Transcription
Probably Lord Lever and the people behind the soap revolution of the 19th and I suppose early 20th century. Until penicillin came along, the most important work in public health in Britain [music] probably wasn't done by doctors. It was done by marketers who sold soap powder and detergent.
But interestingly, most of the time they actually sold soap not on the basis that it was for the public good. They sold it on the basis that cleanliness was status enhancing.
This is a wonderful case. Finnish quantum [music]. It's actually a very effective way of being kind to the environment because it reduces the amount of powder people put in. Now, one way of reducing the amount of powder which also saves not only on on environmental costs, it also saves on transportation costs.
But if you notice what they've done there is they've actually achieved concentration by stealth. If you simply produce a concentrated liquid, people either use too much of it or they think it's no good. And so by making these dishwasher tablets insanely intricate, you have a kind of yin and yang configuration of two different colored powders and the power ball in the middle. The consumer does not notice that they're using less dishwasher powder because no one's told [music] them. And their system one is telling them, "God, that's really complicated, so it must be great."
The human brain is programmed to look for tradeoffs. Therefore, if something's better for X, it's probably worse for