Transcription
[Music] Hello everybody from all over the world. I'm Piers Pandey from Ogilvy India and WPP Worldwide. So happy to be on Amazon Sambal and to chat with me is my very dear friend and a scholar and a behavior scientist, all kinds of persons rolled into one, Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy UK and WPP Worldwide. Also, hi Rory.
It's a pleasure to be here. I find this absolutely fascinating. So, I couldn't have been asked to be present at anything more interesting this year. Thank you very much. And Rudy, um, this meeting is an amazing meeting. Amazon, amazing, or whichever way you take it. The world is looking at India with a lot of hope in terms of what will happen in this part of the world. India is looking at young India with a lot of hope. A lot of young Indians are starting enterprises, doing some amazing things. A number of them are going to be startups, so first-timers into business, not first-timers into life and education. They are very well-educated people, very savvy people, but first time into the world of business. And you bring with you a lot of experience from around the world. I bring some of it from India and its little bits and pieces from around the world. And maybe today is our day to share with them as to what it's going to be like, whether they are going to be from B to C or from manufacturing to consumer or from business to consumer, whichever way. I personally believe that whichever way you look at it, whichever way you do it, somewhere down the line, you will have to create an identity for yourself, or should we call it a brand? A brand which is more than the offering that you have. A brand which, as they say, that products are made in factories, but brands are made in the hearts of people. So, what is it that you and I could share with them? They can throw it out of the window, or they might take something out of it. I'll leave it to you, Mr. Rory. What do you think should be the angle looked at by young Indians, women and men? Everyone is ready to go. What would we share with them?
I think what's really interesting is if you look at the United States as an economic powerhouse, we often tend to think of the factories as what drove it. But actually, the United States became an economic powerhouse in part actually on the back of the mail-order industry. I think at one stage, I think Sears and Montgomery Ward accounted for something like 25% of U.S. retail sales back in the early part of the 20th century. Now, what's interesting is if you look at Byron Sharp's idea of mental and physical distribution, his point is they're both necessary. Before you can either build out at scale and enjoy efficiencies of scale, or before you can enjoy gains to specialization, which is selling something which is a niche product but to a geographically distributed audience. Okay? And I think what always happens, let's be honest about this, is people who think about distribution and manufacturing always underestimate the importance of mental distribution, or what you might call prior fame. But equally, those of us in the advertising industry probably underestimate the importance of physical distribution, which is just getting the stuff on the shelves. So, I think in a plug to our sponsors, what we ought to say is that by creating this extraordinary distribution network within India, Amazon has done something in, you know, the space of very few years, which is akin in importance to what Montgomery Ward did or what Sears did for the United States. But it only works if you have the fame to go along with it. And what happened in the United States was that Chicago, being the rail hub, the center for distribution, Chicago brands or brands from that part of the Midwest tended to achieve national distribution first. But they did it on the back of national advertising and a major investment in what you might call mental familiarity. And I think it's really important to know that if you want to get the full benefits from having this extraordinary new trading network online, uh, you've got to do the grand work of creating demand before you can really benefit from the supply.
I hope that's true. I think that's right. But what's really important to remember is you've just got to do both. You know, in other words, there's no point in having widespread distribution for something which nobody knows about, nobody wants. Also, Rory, I feel what, uh, I feel like sharing with the people on this group is the fact that there is a bit of a misconception these days that I can reach so many people through technology. I can reach so many people very easily. I don't have to spend this kind of money. I think what each one of us should remember is reaching people is not good enough. Reaching people with a message that stays with people is what is required. I am extending on what Rory said, that the people should know about, you know, the depth to which you go, must have the ability to connect with you. You think somebody is not good enough? It's like distributing visiting cards to a million people. I completely, I completely. This book this morning by a brilliant market researcher called John Cohen, and he quotes something from Walt Disney. "Until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed. And without personality, the story cannot ring true to the audience." And so, I completely agree with this, that until you've created some sort of personality around your product, essentially you haven't created something which is a kind of sine qua non for selling anything, which is enough trust and belief to be willing to stump up the money in the first place. And without that, you've still got nothing. People hate to believe it because all of economics tends to take demand as a given. Have a look at economics as a discipline. Any marketer will find economics deeply alarming as a discipline because it starts from the presumption that the consumer has perfect information and perfect trust and proceeds from that. And so, economics has nothing to say about how you create that trust in the first place. But without it, you've got nothing.
I completely agree with this. And, and just in case some of you think that we are trying to sell advertising, definitely not. We are trying to share with you the idea of building a relationship between yours, what you are offering, and the people who are consuming. And there was a very interesting conversation that Rory and I were having, and Rudy should elaborate on that, is the story of the likes of Starbucks. They did not advertise. But what did they do to connect with people? Would you like to spend some time on it on Starbucks?
Well, I think, I think it was really interesting because what always fascinates me about Starbucks is there was nothing really in market research or much in consumer behavior that told you that Starbucks would, um, succeed. No one was walking around the United States in 1993 saying, "Why can't I spend $3.50 on a cup of coffee?" But what made Starbucks interesting, I think this is my hunch, we'll have to test this more, is that when you focus on selling only one thing, consumers tend to assume that you're pretty good at that thing. And previously, coffee had always been sold as an adjunct to something else. You bought soup and a coffee, or a sandwich and a coffee, or in the United States, you went into a gas station and happened to pick up a coffee. And what you can charge for something, and what people are willing to pay, and the degree of interest they show in a category, I think it's completely changed just when you actually achieve that kind of focus. But they also built a brand through huge distribution. They opened stores everywhere. And of course, they created, I think, a certain amount of self-advertisement, which is, it was obvious which brand of coffee you were carrying into the office every morning. So they added a certain amount of badge value to a product which had been completely commoditized before. But there are lots and lots of ways in which you can create perceived value. But I, I have come around to the conclusion, I don't mind. I started my career in direct marketing, which was all about hyper-targeting. I have come to the conclusion that some degree of faintly indiscriminate fame is still necessary, whether that's achieved through advertising or something else, that's a different matter.
Also, Rory, I think advertising has become a very narrow definition. Any way of reaching out to you and talking to you about myself is advertising. So, even if Starbucks was starting stores, or as you said, people were carrying those the cups with a lot of badge value, you can put it in your ledger books as advertising spend, or experience spend, or this spend, or direct marketing spend, or any other spend. The basic thing is that you're connecting with people. You may want to connect with people on television through a commercial, or you may want to connect with people by people passing through the road and seeing a huge Starbucks outlet and saying, "I want to go in there." So, a whole lot of things which are being shared with a whole lot of people like yourselves in the name of, "I do it this way and I do it that way." I would say the way you should look at it as young entrepreneurs is that which is the way in which I will connect with you, which is the way in which I will build a relationship.
Also, one of the things that always, uh, I think about is that innovation probably is not that easy. It's not very easy for you to come out with something that nobody else is thinking about. Even if you're the first, that's an advantage, of course. But somebody will be there with it day after tomorrow. And when all things are equal, if you don't have that relationship, it can, it can go anywhere at once. So, that's the point I wanted to underline.
And what you can, yes, and also, also, I think a degree of fame and customer affection gives you more license to reinvent yourself. It gives you, um, if you like, you know, more upside opportunity, more chances to get lucky. I particularly think actually that we make a terrible mistake in B2B advertising because immediately when we think about B2B advertising, we think about narrowing the target audience and defining them very narrowly down to their job title and a particular business sector. And so we tend to try and do B2B advertising which is super efficient. But sometimes in advertising, the part that appears to be wasted is actually the part that works. And one of the ways to look at fame, we often criticize our kids. I bet we've got kids who secretly want to be social media influencers. And we look at them and we say, "You've got a terrible approach to life. You should try and get rich by doing something brilliantly and then get famous on the back of that." And you kids, all you're trying to do is to get rich by getting famous first. I'm not sure, to be honest, in my more honest moments, that my kids aren't right. But actually, if you're famous, essentially what happens is opportunity comes knocking. And if you're more famous as a B2B brand, you'll suddenly discover markets and clients and customers out there that you never envisaged when you were defining your target audience more narrowly. So, one of the great, one of the great reasons to advertise is not just to measure your advertising by how successfully it achieves what you intended it to do. I think that always underrates the value of advertising. You've also got to measure the value of your advertising and what it achieves that you never intended. So, just to give one example, okay? If you're a famous company, whenever your chief executive rings someone up, they call back. You know, if you're the chief executive of Rolls-Royce Aero Engines, you can call pretty much anybody on the planet below the President of the United States or a major world leader, and they'll return the call, at the very least. Okay? If you're the chief executive of Zog Enterprises, that doesn't happen. Now, it's impossible to put a quantifiable value on it, but it's still really, really valuable. And I think we make that mistake if we define what advertising is supposed to do and we measure its value by the extent to which it achieves things that we imagine it would achieve in the first place. But what my kids probably realize instinctively is that the great advantage of being famous is it just causes opportunities to come knocking that you've never even imagined. So, I think, I think we need to be really careful about how we value this. I think that there's been a kind of conspiracy between the tech world and the media world to turn advertising into an efficiency optimization game. But there's a wonderful guy who's the head of Mastercard Worldwide, so I think he's from India, called Ajay Banga, you probably know of him. And he said brilliantly on a talk I saw him give a few weeks ago, he said, "It's actually the 50% of advertising that you think doesn't work that makes the other 50% work so well. You need the 50% that's exploratory to understand how to make the other 50% work best."
I think that's fundamentally true. Very true. In fact, two other examples since you talked about B2B. Two examples from India that I have had the opportunity of working with are things like Asian Paints and Pidilite, the makers of Fevicol. They were basically B2B businesses, and today they are more B2C than any brand can dream of being. Why? Because they became famous in the streets before they became famous in the hearts. They did the kind of things that made them famous, and then when they went out onto talking to consumers, suddenly there was a feeling, an attraction of, "Hello, I want to talk to him." So, the theory that you had of building fame and then making money, that's definitely one of the ways of doing it, and it's right in front of us.
It's funny, isn't it? Because it seems almost immoral, but deep down, I think my kids might be right. You know, that idea of just get famous for something and then see what happens. Probably isn't a bad strategy. It's more probabilistic rather than deterministic, and it doesn't look very strategic. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't work. I think, I think it's really important, by the way, even LinkedIn. Now, if there's one organization that should be obsessed with narrow B2B targeting, it's LinkedIn. But they admit, they said, "Look, we look at our data and we realize that most people in a buying position in a company, they change every two years. You've got no way of knowing who their successor is going to be or predicting where the successor is going to come from." So, at some level, you've just got to accept that if you're interested in building a long-term brand, not just maximizing short-term sales, you've got to become famous far beyond the, you know, the narrow category of who actually signs the check. And I think that, I would love to believe that a whole lot of new entrepreneurs are not looking at market capitalization to sell things and move on. I would love to see India making brands, brands that first go international, hopefully they go global, hopefully they are able to attract a lot of money into this country, which we can feedback into other things where we require the money. And I think one of the things that Rory, you and I talked about, you can share, this huge desire to be global. Why aren't Indian brands global? I think that our first aim should be to become national. Most of our brands do not even national. We are like a huge continent with so many states. Let's try and be national. Let's try and then be international. You may not be around the globe, but a whole lot of our companies today are present in South Asia, are present in parts of Africa, are present in, present in parts of South America. The motorcycle businesses of Bajaj are fairly big in these areas. Now, what makes it global? Global means more than 150 countries, or it means one brand is traveling outside one country and being attractive in more countries than one. I don't think the biggest of brands like, uh, what you were mentioning to me the other day about McDonald's or or the likes of those were global brands to begin with. They were actually regional or local brands. Will you elaborate on that?
Truly, yes. I mean, actually, I suppose if you watch Mad Men, what you see play out is actually in a few episodes of Mad Men, and that said in the 50s or early 60s, the United States was very much a company of regional brands. You have brands only known in the Southwest, brands only in the Northeast. You have a few that remain. So, In-N-Out Burger, for example, for some peculiar reason, because they, I think they own their own beef farms and they'll only sell within fresh beef distance of where they actually have cattle, I think they're only in Arizona, California, and a couple of other Southwestern states. Actually, a lot of the United States was like that. I mean, historically, Pepsi was Northern and Yankee, and Coke from Atlanta was Southern. Okay? Nobody thinks of it like that anymore. But actually, that's how most of these brands started. They started regional, and then with national distribution and national media, there was a kind of fight to be top dog, effectively. There was a kind of winner-takes-all effect. And I think that's going to play out for what are now currently regional brands in India. And it's not a bad principle to try and be national before you go global. Which said, though, I think India has huge potential to create national luxury brands, which I think is really interesting because those are hugely high margin. I mean, in some ways, you have a big advantage in not being over-invested in manufacturing because manufacturing is kind of a race to the bottom. You already see China being undercut by Vietnam, for example. And it's essentially a race to the bottom. And what you realize actually, actually, what all these manufacturing powerhouses realize is that all the money is really made by the brand owner, by the person who finally puts their kind of stamp of approval on the manufactured product. And the money isn't really in manufacturing at all. And so, I think, you know, I think actually, I think the existence of Amazon in India is really, really important because you might want to compare it in some cases to, you know, the effect of, you know, the railways in in the United States. And that applies globally because of course, you put me in touch with this fantastic Amazon site selling local crafts, and, you know, I was looking at the blue and white pottery, amazing. I could, I could see a pretty massive market for that in the UK once people just become more confident in ordering from overseas. The, it's worth remembering actually that railways and airlines, I'm always really interested by this because I think we're starting to see this with the adoption of video conferencing as well. There are networks like train networks and air networks where your location on the network, your proximity to a hub, majorly affects the value you derive from that network. Okay? If you're close to a global airport, doing global business is much easier than if you're 150 miles from the nearest major airport. If you're close to a kind of rail hub like Atlanta or Chicago, it used to be a huge advantage in your business. Now, actually, the internet and the postal network aren't like that. The interesting thing with postage and distribution, the interesting thing with the internet is, once you're on the network, it delivers its value pretty equally regardless of your geographical location. And that's why, by the way, Zoom is the potential for, uh, India to become a major services and expertise export market, even more so than it already is. Because actually, you can add value to a service industry without your location mattering at all. And, and I think that's a huge advantage. Within the difference, you and I were talking about that the world is talking about the difference between China and India is that there is a lot of mental power, and therefore there is a great ability to be excelling in in the services industry. Now that you can do it from here, you can rock the world from here, by and large, if you build a brand. Otherwise, there'll be many others who will be doing the same thing.
I completely agree. And I think, and I think that opportunity for, I mean, you know, the next time we hire someone in London, should we assume they travel to London at all, ever? Not necessarily. And one of the, one of the interesting things I've noticed actually in in the last year when we've largely been under lockdown is eventually, I mean, this is a sort of slightly outlandish prediction of mine, but I think the world's going to align more along linguistic lines than geographical lines. Because if you look at service industries, which we've never had the productivity gains in services that we've had in manufacturing, there hasn't been a kind of Henry Ford of the service industry world. But maybe actually, Eric and Zoom, maybe that's it to a large degree. Because one of the things I've noticed is the number of conversations I now have with Australia, India, Canada, etc., has gone up by a factor of 10 over the last year. I have actually fewer conversations with people in the UK. Maybe that's just Brexit. They're not talking to us anymore. I don't know. Maybe they're just snubbing us. But but genuinely, the ratio of conversations has completely shifted. But I think potentially, I think the world will kind of align along linguistic lines to an extent.
Yeah, it's true. And I, and I see it happening in particular in the entertainment industry as to where it's spreading in India. And it is going deeper into the linguistic lines within India. And I'm sure that that's going to happen internationally at the bigger level too. Now, I mean, Indian Netflix, for example, I watched Delhi Crime. I thought it was probably one of the best three things I watched in the last year. So, the opportunity to export entertainment is absolutely massive. I think I definitely think that we're going to see more of it. And I have had conversations with entertainment companies, and they're looking beyond reaching out to the diaspora. And now it was easy to get through to the diaspora, and now they're creating programs which would operate in countries that have not seen entertainment from India reaching their homes. And there is a great opportunity out there. I think it's huge.
Also, we've got into the, one of the things I found absolutely beguiling in Delhi Crime, and when we next meet, you'll have to explain this, is, um, what causes people to flip from Hindi to English and back again? Now, I'd always naively assumed that if you're having a romantic conversation with your wife at home in bed, it would be in Hindi. But you might switch to English to talk about business. And I assumed that it was neatly partitioned. What I found absolutely beguiling in Delhi Crime is I could make no sense of when the language flipped from one to the other. You'd have romantic conversations in English and then flip to Hindi in the office. If anybody could explain that to me, I'd love to know.
I mean, that that is what happens in a bilingual country. And that comes very handy. Yeah, you can come into business like the language of marketing and language of interaction with clients is largely in English, though the language of delivery to the consumer could be one of the many Indian languages. Exactly. So, I think now that kind of a practice on a day-to-day basis leads up to romantic situations also. It happens. But it intrigued me. I thought it was fantastic. But I've also got a friend, by the way, Guru Madhavan, who believes that you have an inherent advantage by, didn't, if you're polytheistic, that you're simply better at handling ambiguity. He says that now, one of the great things I think you need as a marketer is you need to hold about three or four different concepts in your head at the same time. There isn't one model for how business works. You need to accept there are three or four different ways of looking at things. And my friend Guru always believes that he had an inbuilt advantage in doing this. If you grow up in a society which accepts there's more than one God, he always accuses us of being monotheistic. That you grew up in the West, you have to have one theory that explains everything. Which I thought, that's not a fair point. As long as you can match it with the fact that there are human traits which could be common, and you're able to catch that pulse, then you can make the two mix and make better sense out of what you're trying to do.
But I mean, I, I think the opportunity, I think we've got to remember this, that don't get too, I think the danger is that economics has too great an influence on business behavior. Because if you look at, if you look at these strange primatologists who study chimp behavior, and they'll spend literally five years of their life sitting in a tree watching the same sort of 20 or 30 chimpanzees, and they say that what they never notice is, you never see two chimps cooperating to carry two ends of a tree trunk. It's too heavy for one of them to carry on their own. So, one of them picks up one end, the other one picks up the other, they take it back to camp. Never happens. But the interesting question is, why does that never happen? And you need three things for any cooperation to happen. You need imagination, which is, "What if we both did this?" Then you need persuasion, which is, one chimp needs to persuade the other chimp that picking up the other end of a tree is a good idea. And then thirdly, you need trust, which is, "Okay, if I do help him take the tree trunk back to the camp, he's not gonna hog it for himself." Okay? So, before you, unless you have those three things, imagination, persuasion, and trust, you don't get cooperation in the first place. And yet, what economics does is it assumes that you have optimal cooperation and then just focuses on how you make it more efficient. But actually, that's a secondary consideration, really. Without the first leap of the imagination about how two people can work together to produce greater value between them than they could do on their own, you haven't really got capitalism. And so Deirdre McCloskey says something fantastic, which I'll share with all of you, which is she thinks that 25% of the value of an economy lies in persuasion and sweet talk. It's actually in the ability to persuade. And what economics has done is it takes that as a given and says, "No, no, that's all, that's all. We assume that everybody's already persuaded and bought into the idea, and now it's just a question of delivering it as cheaply as you possibly can."
The other thing you don't want to do, okay, is generally, and I say this to people who are trying to export, don't focus on making things cheap. Okay? In quite a few cases, Peloton is a great example. They only became popular and successful when they put the price up. So, don't let the economists talk to you about price because they'll always tell you to cut the price. Actually, in some marketing cases, that's a fatal mistake. The job of marketing is to get people who weren't thinking of buying a product to pay full price for it. If we're not careful, what we'll end up doing is getting people who would have bought the product anyway to buy it earlier at a discount, which I think is what a lot of programmatic and digital advertising does. Okay? And it looks good on the balance sheet because you claim the value for the sale, but it's the opposite of what marketing should be trying to do.
And that's, not even human behavior. If human behavior was so rational, we would be very happy living in caves with a little window here and there. There is an emotional side to a human being which looks at the value more than the price. Yes, price helps you when you're creating a market for those who had never had the opportunity of using a product. But give it a little while, and they will become selective about making it slightly better, paying a little more price, feeling good about it. So, I, I completely agree with your theory on how the economist sometimes wrong. The economists miss out the human being.
I also think there's an environmental message here, by the way, which is one solution, not the only solution, but one solution to making the world more environmentally friendly is to get people to pay more for less of better. Okay? Now, as we become richer, we don't go from drinking, you know, a quarter bottle of Johnny Walker Red a day to two bottles a day, okay? Right? I hope not, anyway. Okay? Wouldn't advise it. What people, what you do is you migrate people to Johnny Walker Black. Okay? And actually, in a way, what you've got to remember is when people are paying for intangible value, for meaning rather than substance, it's very environmentally friendly. Twice as much product uses twice as much carbon, typically. Okay? But product plus extra meaning, essentially you're getting people to pay more money for what you might call intangibles, and less for tangibles. That's something called dematerialization. It's already happened in the UK economy, by the way. Interestingly, because the UK economy was kind of the first to industrialize, about in 2006, before the financial crash, it was interesting because the UK reached peak stuff. Now, I'm not suggesting that the developing world is going to reach peak stuff for a while. There are a hell of a lot of people who are short of stuff. But ultimately, you know, ultimately the solution, unless you want to destroy the planet completely, is for people to spend less on things and more on what they mean. Now, it sounds very strange to suggest that the advertising industry and the environmental movement can be hand in hand, but I think this is genuinely true. I got The Guardian in the UK to kind of agree with me on this part. Now, interestingly, producing fantastic quality stuff at a premium price is something I think India could do brilliantly well. I, I think that's where the opportunities lie for the future. Otherwise, uh, we can again fall into the same trap that China fell with Vietnam, and we have suffered with Bangladesh on textiles. So, doing it cheaper, doing it better, the human being will come out and want better. I mean, the day the economist can define joy, that's the day I'll start listening to the economist.
I can completely agree because, I mean, they think, I mean, the assumption of economics is that you start with perfect information about how much utility you'll derive from a product. So, it treats advertising as external to the model, and therefore people tend to see advertising as a cost because it's something that you have to pay for that, according to an economist, isn't adding to value. Now, the Austrian school of economics thought this was absolute rubbish. They have this great phrase, "There's no useful distinction to be made in a restaurant between the value created by the man who cooks the food and the value created by the man who sweeps the floor." And by the man who sweeps the floor, they mean advertising and marketing. There's the product itself, and the context which allows you to enjoy its consumption. And they're both interconnected, and the money you make from them is equal. You know, it doesn't make, doesn't matter whether you. And in innovation, okay, there are two ways you can innovate. You can either find out what people want and find a really clever way to make it, or you can work out what you can make and find a really clever way to make people want it. And they're both profitable. It doesn't matter in which direction you do it.
Yeah, I think that takes me to another interesting Indian enterprise that we talked about, which is a savory producer called, from my state of Rajasthan, who the two brothers, young youngsters, 19, 18 or something, they said that this savory product is made out of chickpea flour, but how, how about we make it from a lentil which is grown in Rajasthan? A little more. And today, they are giving a run for their money to the international fast food joints. Again, starting with something innovative. You can be innovative about what you produce, or you can be innovative how about how you introduce. I think it works both ways.
Fun enough, the whole of Ferrero Rocher as a company arose out of something similar. Is that, uh, there was a massive chocolate shortage after World War II, but they discovered they had a surplus of hazelnuts in a particular part of Italy. And if you mixed in hazelnuts with chocolate, you can effectively produce a lot more chocolate at a much lower price. But they built a brand on the back of that. They just, just sell it as cheap chocolate. And they, in a sense, what great marketing does is it turns a constraint or a weakness into a strength. You know, "We're number two, so we try harder." And I thought that was fascinating. So, they used a lentil. What was it? It was, there was a locally grown lentil. So, they make those, those doughnuts you eat for breakfast for something. Flour, isn't it? Although that's it, that's the one that looks like a donut. That's a South Indian breakfast thing. Yeah, they sell that, don't they? I noticed. And so, what's interesting about them is they're frightening McDonald's, which I think is really, really fascinating. And interestingly, part of the reason they're doing it, I think, is also not just advertising. It's investment in the outlets. Now, you've got to play that very carefully, actually, because one thing I have heard is that Indian retail is slightly different from Western retail, in that if you make it too fancy, people assume they're getting a bad deal. And that there are aspects of. But funnily enough, we found the same thing in the UK, that one of the problems with actually making a store, if you revitalize the Tesco, say it was brand new with fantastic flooring and new lighting, people just assumed the prices had gone up, even if they hadn't. So, you know, obviously, there are always going to be little local subtleties. But understanding how people interpret information subconsciously, I think, is really, really important. But I think, I think the way in which they've done those stores is really interesting because, you know, I think the same things happen with fast food in in the West, that McDonald's and KFC realized that actually, people's just expectations of cleanliness had generally risen. And so, what was acceptable as a food outlet 10, 15 years ago wasn't anymore. And you just had to, you know, and so all these things are continually changing because we judge the world against expectation, not by reality, in a way. And so, there's great, there's a great rule on how to innovate, which is Silicon Valley, on from there, and I can't remember his name, taught me, which I think is really useful for us as well, which is, um, "Look at all the assumptions in a category and make a list of everything that everybody in the category assumes is true. And then ask yourselves, which of those assumptions either isn't true or won't be true in two years' time." You know, that's fascinating. We could look at a business now, assume that more people are working from home in future, more of the time. Okay? So, a whole bunch of assumptions about where you want to locate a lunchtime sandwich bar may have to change.
Yeah, I, I think it goes back to it. If we were to come to a conclusive mode to this interaction, and if you want to leave behind some things for people to think about, I would say that forget the book, read the book, and forget the book, and then read the book in the lines between the lines, and probably that's where you'll find your answers. If you look at advertising as popularity and fame, and not as advertising as a cost. If you look at technology as something new, and not, not as something to talk about, but something that to make happen. If you look at the market of tomorrow as a result of what you do today, I think you have a wonderful future to plan and leave behind for the others.
Next year, I think what you have with, um, Amazon India is pretty extraordinary because if you generally believe that the task of marketing is mental and physical distribution, and you look at what Amazon seems to have attained, which is, um, you know, essentially delivery to 1.5 billion people within two days, pretty much regardless of where they are, that's a complete reshaping of a marketplace, isn't it? Not for every product, obviously, but for many products, that completely transforms, uh, your selling overnight. Which is why, uh, what you've got to remember is to match the mental distribution to the physical distribution. And, and I think there are wonderful examples like your artisans act. These acts actually rub off onto your image in a much larger fashion. I see you behaving in a certain fashion on a category that I may not be buying of you, but if I see your behavior, I want to like, if I like you, I want to buy from you. I think that's the way I think it operates. And actually, I mean, you'll like this too. Simple advertising is entertainment. The advertising industry sometimes gets too clever for its own good because it's always trying to, you know, pick up some highly fashionable approach. But Paul Feldwick in the UK has just written a book called "Why Does the Peddler Sing?" and he makes the point that you can go back hundreds and hundreds of years, and people who sell things have always entertained. And, you know, it, it seems almost so banal. There are certain things in, in advertising, you'll know this, having worked on the Vodafone campaign with the pug. People just like ads with animals in, okay? No, it's, it's such a banal observation that those of us in the ad industry, feeling we feel embarrassed going into a client and we say, "I know you're an enormous billion-dollar corporation, but don't forget the value of an animal." But actually, it's a deep human truth. Let's, let's not be embarrassed by it. There are, if there are a billion dollars to be made, there are only nine emotions out of which you can touch one and make another $500 million. Perfect.
I think that, I think that is true. I think we sometimes get embarrassed because what we do can sometimes be quite simple. You know, make it faithless, make it amusing, because it can't, it can't be as easy as that. You know, I've got an Oxbridge degree, right? Okay? But maybe it really is that simple. It is the end of the day, make a great product, and then touch people's hearts and make them buy, no matter where you are. What, that's what I would love to leave behind today. Rory, if you want to add something, otherwise, you can click on a great summit and hope to catch up with all of you.
I couldn't improve on that at all. And the only other thing I would say is that, um, uh, I agree with Push, which is, look to national distribution first, because never ignore the opportunity that's on your doorstep. But actually, I think that, I think the potential for, uh, building significant Indian brands for export, um, not only to the diaspora but to everybody else, um, you know, I said, certainly in the UK, I mean, you've basically converted us to your food already, okay? There's plenty more work to be done.
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