Transcription
Every advertising agency that starts has the promise that they're really creative and imaginative and come up with things that nobody else would have thought of. I think there's room in the marketplace for an ad agency which just focuses on the diabolically bloody obvious.
Now, you may know my story about John Lewis in Tumbidge Wells, which I think partly failed because they called it "John Lewis at Home," which meant that everybody thought it was a furniture shop. I've got an even better case. A person who, at work, every day at lunchtime, walked past a branch of Chopped for nine consecutive years to buy a salad. Now, those of you who know, know that Chopped sell salads. It's their stock in trade. It's their specialism. They walked 100 yards further to buy a salad while walking past a salad shop.
I heard another story of a simple sort of Italian restaurant that simply put pizza, pasta, garlic bread, and a few of their key ingredients on their awning, and sales went up by double digits. Okay. One of the things that's very easy to do in marketing, while we're absolutely focused on the ingenious, is to forget the obvious. And I think there's a whole role in marketing of going through, auditing the customer journey, simply asking the question, "What are we missing?"
>> Conference, and we are talking with Rory Sutherland, one of the famous TED speakers. So today, about the brand, uh, the brand-client relationship. Um, I, um, want, uh, to know how we can, um, how brands can tell their stories.
>> Yes.
>> And be heard from their audience.
>> Um, I think it starts with having something to say. And having something to say means having some sort of point of view on life, or some sort of opinion on life, even if perhaps it's quite peripherally connected to what you make or do. I mean, it obviously helps to be relevant, but having a point of view, or having a view. In other words, the businesses, I think, that we trust, and the businesses to which we are called to the benefit of the doubt as consumers, tend to have something more going for them than mere interest in immediate short-term profit. They have a direction. They have a, um, they're triangulated in some way towards something other than the immediate short-term self-interest of a business.
There's a very good book on this, which I highly recommend, by a British author called John Kay, called "Obliquity." And in the book, he makes the point that the businesses that focus most exclusively on making money aren't the ones that make the most money. In the medium to long term, businesses that have some other kind of purpose, or some other orientation other than simple, narrow self-interest, ironically, tend to be the more profitable ones.
>> Yeah, true.
>> I think you may argue that, you know, profit is something a little like happiness, that it's best pursued indirectly. If you try and pursue happiness absolutely directly, you may fail. If you find something that makes you happy, you then enjoy happiness as a byproduct of what it is you do. And I think that's true of profit in business, just as it's true of happiness in life.
>> Yeah. You were a TEDx speaker several times.
>> Yes. I think in Athens, Brighton, um, and also TED Global, uh, in about 2009.
>> Yeah.
>> You remember it better than me?
>> Yes. Yeah. Um, if we compare TED as a brand and, uh, the storytelling that that brand is talking.
>> Yes.
>> What are the differences?
>> What I think is very interesting about TED, and for which it deserves huge credit, is its format. One thing, and the format is very important, because it's a very useful discipline to be able to explain what you do, or what your idea is, in a relatively short time to a diverse, not necessarily expert audience. That's just a really good exercise. The even more valuable thing, which I think it can foster, is cross-disciplinary knowledge, because academia, in particular, has become very, very siloed. So that if you're an astrophysicist, or if you're an epidemiologist, your career is decided by the, uh, amount of admiration you inspire in six or seven other people within your specialist field, who are the only people who understand what it is you do. And this leads to increasing siloing of academic disciplines. And I think I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be being ridiculous if I would say that the most valuable progress is often made not within a discipline, but in the intersection of disciplines. So the TED format does a very, very good job of making one person's specialism comprehensible to someone else in another specialism.
>> Yeah. Um, what's the most valuable lesson that we need to learn as storytellers? Can you tell us the good and bad examples?
>> I think that's an interesting question. Um, I mean, some people believe there are only seven stories, that there are certain narratives, uh, which are just innate within the human brain, you know, uh, you know, virtue rewarded, slaying the dragon, that kind of thing. And there are these kind of Jungian archetypes as well, which populate those stories. I think there's a little bit of truth in that. I think, I think the use of sort of Jungian archetypes for brands might be a useful way for brands to, uh, decide what they are. And you can see how that would go. Nike would sit in one place, TED would sit in another place, if you like.
>> True.
>> Um, so recognizing that short stories are a kind of shorthand. They're a compression mechanism. They're in some ways the PDF files of the human brain. They put information in a form that makes it easy to remember and store, and also easy to share and replicate. Now, I think we ought to caveat that by saying that stories, just as a little caveat, stories can be a little bit dangerous because we're so desperate for stories. We're so desperate to shoehorn things into a narrative that we do it. I mean, you know, it's, I don't think, I don't think we can avoid doing this, but I think we sometimes do it in occasions where it's not really suited. There are some cases where it isn't good or evil. It isn't, you know, George and the Dragon. Actually, it's very, very complicated. May go back hundreds of years, and maybe impossible to understand unless you're actually in the actual moment and in the place in time. So, I think we ought to caveat that that stories are very, very useful. They're important. They're probably an evolutionary necessity, but they're not always helpful.
>> Yeah. Um, what's the best decision you've ever made?
>> Other than probably getting married, having children, we'll all say the same thing. Um, sometimes I've made good and bad decisions through deliberately looking at choice architecture and behavioral economics. And there are occasions where you actually realize that what you want to do is what everybody else does because there's a kind of wisdom of crowds effect. There are other cases where you go on holiday, for example, where you buy a house, where it really pays you to have different tastes or a different choice architecture to everybody else. So, interestingly, I bought a flat in a Robert Adam building with seven acres of communal grounds. It's a Grade I building by one of Britain's best architects. Because I discovered that the way that people buy property, they start with a location, then they have a price, then they have a number of bedrooms. Quality of architecture comes very, very low on the list. That's something that's a decider at stage seven or eight if they're undecided on other factors. And what I realized is there's something very strange there, which is that if you buy a Picasso, it will, or you go and buy a Braque, or you go and buy a work by a major artist, it will cost literally a thousand times more. And I'll just cut this off for a second. It might cost a thousand, 10,000 times more than an equivalent-sized work of art by an indifferent artist. Strangely, when you buy housing, a house designed by a genius architect may only cost 1 or 2% more than a house the same size in the same location designed by a completely indifferent architect. Now, that might just be because rich people don't have much taste. But I think there's something really interesting going on there, which is that architecture is a really, really cheap way of buying art. If you're an American, you can go online. There's a website called Rightmove, right with a W, which shows all the Frank Lloyd Wright properties currently for sale in the US. And one of the remarkable things about them is, despite the fact they're produced by a certified genius, they're not much more expensive, if at all, than the surrounding property in the same area.
>> Uh, can you tell us a bit about your project, Arguably Changed?
>> Yes, very simple thing. Um, I, and a significant minority, but nonetheless significant minority, people believe that the advances made in behavioral science, in social science, and in psychology in the last 40 or 50 years provide us, if we choose to use it, with a new and better framework for marketing and advertising. Simple as that. Uh, it's especially necessary because the media environment we inhabit is now so complicated. I think trying to develop theories about what's a good TV ad, what's a good press ad, what's a good direct mail pack, etc. I think, I think those are missing the point. I think what we have to do is go back to first principles, to what Bill Bernbach called the unchanging man, and understand the only medium that's ever really mattered, which is the human mind. And then, once you understand that better, all the other media can be used or ignored as appropriate. But it's senseless trying to develop kind of theories around the new media era which aren't founded on decent psychology.
>> Yeah, that's really interesting. And, uh, how, uh, we can use social norms, um, to encourage behavior change through storytelling?
>> Well, one important thing, just to know, is that, you know, one thing that humans have obviously evolved to do is we feel comfortable doing things that everybody else does. In fact, we don't even need to be persuaded to wear trousers. Now, for most of human history, if you'd been in ancient Greece, wearing trousers as a man would have marked you out as some sort of deviant or weirdo. But once most people wear trousers, people feel particularly comfortable wearing trousers. That's really important because if we're a herd species, there are certain desirable human behaviors which it will be difficult for people to adopt at first when they are necessarily eccentric or unusual. And that may include environmentally beneficial behaviors. It may include certain financial products. I think pensions and savings often have a very low rate, a very high rate of anxiety among the populace because you don't have group reassurance. If you have a company pension and all your colleagues have the same pension as you do, you instinctively feel much, much safer than if you go out on a limb and you're forced to choose a pension exclusively for yourself. You know, driving a brand of car that nobody else drives. And a friend of mine put it very neatly. They said it's very simply, very simply, if you buy a Ford, or you buy an Audi, or you buy a Mercedes, and it goes wrong, everybody says you're unlucky. If you buy an unusual car and it goes wrong, everybody blames you, not the car manufacturer. And so if you want people to, you know, adopt hybrid vehicles, if you want people to adopt electrical vehicles, understanding the psychology of reassurance and comfort, I often say in the UK that everybody in Britain will start installing solar panels on their homes once John Lewis sells them. So understanding, I think, I think it's very important because most marketing conversations revolve around persuasion and positives. I think the first place to start in marketing is the removal of negatives. Before you can start talking about positives, you need to understand what the negatives are.
>> True. Thank you so much for this.
>> Absolute pleasure. A delight as ever. Thank you very much indeed.