Transcription
There's a miracle which is Coca-Cola. And I genuinely mean it's a miracle because it's the only cold non-alcoholic drink apart from water where anywhere from a beach shack in Zambia to a Misheland starred restaurant if you asked for it and they don't have it, it's their fault, not yours. In other words, there is an obligation to actually offer it, which is kind and also there is absolutely nothing unusual in either of those two extreme circumstances in asking for it to drink.
Social cues to which we're highly attuned emotionally but of which we're not consciously aware. I'll give you an example. If you go to a restaurant and you order wine, okay, what nobody will notice is that there's a contextual social cue that restaurants create to make sure that you do order wine. There are variety of things. They already have wine glasses on the table. That sets an expectation. In fact, if you decide not to order wine, they take them away with a bit of a huff. Then they do something very clever. They bring you a drinks list, which isn't called a drinks list. It's called the wine list. and it has about 57 different types of wine. And then there's a really sad page at the back with all the beers and spirits. But they do something much cleverer still, which is they only give the wine list to one person. Now, that one person has to choose for the whole table, which means he's going to choose wine because there's only one alcoholic drink if you exclude pimps and tequila slammers. There's only one alcoholic drink you can order for a group, which is wine. So the man with a single wine list will always do the same thing, which is he turns to the rest of the table and says, "Red or white."
Every great idea requires another good idea, which is it's not enough to have a good idea. You need to know how to sell it. And one of the biggest mistakes you to make is the idea that the bigger your product idea is, the less marketing it needs. Actually, it's the opposite. If you've got a really big product idea, by definition, that will require a lot of behavioral change. And things that require a lot of behavioral change require a lot of marketing.
One of the mistakes I think we're making with car electrification. It's very very simple. Okay. The big obstacle is range anxiety. There are two components to range anxiety. There's range and there's anxiety. And quite rightly lots of very clever scientists are spending billions of pounds a year trying to increase range by increasing the energy density of batteries. And that's a very very good thing. What nobody seems to have noticed is that for a fraction of that money, rather than increasing range, you can reduce anxiety.
Now, two tips, okay? One, there is no reason for your electric car to display both digits of the battery percentage when you're at 75%. Okay? It just weirds people out. Your petrol gauge doesn't do that. Okay? Your petrol gauge is full, 3/4 full, half full, quarter full, an eighth full, and oh the lights come on. Why doesn't a battery gauge in an electric car just say 90% plus, 80% plus? I don't need to see each individual percentage of depletion.
Secondly, a large part of range anxiety isn't even range anxiety. It's infrastructure anxiety. And the problem there is that petrol stations are really visible, whereas electric car charges are hidden around the back of some industrial estate in a darkly lit exclave of the main car park. What we need is more signage, more illumination. We need legislation to basically say car charging in 5 miles, car charging in 3 miles. Or you could simply go to Google and say on Google Maps when you're on Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, there's just a little window on the display in your car which tells you on route where your next available car charger is and how many of them are available. Has an increased range. reduced anxiety. They match to the same thing.
Reason creative people are annoying to other people. There are several reasons. One of which is their procrastinators. They don't start work straight away. There's even an experiment John Clees mentions about this where the the most the least talented architects would all start drawing things up on day one. And the most talented architects would do nothing. They'd commit nothing to paper perhaps other than doodles. And what they're doing because they're creative is they're waiting to get lucky. They're waiting to have inspiration. You know, Frank Lloyd Wright, actually, they've asked me to build the house next to the waterfall, but I'm going to flip it and build it over the waterfall.
They know that something that's emotionally potent can come from a very trivial behavior, gesture, change in wording that actually human perception doesn't have a sense of proportion. In other words, how we respond to, you know, can you close the door? Can you close the door, please? and there's a draft. Okay, we respond to those three sentences although they're attempting the same end in completely different ways. And therefore, creative people are right in many cases, not all, to get anally retentive about what seem to the people commissioning them as relatively small details.
Kind of got a problem with AI. And the problem with AI is that it might be quite good very quickly at getting to quite decent advertisements. Now, why is that a problem? And the reason is really quite simple. It's that it occurs to me, okay, that if you look back on your student essays, or indeed your sick form essays, I'm fairly confident in betting that you've never read any of them ever again. In fact, you may have thrown them away. Your mom or dad may have thrown them away, but you certainly haven't kept them for rereading because the value of the essay wasn't really in the essay. it was in the process you had to go through to write the damn thing in the first place. And I think there's something true about advertising that the real value of doing advertising may emerge much more from the process you have to go through to decide what to say and who to say it to. That painful and laborious process and the various byproducts of that process may be in fact more valuable than running the ad when it finally emerges.
I've often said to B2B clients, maybe you should produce an an ad campaign for yourself, even if you have no intention of running it simply because the kind of thinking you have to do to produce it is valuable to you as a marketer in general. And so I think we're making a kind of dormant fallacy mistake by trying to use technology to effectively shortcut the process from A to B because the journey is actually the thing that's of value there every bit as much as the destination. And if you're wondering what the dormant fallacy is, well don't worry, I'll tell you on the course. But if you're the kind of person who actually realizes that actually the insights that emerge as a byproduct of doing what we do may in fact a bit like Marmite being a byproduct of brewing the byproducts might be every bit as valuable as the end result then this is pretty much the course for you and I'd like to see you there.
You say 20% off washing machines for ginger people. Okay. Ginger people will find that inordinately more exciting and will see the perceived value of the saving as much much higher than if you simply say 20% off for everybody. So tricks like because you have been a member for X years you qualify for a 20% discount will at least mean that the discount can be slightly smaller and the actual perceived value of the saving is correspondingly greater.
So price is bizarrely psychological. I mean, it's the idea of economists that there's a kind of utility price tradeoff and that our perception of price is somehow completely objective. No, I'm afraid that's wrong. Those of you who go to Marks and Spencers have probably bought three things for £7. Have you ever actually added up the price of the three individual items to see how much you're saving by getting this deal? I suspect most of us haven't. We just go, "Well, I better buy a third thing cuz otherwise I won't get the deal." Without actually calculating the value of the deal, we nonetheless perceive there's something of value.