the, in the Sutherland family, which was, uh, Keith Nes, crofter, move. So this is in about 1860, I'm guessing, moves down to, uh, Edinburgh, intending to say, join the police force. The people in Edinburgh say, "You're wasting your time here. If you want to make money, go to South Wales," which seems a bit bizarre, but it was kind of the Dubai of the mid-19th century.

Why?

Coal. Coal. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was, by the way, the first ever million-pound transaction took place in Cardiff was a coal trade that took place in Cardiff.

Um, and so it was actually an absolute boom town. And so he went, worked in a Scottish shop, um, married the daughter of the shopkeeper, and then educated, effectively, I think his son went to one, went to Christ's College, Cambridge, that was my grandfather, in 1919. Um, and then the, I think the younger brother went to Edinburgh to also to study medicine. So you get people into a profession. And then my father was trained as a barrister. His father died in the middle of his training. So he came home to look after his mum and also effectively then started a property business. My, my, my grandfather had built up a bit of a portfolio of very bizarre portfolio of properties everywhere from Pembrokeshire to South Wales. And so my father started off managing that. And then I went to Cambridge. I read Classics. Uh, at one stage, I trained to be a teacher for a year, and then I had a panic attack because I thought, if I basically grow up, go to school, go to university, and then end up teaching in a school without doing anything in the interim, it's, I, I just thought, this, I'll spend my entire life in educational institutions.

I could imagine you though, as there was no professor there.

Well, it was funny because, um, I was actually more popular with the pupils than with the teachers, generally, for all kinds of reasons. The other problem I had, I'll be absolutely honest with you, is having been a kind of slightly mischievous, you know, secret smoker and things at school, I could never really bring myself, at age 23, to discipline the kids for what I thought were trivial infractions.

Yeah.

Okay. So there was also a sort of problem I had, which is the exercise of kind of rule-keeping, you know, you know, so someone would come in and say, "Father, Father Gill Miner has been caught smoking behind the bike sheds." And my natural instinct was, "Brilliant!" And I remember, "No, no, you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to... Gosh, that is terrible, he must be punished." You see, so you became a teacher. I briefly trained. I, I did one, one term as a teacher, and that's when I had the effective, I, I think I realized beforehand, and I have to do something else first.

Okay.

So, what was your first job?

So, my first job was a graduate trainee at Ogilvy & Mather Direct in Soho Square in September 1988. I started. Now, not quite my first job. I had a holiday job driving a forklift truck, uh, in the Ryvita factory in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean.

We don't need to go into that.

You don't need to. No, except for...

We don't need to know about your truck driving skills.

Except for two things. Um, which is that, well, I actually, I won't tell you the second one, it's a bit weird. Uh, the first one was driving. No, no, I won't. Driving the, driving the forklift truck.

Um...

Yeah, okay. The second thing was, I'm not a, I'm not a great devotee of Freud, but when I was working as a forklift truck driver, I once had a dream where I dreamt I had two genitals. Okay. Because if you think about it, you spend literally eight or nine hours a day effectively putting two prongs into two parallel holes. So that's my only Freudian moment, which I'll reveal. But the other one is that actually driving a forklift truck is an absolute blast. I absolutely love cars, vehicles of any kind. Always have done.

What car have you got?

My sexual identity is motorist.

Uh, I've got a Ford Mustang Mach-E, which I absolutely love. I'm, by the way, I'm an advocate. Introvert.

No, I'm an electrification enthusiast. Now, let me, now I know, I know you oldsters always get grumpy about this.

Very old, but I'm portraying myself as the voice of the. Okay, it's really this simple. Okay, which is, uh, first of all, two things. One, every single car traditionalist in Britain resisted automatic transmission until they drove one. Yeah. At which point they never went back. Yeah. Okay. It's the same thing. It's an air fryer. Okay, everybody goes, "Why would I want one of these? I don't get it. It's just a small convection oven." You have an air fryer. There's no... You've got an air fryer in your shepherd's hut, haven't you? Right. Okay. Now, uh, automatic transmission is exactly the same. Don't get me wrong, if I lived in the far north of Scotland or West Wales, in empty winding roads where I could really enjoy gear shifting, I might revert to a manual. Uh, anywhere in the southeast...

Or Tiptronic.

Yeah.

Um...

But funny enough, there's an electric car that has fake Tiptronic transmission. So it's all done with software. I'm just trying to remember, is it not, is it the new Kia something or other? Or no, is it the IONIQ, Hyundai Ionic? One of them, anyway, has fake, effectively fake transmission, which is quite interesting. Um, but my argument is that on a very simple level of simplicity, every other, apart from a lawnmower, every other device that develops rotation has moved to the electric motor.

I love electric. I love. And the argument is, everything in that engine of yours, the cylinders, the gearbox, the spark plugs, the injection mechanism, okay? Uh, the, you know, the oil filter, the air filter, all of that [ __ ] which needs to be replaced or repaired, only serves one purpose, which is to rotate a shaft to provide for momentum.

I, I think they've got a fact that in an electric car, you've only got 25 moving parts. And in a normal petrol...

It's seven. I think I think the drivetrain may have some. In a petrol car, it's 247. And there's a great mantra in the car industry, which is, "The best part is no part."

Yeah. Yeah.

And what it can also do, which is what's really exciting, isn't the electric car. It's the electric car-like object, which would include miniaturized versions. So, I borrowed...

Do you want to borrow one?

A Microlino. Have you? It's a little Swiss. It's basically a bubble car, an electric bubble car, which seats two. It's a tiny car designed for urban transit.

Really?

Yeah. I'll give it a go.

It's an absolute joy.

I've got my little electric scooter.

You've got your electric scooter. You... What is it? And you've got a scooter and a Lino. You use Lime bikes, do you?

No. So, I've got downstairs. I've got a VanMoof.

I've got the electric car. My wife's electric car is outside.

Which one is that?

She's, I hate to say this, she's got a Porsche Macan.

Which I love driving. Brilliant.

But, but literally, I bought one of the first Teslas in the country. So, this is going back seven or eight years.

Yeah.

And so, and then we bought another Porsche. Now we're on the Macan. And, and I, I, I'm going to tell you why I love it, okay?

Because I'm a bad driver, and the car is a better driver than me. So the Macan drives itself. So I can't really... So the only worry I have about that is that younger people, if they've never driven a slightly crap car, will lose some of the skills.

It's rather like the fear with pilots. If you over-reliance on the autopilot may lead to a loss of kind of instinctive skills. It's like kids not being able to use an old phone.

Did you ever see that Instagram or TikTok where you got a group of kids and you put an old dial phone in and you said, "Okay, you've got to dial a number." They just sort of looked at it and went, "What have you got to do here?"

It occurred to me that we occasionally use a dial and a receiver on top of it as a, as signage directing people to a telephone. Okay. And it suddenly occurred to me that people under about 15 or 20 have no idea what that signifies. It could be a Chinese character for a while.

They have not got. I mean, this film is hilarious. Literally, this father gives him this phone and says, "Dial a number," and they look at the phone for 10 minutes trying to figure it out. I want to now come back to brands. Okay.

Mhm.

And which is, by the way, an important part of marketing, but not the only part.

I'm going to, but, but let's start with something.

Yeah.

What is a brand? Okay. And what makes a brand special?

What makes a brand special and what is a brand? The best definition of the effect of a brand, which is probably the best way to define it. The best way to define a brand is not by what it is, but what it does. Is by a guy called Matt Johnson, who's a neuroscientist, who in his book, I think, "Brands Mean Business," wrote this fantastic sentence, which is, "Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode."

Right. That is a very good definition. What it is, effectively, is a brand. And I think we should define it by what it does, not by what it is, because what it is is, uh, is very difficult to pin down. It's anything that confers on you an enduring, and I would argue, justifiable advantage in your future business dealings. Yeah. Okay. Uh, once defined by an advertising guy as, "the last legal unfair advantage you can enjoy in business," essentially. Uh, the only other aspect of that is, you know, there is a, effectively, there's a psychological and perceptual component to it, which is that in some ways, often these are highly contradictory. You know, you know, my phrase, "the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea." And when I came up with that phrase, I Googled it to find out if anybody had said it before. And the, it has the weirdest, um, provenance, which is the first people to say it, you wouldn't expect this, but actually, it's a conversation between Einstein and Niels Bohr, where they said the same thing about advanced physics. They said, "In basic physics, the opposite of a good idea is wrong. But in advanced physics, the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea." And so sometimes brands have a value because they make you stand out.

And sometimes brands have a value because they help you fit in. Sometimes brands have a value because they surprise you. Sometimes brands have a value because they're completely unsurprising. So, if you take the example of somebody who stays at a Travelodge or a Holiday Inn Express or a Premier Inn, okay, those are what I'd call variance reduction brands, which is, you know, they're not, they're not shooting for a 10, but they're, to borrow from Scott Galloway, they're kind of always an eight, you know, they're always a seven. You know, you know, it'll be pretty good. There won't be any weird surprises, okay? But equally, McDonald's will be the same. Okay, you know, I know basically that what I get is going to be, first of all, worth the money I pay, and secondly, you know, the loos are going to be clean, I'm not going to get ill. They're not, you know, the food's going to be pretty palatable. Okay. And then, so if you're staying at a Travelodge and you're going to Alton Towers, okay, in a sense, what you're getting from the brand is two completely different promises, but they're both a promise which fits the task at hand.

Okay. Um, and the other thing about it is that this is why I think this is, by the way, much more important than we realize. Is you can also define a brand. I, I'm not very comfortable about people using the word "brand" in a funny way because it's a bit like the blank tile in Scrabble, which is you can use it to mean anything that suits your purpose at any given moment. Um, but one other really important thing is that in the absence of brands, uh, you have market breakdown. Now, let me give you an example of this, which is that there are some business categories, I think, which are actually such a good idea, they attract lots of dishonest actors very early. Okay. And they actually destroy trust in the whole category.

What do you mean, like venture capital?

Okay. I won't go there, cuz I, you know, I'm, you know, we never know where we need a job next. But, um, an example would be, okay, one, do you remember those funny little wheelie scooter things with two wheels where you, they were variously called, um, they were kind of like, um, wheelie boards. So it was like a skateboard sideways, and you stood on them, and then you moved forward.

Yes. Yeah.

Loads and loads of manufacturers. They were branded by the importer, not by the manufacturer. One of them caught fire under a tree. Okay.

Yes. They would, they would move by themselves, didn't they?

And effectively, people lost trust in the category. Now, had there been a Panasonic wheelie board or a Samsung wheelie board, I think we would have bought it with a high level of trust, and that category would have survived in the absence of people with reputational skin in the game. Now, two examples. The early days of mobile phones were basically a bit of a wild west. Okay? You know, mobile phone shops were all a bit of a, kind of, there weren't any brands. You took pot luck. Um, you know, interestingly, I noticed a brand called iSmash that's appearing in railway stations because mobile phone repair was one of those things where you just were taking your life in your hands. They, the people could be geniuses, they could be terrible, but what matters, of course, is not the actual service you enjoy, but your expectation of it. Because when you make a, when you make a purchase, you're often making effectively a prediction, or actually a bet, to some extent, on the outcome.

Um, uh, timeshare was a classic case, I think, which was a brilliant idea, which fundamentally attracted a lot of bad actors. What you're seeing now, 20... Brilliant idea. Timeshare, when you think about it, is any house. You know, I, why do I want to own a house for 52 weeks of the year when I only want to go to Fuerteventura for three? Yeah. Okay. Brilliant idea. Okay.

Very windy, by the way.

And now it's slowly... No, no, but I like it for that reason. It never gets too hot. There's always a nice breeze.

Um, and it's also, you can watch the surfers, which is good. So, this unfair advantage thing, it, what it is, is that sometimes it's because you garner attention. Sometimes brands are powerful because you don't have to think about them very much. I mean, one of the things that makes Coca-Cola incredibly powerful, right? But what's magical about it is you can ask for it without really thinking whether the answer is going to be no. So, beach shack in Tanzania, you know, Michelin-style restaurant. Now, that's not true of Dr. Pepper. I always make that point. Okay, there's a level of sort of uncertainty when you ask for a Dr. Pepper. Unless you're in Texas. Actually, we do, you know this, that there's basically no Pepsi in Texas and New Mexico. So the competition is Coke, Dr. Pepper. When I was quite young, at the age of 25, I was running my first business. I bumped into a brand consultant. His name was Ted de Cruz. Have you ever heard?

I know the name. Yeah.

Do you know Ted de Cruz? I think, I think he... Well, he's had quite an illustrious career. At the time, he was creative director of Wolff Olins, which was a big brand agency in the '80s. I think he went on to set up, uh...

A big agency for Saatchi. And, and he's kept, you know, he's still a quite a close friend. And he said something to me which became my mantra in all my branded life. And it was the following: "If you're not special to the customer, you won't exist." And it was the idea that a brand is about being special to the customer.

Yeah.

And now, what special do you relate to that?

No, no, that's perfectly fine. I mean, what that special means is entirely depends on what category you're in, what consumer you serve. Okay. So, as I said, there are brands which serve the, what I call the, you know, the, the no surprises, uh, need. And there are brands, obviously, which stand out. And this is actually, funny enough, this, if you want to get really philosophical for a second, uh, there's a book which has just come out, and I can't remember the title, but it says that the essential contradiction of humans, which makes, to some extent, is possibly the source of some of our unhappiness, I would suspect, or at least ambiguity. It maybe a strength as well, is that in a way, we're trying to do two things at once, which is we need to stand out and we need to fit in.

Yeah.

Because if all you did was stand out and you couldn't actually form allegiances or you couldn't be part of a group, then obviously you probably died in the ancestral environment. But there are lots of situations where, for reasons of status, prestige, um, mating, probably, okay, you need to stand out. You need to be different.

You need to be the people. And there's a similar thing, I think, with a brand, which is, in a way, you've got to tread this weird line between two contradictions, which is, in design, it was called MAYA. It was, I think MAYA stands for "Maximally Advanced Yet Acceptable." And this was something I think conceived, I'm trying to remember who the designer was, Raymond Loewy. Um, and he designed a fan which was too quiet. Okay. And everybody basically said, "This fan isn't working." And he realized that if the fan doesn't make a noise,

Okay.

We just assume it's ineffectual.

Yeah.

Uh, and actually, you... So, somebody once came to me and said, "We, we're developing, we're using AI to develop a, it was a razor, an electric razor which was completely silent." And I said, "But the weird crackly noise in the wine is how I know it's working." Okay? You know, you don't want your nasal hair trimmer to be silent. Okay? Yeah.

I mean, apart from, I mean, you don't use it for that protracted period.

Or you don't want your electric car to be silent. Well, that's the interesting thing, which they're adding, uh, phomorphic noise, which technically you call it, which is. And so Raymond Loewy's point is that you, and, and, and similarly, there is this weird line between, obviously, there are brands which people buy to stand out. That's an evolutionary need. Okay? There are also brands people buy to fit in. Football kit, probably being, you know, again, a huge premium market. There's a massively nuclear market in those, in football shirts, but they're really, you know, in a way...

Retro ones. And the retro ones, there's a whole kind of back catalogue you can exploit there. And in, in many ways, I mean, an awful lot of what we do is, is actually in service of these two sort of contradictory needs. And actually, you know, you, you don't want to be in, it's very important in innovation, which is, you can be too weird to succeed.

And this is why the concept of skeuomorphism is interesting. You need a digital camera to make a click noise. You know, uh, you need electric cars to make a hum as you drive along because we're so used to using noise to kind of gauge speed. And there was a very interesting one, which is, Rory, what's his name, who is on, used to be on Top Gear. Brilliant presenter, actually. I never understood why they dropped him. He was the best of the lot, really. Um, he reviewed the new Rolls-Royce Spectre. Yeah. And he said, "There's actually a problem because it's so quiet." Okay? That utterly trivial noises like the hum of the air, there was some sort of activity going on in the left-hand air conditioning vent. Okay? And he said it was driving him practically nuts.

Yes.

Now, he said, in a petrol car, you wouldn't even have noticed. You see, so you, there are always these fascinating things in terms of innovation, in terms of being just the right amount of innovative, maximally advanced yet acceptable. And so, these are the really, and as I said, brands often for, you know, serve contradictory functions. You know, there are brands that exist to amaze, surprise, or to help you display your distinctiveness. And there are brands which actually, in a sense, do the opposite. Let, let's, let's talk a little bit about behaviour. Okay. Because...

So there are areas, I suppose you could argue, there are areas of human decision-making which are all about variance reduction. In other words, don't do anything too weird because if it goes badly wrong, the upside isn't that great and the downside's potentially catastrophic. Okay. It's weird for me, just going... One thing that we touched upon before was, I, I believe that at the moment, it's the, it's the world of the geeks, isn't it? And we're, we're trying to sort of quantify everything and we're trying to theorize everything. And I'm a great believer in emotional intelligence. I'm a believer that when you buy something, there's a large part of...

Intangible.

Yeah. There's an intangible there. It's an emotional decision. It isn't the computer says do this.

Yes, of course.

There's also an element of branding which is your capacity to reinvent yourself. Because if you think about it, the Ford Motor Company doesn't own a single asset that it owned in 1924. Okay? There's not a single part, factory, employee, or really element of knowledge. Actually, there may be a few patents kicking around, I have no idea. But the one thing they own is effectively their name, which is the consumer's expectation that they have enough reputational skin in the game not to produce a bad car. A very good, interesting planner called Kevin Chesters makes the point that advertising and marketing is slightly problematic because it's, we actually did for a very large TV company, we did some research into the, um, big five personality values of their employees. And the big five, for people who don't know, is something called OCEAN, which is Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion/Introversion, Neuroticism, and, um, Agreeableness. Okay, I've got that the wrong way around, but you get the point.

Don't worry.

And actually, nearly everybody in marketing is massively high on the Openness to Experience thing. Um, interestingly, what we found was that the TV company's viewers were very, were relatively low on openness. They wanted familiarity, soap operas, repetition. They did. In other words, you know, the typical advertising person is into, which I am, actually. And funny, my dad, who is in every other respect, was an archetypal Telegraph-reading conservative, was actually very, very high on openness to experience. So, you know, he would, he was highly appreciative of modern art and things like that. I, to be honest, I'm a bit like that. I, I noticed you had anti-Brexit crockery, which I don't totally approve of. I thought the... Just to be clear, I thought I voted Remain. I thought the anti-Brexit-eers were so derangedly con... uh, uh, confident in the rightness of their opinion.

I, I don't think they campaigned, to be honest with you.

Well, it was almost as though, "There's no way we're going to be stupid enough to vote for Brexit." But the reality, there was a better message out. Well, I mean, as an advertising guy, I would say that if genuinely, this thing has been in existence for 30 years, and you can't write a great song in favour of it, okay, you can't write a great line that sums up why it's brilliant. Whereas you can sum up "Take Back Control." Okay? That shows a failure of the product, in a sense, not the marketing, in that it had never managed to define itself in a way that... I mean, I think it's complicated because I think by dint of speaking English, I don't think we're a fully European country, nor can we be, by the way. Uh, by the way, I'd say the same for Scandinavians as well. I mean, there's Europe, Europe, which is like the middle of Europe, which is really, really kind of Europey. And to some extent, Portugal, the UK, Ireland, actually, okay, okay, they may have huge economic reasons for participating in this thing, but they can never wholly be part of it because you just can't. You know, we've got a history. Anyway, we won't go into that. But no, my only argument was they were woefully overconfident in the rightness of their cause, which is, you know, I would have acknowledged when I voted Remain, there was a 30% possibility that there would be a future where it was better to be out than in, which could be. I mean, I don't know what our trade deal with the US is going to be.

Well, pretty appalling. No, no, no. Okay, the obvious one is an interesting one. If you look at KANG, which is basically you create a single market and a single point of travel for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Okay.

Um, just to give you a single statistic, at the time of Brexit, there were more British-born people working in Australia than British-born people working in the EU, outside the UK.

Yeah.

Now, if you simply look at what people are doing, rather than what economic theory teaches you.

Yeah.

I had someone come up to me in Ireland once who said this. He said, "We're always talking about Ireland is at the heart of Europe." He said, "But when people leave Ireland, he said they go to the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United States." Okay. If you think about it, the fact that we speak English is a fundamental asymmetry because, um, it's very difficult for us to know what language to learn. I hate to say that. It's bloody obvious if you're Dutch. Do I learn a foreign language? Yes. What language do I learn? English. Okay.

If your first language is English, it's not entirely clear what you should do.

I think... Okay.

Give me a minute here. Like, and, and I, I don't want to talk too long about Brexit. So, I really want to get into you and branding. And, but I think that Brexit was a classic example where the marketeers did a much better job of marketing one argument, whether it was truth or not, than the other side. So, in the first... Let me finish it. So, so the reality is, we never lost control. Okay. But that line just appealed to everyone.

I'm not entirely sure about that.

But, but, but what we really needed to do was focus on what we actually gained, which was 40 years of the most fantastic prosperity and growth that we had seen in Britain. 40 years of safety. And let's not underestimate that. The important. We live in a world nowadays where my...

That's NATO, mate. Okay. No, no. Yeah. But my generation do not understand what it's like to have a war.

And, and the reality is, we've had peace and prosperity in Europe. Whether it's NATO or whether it's Europe, of course, working with our European partners has helped create that environment. And you know this weekend, and I know you love to talk about the Euro.

I would continue to be incredibly cooperative.

Yeah. And this, this, and to be honest, I think now what we should be doing is just having, we should, I never thought we'd be going down this route. We should just have the humility to just go, "We made a massive mistake. There was no plan B." The Conservative party have admitted that they didn't expect to win, you know, and let's just be honest enough to say, "Look, it's gone wrong." We, at the moment, have got...

It was not well executed. I, I, we can't say whether it's gone right or wrong, um, for another 10, 15 years.

I'm going to... No, I genuinely mean that. In other words, black swan events are so significant.

Okay.

Uh, that, um, I mean, okay, the Ukraine invasion has had much more impact on the country's economy than whether we leave or remain in the EU. The, the EU had become such a weirdly economically monomaniacal project about, about freedom of movement. Okay. That the first argument the Remain campaign thought of, I'm not making this up, is someone said, "If we leave the EU, labor costs might rise." That was a senior businessman. Okay.

Now, I don't want to be rude, but to normal people on the street, labor costs rising means a pay rise. Okay. It's only if you are, if you're capital, if you're on the side of capital. Yes, that's a perfectly feasible argument. Most people are not capital. They're labor. Okay. So, that was the kind of where, where it had undoubtedly...

I think it suffered from basically a, a completely soulless adherence to kind of neoliberal...

Yeah.

Economics at one level.

Which it, you know, it only had one idea. I, I want to, I want to get back to talking about emotional intelligence and the psychology of the customer. Okay. What is the psychology of a customer when he buys a brand? Let's take an example like Coca-Cola.

Well, for one part, we're strangers to ourselves, to use the title of a book by Timothy Wilson. Some part of our consumption is undoubtedly driven by motives which are effectively hardwired and in what is called the adaptive unconscious. So these are motives that we've effectively inherited. Um, to what extent they're a product of evolution and environment is complicated and mixed, but, uh, they're not necessarily, uh, what you might call available for introspection. In other words, that there are feelings that aren't necessarily connected to the parts of the brain that do the talking and the explaining. That's probably the way to describe it. So there will always be, you know, if you think about it, I mean, thirst is fairly fundamental, but also you might argue that status, for example, among humans is fairly fundamental. Brilliant book called "The Status Game" by Will Storr, which is probably, uh, well, you know, one of the best books written, I think, on that topic, where he just realizes that if you delve into what people really do and what makes them feel good or bad, fundamental sort of, uh, status gains or losses are something we account for just as much as we account for...

Status and ego.

Ingestion of necessary calories and so forth. Um, I mean, there, you know, other other instincts that, that's often positioned as malign. It sometimes is, sometimes isn't. I think sometimes it leads to extraordinary achievement and, uh, brilliant outcomes. It can be harnessed in good ways or bad ways. And equally, by the way, you can compete for status in ways that are pro-social. If, in an ancestral environment, you competed for prowess and prestige by being very good at hunting and then sharing your catch with the rest of the tribe, that's pro-social. If you competed for status by fighting with hand axes with other men in the tribe, that's antisocial. And there, and so you can take the same instinct and effectively direct it or misdirect it. I mean, equally, the urge to feel safe, for example, uh, you know, the urge not to be anxious, you know, freedom from anxiety is an important urge. Obviously, there is a parental urge. You know, there's an urge to effectively, uh, I think attach some sort of meaning, significance to your life and what you're doing, so that it has, in other words, it's more than just the sum of its parts. Um, and some, some of these things we can probably describe accurately. It appears, by the way, in experiments that some people are quite well aligned in what they're trying to do unconsciously and what they consciously believe they're trying to do. And there are some people who are actually quite misaligned. They will make a claim that they're doing something for one reason, whereas the real ulterior unconscious motive is something else. What's interesting is because this stuff is often unsaid, some element of competitive capitalism, okay, is a discovery process. It's not an optimal supply of, uh, human needs, uh, uh, to, you know, to. And also, you know, the currency of status changes. Okay, you've got an extremely expensive electric bike. Okay. Now, in parts of the world, the idea that an electric bike conferred higher status than a car would seem ridiculous. Okay? But here in London, the currency is different.

Yes.

And so, of necessity, free market capitalism, which Deirdre McCloskey thinks we shouldn't call capitalism at all, we should call it "innervism" because it's a discovery mechanism. It's not an optimization mechanism. It's not a delivery mechanism. It's a mechanism for continual discovery. And this is why Boxpark interests me because you have literally a randomized control trial in a single location between 10 or 15 food suppliers, and you can see effectively, it's, it's selection, replication, and elimination. We wanted to let the food do the talking. We even tried to control the branding, to be honest. So we use generic branding throughout, limited amount.

So you're limiting the variables of comparison.

Yeah. We wanted to let the food do the talking. But...

So Deepak, who runs, um, Arcade...

Arcade. Yeah.

Very similar model.

Which is it? It's an extraordinarily good incubator for original food ideas, partly because, as I said, one of the problems with opening a, now to be honest, there are animals which only succeed, okay, because of where they are. Flightless birds in New Zealand. Okay. There were effectively, I'm just trying to work out what the hell happened. Um, but for some weird reason in New Zealand, there weren't cats or weasels or other predators. So, you could evolve very large flightless birds.

One of the problems, I suppose, with food evolution is that when you open an experimental restaurant, you can't tell whether it succeeds because of its location, its food, its branding, its service, its price, etc. You can't tell which variable makes it succeed. You might argue in a box park or an arcade, you've got a beautiful, like for like comparison because every, I mean, okay, one place is going to be closer to the door and one place is going to be further away, but you're basically, you have a group of people and you say, "Okay, here are 15 food brands. Which one do you want to eat from?" Or indeed, which mixture of two do you want to eat from?

Hopefully, it's all going to be based on the product. And no, um, because just, just to be very clear on this, I think that a great product requires, uh, competent branding to be successful. I think it is perfectly possible to be a brilliant product, um, and fail because you haven't communicated your greatness in a way that can be fully appreciated by the consumer. So, an example would be, um, Michelin-starred food in the wrong setting wouldn't actually be very enjoyable.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of fancy food. I'm a bit, I'm a bit of a, I'm really not.

No, but actually, if you think about it, that, you know, um, uh, if you, you know, if if you don't, if you don't make the promise in advance, and the, in other words, the psychological context in which the person experiences something is inappropriate. Okay. It's rather like, let's say you had the best restaurant in the world, but it smelt of sewage or poo or something like that. No one would enjoy it.

Okay. And it's the same thing with branding, that it creates a smell, which fundamentally will either add to or detract from your enjoyment, your expectation of, as well. Now, Ryanair to some extent succeeds very, very well because it sets deliberately low expectations and then delivers. Actually, okay, right. I mean, he, he's the absolute example of his, in his own brand is, "I'm going to take all the frills out of the flying." And really, to be honest, the impression that Michael O'Leary gives is, "I don't give a [ __ ] about the customer." You know, all I really want to do is get really low, low-cost flights, and that's it. And that, that is that brand, and that's okay for some customers. If you're, you know, if you're really on a budget and you want to travel to Lithuania, it's, it's the person you're going to fly.

He also has, in a sense, two customers, doesn't he? Because, um, there's the low-cost brigade, where for a lot of people, you know, in other words, they want the money to spend on their holiday, or, you know, whatever, or it's a trip like a funeral or something where you have no choice but to make the trip.

But he also, of course, the routes are unusual. So it's worth noting that he does actually have premium customers because if you want to fly from London to, um, obscure, well, Bergerac, for example, okay, you know, now the people who fly London to the Dordogne are pretty much minted, okay? But on the other hand, they are prepared to put up with Ryanair, a, a, because they do save quite a lot of money, which nobody totally minds. But actually, they also go, "Well, compared with driving for two and a half hours from Toulouse or having to hire a car, for example, actually, it's, you know, it's a price I'm willing to pay." How well Ryanair would do, obviously, it doesn't work with a business model, but how well they do if they were head-to-head with EasyJet or British Airways everywhere they flew is an interesting question.

That is interesting. Let's go back to, I'm going to try to bring this back to why does a customer buy Coca-Cola rather than Pepsi or rather than the own brand? Um, well, this is where we get back back to what the advertising agency should be doing versus what the advertising agency is doing. Not everything's a brand question. There are, there are moments of decision where brands are absolutely decisive. It's also worth noting that the decisions are not only, um, between brands, okay, but also we feel much more comfortable buying brands than non-brands. So, I have no idea what brand that television is, 'cause the bezel's actually out of sight. Well, I'm guessing that would be a Samsung Frame.

It's a Samsung Frame. Okay. Now, you felt much more comfortable buying that, even though you paid 100 quid for the privilege, uh, than buying the Zugagu TV, which had identical seeming specifications and which Amazon was somehow desperate to sell you for no readily apparent reason. That's because my wife didn't want me to have my 65-inch Frame. But when I said, "If I get a TV that looks like a painting, can I have it?" By the way, I'm going to make a really important defense of irrelevance here, which is that, uh, there is a mode to problem-solving. Okay, this is important. Creative problem-solving, which is highly anecdotal and incredibly tangential.

Now, my argument, I've made this on several podcasts. Cops understand this. You have an investigative phase in an investigation where you'll literally ask questions like, "Did you notice anything unusual?" Okay? Where any information, however seemingly trivial, even if it's of no evidential value, is used to refine your investigation. Then eventually, when you know who did the crime, you have to actually compile evidence. What we've done in business decision-making is because we think, "Oh, we've got all the data we need," okay, which we haven't. What we've done is we've we've leapt to making decisions on the information that's available without adequately looking for what other information might be useful.

Yeah. Now, cops will ask a question. They'll literally go to the next-door neighbor and go, "Did you notice anything unusual last night?" Completely open-ended question, which could be, you know, there was a scream, or there was a funny man in a white. It's always a man in a white van, isn't it? Uh, there's a funny man in a white van parked outside.

Yeah. Now, I, one of the things I think we've lost in business is this question where we literally ask very, very open-ended questions and let the conversation go where it goes.

Totally. So, because, sometimes that's better. Yeah. You get, you get to a place where you never would have got through an intentional, managed, orchestrated discussion. The interesting thing is the information that's often, um, what you might call, uh, disconfirmatory emerges more slowly. And that's why you've got to be very careful about things like AI, I think, because my problem with AI is not actually the fact that it's bad. It's that it's too fast. Yeah. That a lot of decisions have to be made sequentially, iteratively, and it's an exploratory process.

Dating, okay, I don't really believe in dating apps because I don't think, uh, I don't think photographs and a few lines of text are sufficient. I mean, you might argue, okay, with guys, there's a type. So, there's a certain type of appearance which you just wouldn't go for under any circumstances and you couldn't. Okay. So as a process of elimination, it might perform some sort of, you know, role. I don't think as a process of selection, it's satisfactory. Okay. Because, you know, what you need to know to make a decision like that involves, you know, regular interactions. And we use what we discover in search to refine our preferences. You know, what's realistic is not always the same as what's desirable, for example.

And the same is true of property search. People come along with a list of criteria and then they end up buying a house which is weirdly quite different. So I think, um, I think what we've got to be very careful about is this data fetishism because, totally, the data is quite often unrepresentative and also it's heavily weighted to those things which arbitrarily are easily given to quantification. So in the property market, the weirdest thing is we, we've got this office on the South Bank of the Thames overlooking the river, and, um, when my boss came to me and said, "I think we can move to Sea Containers House." I said, "Look, that's a brilliant place, but there's no way we can afford that."

Yeah. And he said, "Well, this is the weird thing. We can." And the weird reason is that South of the river is defined in London property as not prime London. Yeah.

Okay. So prime central London does not extend south of the Thames. Now, sorry. Okay. Right. Yeah. Okay. Except if you're actually on the banks of the goddamn river, that's pretty effing prime by my book. Right. Okay. Similarly, if you're, you know, you know, by that definition, Windsor Castle is not a prime piece of London property. Okay. And it's north of the river, technically, I suppose. But, okay, this is absurd, but it's an attempt to create a binary classification for something. And of course, the really interesting thing entrepreneurs do and property developers do. It's not about what you're right about. It's what the competition is wrong about.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the really valuable information. You notice that every entrepreneur isn't trying to be right. They're trying to find out where everybody else is wrong.

Yeah. You, you've got to be brave enough as an entrepreneur to do something that no one else is willing to do. It's, it's interesting when you talk about quantification because I was in, um, Paris this weekend and I, and I was traveling on the Eurostar. And I know you've got a lovely anecdote about the Eurostar, and which I'd love you to share. And, um, I'm sort of boycotting until they start stopping in Kent again.

Okay. If you're going to run through our bloody county, the least you can do is pick us up and drop us. I don't know why they don't stop at Ebbsfleet. Because for instance, with me, when I was coming up from Sussex, I would have preferred to go to Ebbsfleet and then left my car. Million people live in Kent. 1.8, 8 million people live in Essex. Okay. East Sussex would be another 600,000. Surrey would be 600,000. East London, a lot of people used to go to Ebbsfleet because the boarding experience is much better.

Okay. Um, someone told me it's something to do with unionization. It's not the real reason that that unions are bothered about some weird thing that you can then employ drivers who aren't paid a London. I'm God knows what. But, but the really annoying thing is that, um, I mean, this is a misrepresentation of statistics. Okay. When you give people a lot of data, you get Lucy Letby because you can cherry-pick the data effectively to provide a lot of data which is confirmatory and ignore the stuff that is, uh, contradictory. And the Lucy Letby problem. And the real problem with Lucy Letby is not they made the wrong decision. It's probably that it'll take seven years to put it right. I noticed that Eurostar quoted the statistic that only four to 5% of their passengers embarked or disembarked in Kent stations. Okay. But they're slightly disguising that from the fact that only two trains a day stopped in Ashford. Okay. And a minority of trains stopped at Ebbsfleet.

Yeah. Okay. So if only 30% of your trains stop, now actually that's 15 to 20% of the people on the trains where you can get off in Kent. And it's likewise on the other side.

So that's classic Lille, of course, is. But they've stopped there. What? They don't stop in Lille anymore.

My train didn't stop in Lille.

Well, that's [ __ ]. You got to get to Brussels. You got to go via Paris.

Well, well, also if you want to go to Wales, also if you want to go to the South of France, change in Lille. Okay. Don't change in Paris.

Yeah. Okay. Because if you change in Lille, although it's, this is again a problem. Okay. Quantification because every single bloody website you go to, you say, "I want to go by train from," well, it used to be, "Fleet Street Pancras to Lille." Okay. They don't do the direct train.

Quantifies it by speed.

By speed. Now by comfort or enjoyment. You, it will take you 45 minutes longer if you change in Lille. But you don't have to get a taxi in Paris. You don't have to navigate the garden, get your luggage to some hideous thing. You go across to a place called the Palais, I think it's called the Palais de la Gare or something, which is across from Lille station, where they have 27 northern French and Belgian beers on tap. Okay. And they also serve a thing called un Welsh rarebit. I'm not making this up. It's the French for a Welsh rabbit, and it's got an egg on top and chips as well as bread underneath. Okay. It's insane. It's something only the northern French could produce.

Sounds lovely.

It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Right, Rory, I'm conscious of time. I've got some quick-fire questions, and I'm going to be, sorry, but I'm going to limit you to, uh, 30 seconds replying to each one. All right. Okay. Which brands do you admire and why?

Entirely different brands for entirely different reasons. Some for consistency, some for the opposite. Um, everything from Jack Daniels for total, absolutely laser-focused consistency to, for example, Jaguar for its latest innovation, controversially. Okay. I think that's entirely in the spirit of the brand as it was envisaged. The E-Type was not a nostalgic car when it was launched.

Right. I believe that the future of all consumer brands will be impact brands, sustainable brands. Do you believe there's going to be a future for brands like Coca-Cola in 10 years' time?

Um, there will, argue why. Uh, okay. First of all, the sustainability question is relevant. It's better as a support point than as a lead point because it's too much hard work otherwise. Also, we don't want people burning their reserves of good intention for meaningless causes. Okay. So Steven Pinker apologizes for getting involved in a campaign with his students to unplug your mobile phone charger when you're not charging your phone. That makes about as much difference to carbon emissions as pissing in the Pacific. Okay? And yet it wastes reserves of goodwill. And so we should direct those, um, uh, focus those brands that are focused on, you know, solving the carbon crisis on those areas where they can make a difference. Where you could make a difference is if someone actually bought branding to solar panels. If John Lewis started selling solar panels, five times as many people would buy them, or Tesla for that matter, which they do now. Okay. But that business of trying to turn every brand into an environmental campaigner was was irrelevant to the consumer. Now, purpose, by the way, for employees is a really vital thing because you might spend 40 hours a week working for an organization. I don't want my sausages to have a really strong opinion on, um, for example, the, you know, Taiwan or, okay, the plight of the Uyghur. Sorry, it's not, you know, okay, right, too tiring.

How will AI change, uh, branding?

Uh, it'll make it better and worse. I treat it like a satnav, which is sometimes it has good ideas, sometimes it's stupid, and you still need humans to tell the difference. Okay. What's the future for advertising?

Uh, the agency is totally unfit for purpose, the creative agency in my opinion. Why?

And because it is too focused on, uh, it still has the muscle memory of, uh, marcoms where you made money from media commission. What we've got to look for far more is brand is great ideas for businesses and brands. Not only, not everything is a brand problem. We've also got to learn how to tackle category problems, not brand problems. So a lot of problems which we need to solve in society. Car electrification is one that's close to my mind. Getting people to use the right mode of transport, which may or may not be a car. Okay. Those problems are category problems. They're not brand problems. And, um, consequently, I think because most communication budgets are brand communication budgets, we're missing a huge opportunity to change behavior in other ways where the where the role of communication is not deciding between one brand and another, but it's actually between doing one thing and doing something else.

What does the future have for Rory? So, let's look at Rory in the next 10 years. So, what's going to, what's the future for Rory? Are you going to remain working? What are you going to do?

The really useful thing I think you do when you're a bit older is you do it.

How old are you now?

At 59.

My age.

Yeah, exactly the same. You do want to put something back. That doesn't mean you become wholly altruistic, by the way. But one thing that strikes me as obvious, and there are other people who've led the way have done far more than that, from David Ogilvy, Dave Trott, people like that, actually teaching creativity in economic terms is the most valuable thing you can do with it. Or actually, it's not quite that, because I would argue a lot of people are innately creative, and you give people permission to actually come up with creative solutions.

Yeah. Because there's a huge tendency in any institutional setting where you're not trying to solve a problem, really. You're trying to win an argument. Yeah. And the mental mechanisms you use to solve problems aren't necessarily the same approaches you'd adopt to try and win an argument. Consequently, the best thing that anybody ever says to me, and someone from Unilever said it to me last week, was they said, "When I read your book, I finally felt seen." In other words, I realized this is a legitimate way to think. It's not just me being crazy. And so the self-suppression of creativity is the thing we've really got to fight.

So we talking about more books from Rory?

Uh, there is one on the way. It's going to be called Mad Think, and it's due any year now.

Wow. Okay.

I mean, I'm hopeless with deadlines, but that's another story.

On on that note, I'd like to say it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Rory. I do, you know what? I wish there wasn't a time limit because we could have talked about lots of different things and but it's been a pleasure having you here today and thank you for coming.

Absolute joy. Likewise. Thank you very much indeed. Fantastic. Thank you.