Transcription
I'll go back to the scarf model. Okay, there's this great model neuroscientist, David Rock, and the model of human things that humans care about that aren't really quantified and aren't well understood by economists. It's it's SCARF, which stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness, and okay, and people care about those things to the depth of their being. If you do something in a restaurant which is an affront to someone's status, effectively, that will that will arouse far more and likelihood of a boycott, uh, than uh having slightly bad food.
What are the other ones? Status, certainty. So that's kind of like predictability. Uh, a good example of certainty would be um signs on the tube platform which say, "Next tube 7 minutes." Okay. Uh, in restaurants, we'd ra we we'd rather I mean, okay, if if we're at an airport and it says, "Flight delayed 47 minutes," we going, "Flight delayed 47 minutes. I'll go and find a go and have a drink or I'll go to the lounge or whatever." Okay, if it just says, "Delayed," we're in a state of uncertainty. And we find that inordinately more painful. Yes. Then we we you know, so quite often you can manage a downside in advance. I mean, there's a huge difference if you think about it between being handed a menu and being told that the hake's off, okay, off the menu, and then or versus ordering hake and then 10 minutes later they come back and say the hake's off the menu. "Oh my god."
I listen to I listen to a podcast with a Michelin star chef, and one of they go through their foods and that's that's one of the it's in terms of manage expectations. Totally fine. You hand someone a menu and say, "I'm terribly sorry. But why?" But but for some reason, apparently in loads of restaurants, they uh they say that they the staff know from day dot that there's no hake, right, but they still go around the tables and say, "Order," the person orders, the expectation becomes here, and then suddenly you'll go go to the kitchen, come back. I mean, the brilliant book you must have read the book by Will Gaddara called "Unreasonable," so I tried to get him on the podcast actually, and in terms of hospitality, cuz I asked that that brilliant observation that the things you deliver that the person wasn't wasn't expecting. Yeah. That you have in a sense the mind of a game theorist with the customer, not the mind of a, you know, of a kind of uh of a rule follower.
What do you mean by what do you mean by the mind game theorists? I loved the way in which he went to, you know, one of the best restaurants in the world and said, "Okay, all of this was, as you'd expect, absolutely amazing, but where could we do better than them? We can't do better than them in the food because their food is already topnotch." But he said, "When I ordered coffee at the end of the meal, it was just bog-standard coffee." And he went and appointed one of his staff as kind of like the coffee sommelier, basically. Yeah. Uh, you know, and and you know, got into some massive, you know, Pavoni cappuccino machine. He also appointed I think one of the waiters as their beer guy because he said that all these restaurants wank on about wine endlessly. Yeah. But 20% of people prefer beer. Yeah. We were talking about this last time. So he there were these sort of craft breweries who are literally so delighted. They were more like sending them free beer I think because they were so delighted that a that a leading New York restaurant had finally decided to take beer seriously.
Can we just go back to the SCARF thing? So So we've done we've done status, consistency, autonomy. Now an example of that would be people prefer a table they've chosen to a table that's imposed on them, even if it's the same table. Okay. So one nice thing a restaurant can do is say, "Where would you rather sit, or you can have any of these three tables." People are just happier with that. Not because necessarily they get to choose the table. Well, sorry, not because they wouldn't have chosen the table you wouldn't would have allocated them anyway, but simply because the act of making the choice makes you like something you've chosen more than something you that's imposed on you. Yeah. Okay. Even if it's the same thing. Okay. It's why we used to work with um Ford, and Ford always had lower um customer satisfaction figures than a few competitors. And we had to explain that, and they they got annoyed because they couldn't get the satisfaction figure above a certain amount, even though they'd made the cars better and better and better. And we had to explain it's because um so many of your customers are fleet customers. They haven't chosen a Ford. They've been told they're driving a Ford, and it's not the same. Even if you would have chosen a Ford, you won't like a car as much if your employer tells you that's the car you've got to drive versus if you've chosen that car. Um uh so that's autonomy. People don't like being railroaded or tramiled.
Um, relatedness. You could actually a better phrase might be reciprocity or relationship, which is people don't like a series of standalone transactions. They like an acknowledgement of their past custom. Um uh you know, and so treating regular customers differentially better than you treat in treat treat people who just in in off the street, and you know, at scale that's a loyalty program, perhaps, but in an indiv in an independent restaurant, simple recognition, simple as that. And then fairness is fairness, uh you know, well, okay, what really pisses people off is that those people got their food first, but they ordered after we did. Those kind of things really really upset people. Yes. Now, it might be that the thing you've ordered is a completely different thing, but again, you can overcome that by pre-warning people in advance, perhaps.
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