Transcription
Nuclear power undoubtedly chose the worst two, two terrible marketing decisions. One of which is using the word "nuclear." Yeah.
And the second one, less so in France but more in the UK, is the design and location of nuclear power stations, which make them look as sinister as [ __ ]. If, if you had actually put them in fairly mainstream locations and you designed a mocktuda nuclear power station, okay, our entire reaction to nuclear power would have been entirely different. Whereas at the moment, they look like Dr. Evil's headquarters, and they're always in some remote coastal area, usually shrouded in fog, you know, so they look deeply sinister.
Other examples would be another great marketing failure is The Shawshank Redemption, which I, you've seen it presumably. Okay, most people agree it's one of their favorite films. Wasn't that, didn't that bomb at first? It absolutely bombed. Um, and it even, you know, you would have thought that word of mouth might have rescued it. But one, they timed the launch badly, so it coincided with the launch of some other blockbuster. But why the hell do they call it that? Okay, because now it's one of the world's most popular films. We can all remember the name of The Shawshank Redemption. Now, Morgan Freeman himself was livid about the title of the film because he said the original title of the Stephen King short story was Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. And Morgan Freeman's observation was, you've got Rita Hayworth, you've got the Shawshank Redemption. Why the hell would you go with Shawshank, not Rita Hayworth? Okay, Rita Hayworth. That was the poster, if you remember, in the film. The reason it was called Rita Hayworth, famous actress, extraordinary. So he, it went from Rita Hayworth to Raquel Welch to show how long he'd been in the prison. Okay. Um, Andy Dufresne. Um, but, um, that was an interesting case.
There are really, really interesting cases where the reason for marketing failure may well be just lack of patience in that new, significant new ideas. The other thing that's interesting to me is quite often, in order to do a "willara," which is what I call reverse benchmarking. Okay. You make, you do what everybody else does, not quite as well, but you invest your resources into doing what they've neglected brilliantly well. Okay. A friend of mine made the point that that was how you invented Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Okay. Sorry. McDonald's did that. Okay. Um, okay. So, a diner did choice. McDonald's did speed. Yeah. Okay. Right. Very simply, diners, you could have it over, over easy. You could have it sunny side up. You could have substitutions. You could have link sausages. You have this huge great menu. McDonald's did absolutely the opposite, which said, we're going to cut down on choice and we're going to deliver on speed and instantaneousness because everybody likes, you know, everybody likes a burger, basically. Okay.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu was that every other martial art had got really, really good at how to fight when you're standing up. And the guy who was not, not coincidentally Brazilian, who invented Brazilian, Roger Gracie or something, I can't remember his name, but his whole insight was, in every other martial art, once you're on the ground, you kind of lost. So nobody's actually given any thought to what happens to fighting when you're actually at ground level. Oh, there's a great. So that's how he invented the martial art. There's a great meme of, um, Brazilian jiu-jitsu takes on, um, not a meme, like a little video takes on like London mobs and basically the guy's got these like balaclavas on and [ __ ] baseball bats and he's walking around and goes, "Oi, bruv!" and the guy goes, "Come on then," and he gets on the floor and obviously they're standing up with baseball bats, but the whole point is like, is basically like once they're on the floor.
However, the interesting thing is that it's unlikely he'll come up with a brilliant new idea for a, um, uh, I mean, uh, you know, it's unlikely he'll come up with a brilliant new idea for a martial art, given that millions of people in the Orient have been perfecting how to fight while standing up for a thousand years. So whereas how to fight while lying down, that's, that's terra incognita. Yeah, that's so, you know, Uber. Everybody would focus on aspects of the taxi. I would argue the magic with Uber was the map, the certainty. We mentioned this already with your time in the, um, I interviewed who's Chris Williamson's business partner in New Tonic, James Smith. Don't you've met him? Um, and he, he, uh, practices jiu-jitsu. He's, he does it like three, Brazilian or standing up, uh, Brazilian. Brazilian. And, um, I was, and he, he's a like a really interesting marketer as well. There's whole things like honest marketing, and we can, I want to talk about that as well about I think you've talked about Robert Cialdini's seventh weapon of influence, which is basically negative selling, which is saying, yeah, you, David Abbott, uh, brilliantly. What's fascinating is that before anybody came up with a "prall" effect, there was an advertising guy, uh, I mean, famously David Abbott said, "Confession works well in the church, and also works well in the saleroom," or something to that effect, that a certain, certain admission where there is a downside to this product, but it's more than made up for.
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