The Behavioural Science Behind Building a $1M Business

Launching a million-dollar business is actually quite easy if you understand the science behind building one. That's where this guy comes in. This is Rory Sutherland. He's worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, helped them generate billions in revenue, not by changing what they sell, but by changing how people perceive it. And in this video, I'm going to show you the recording of a keynote presentation he did at our annual marketing conference called AdCon here in London, where he broke down the behavioral science behind some of the biggest brands in the world and how you can apply it to build your own million-dollar business.

So, with that being said, this is Rory Sutherland.

"I'll give you one tip. Don't accidentally get famous. It sounds wonderful, but the big downside is you can't be an [ __ ] in public anymore."

The question I'm asking, when a business gets big, I'm going to actually talk about something. I, I kind of predicted this event in a funny kind of way, and I would argue that most of the businesses I deal with still haven't clocked what you've clocked, which is there's effectively a completely new Zoom economy out there or a Teams economy. It's an online video economy. And the strange thing is, and I genuinely mean this is strange, is that nobody's named it yet.

Now, what you've done, I think, is you've discovered a frontier. I've just got back from Texas. And the interesting thing that... Thank you. Had a fantastic time. San Antonio, absolutely magnificent, by the way. Um, and um, by the way, the fantastic thing about Texas is things really happen fast. Everybody talks about Texas about the fact that it's big, but the thing I really noticed about it is how fast things are. Because I, I come from this big business background and I have to say, you, you many of you and many of your clients have probably left larger businesses and the reason they've left isn't necessarily to make more money. It's just to speed things up, to be able to actually make a decision without consulting someone from HR and someone from finance and someone from legal because, trust me, if you're in a big business, it's what I describe as tantric capitalism. You know, everything goes on for ages, but nothing really reaches any kind of climax. Okay? And the joy you must have felt when you finally got out of that thing, I think, is really magical.

Now, one of the things I was talking to someone in Texas about is that great businesses discover a new frontier. And obviously, in the United States, there was literally a frontier. Okay? That was after they declared independence and the king was no longer preventing further westward expansion. It's a bit ironic that 250 years ago they had a massive attempt to fight against the British on the grounds that we were imposing tariffs. Um, but we'll let that obvious irony pass for a moment. And um, if you can discover a new frontier, what you've got is you, you can start a business in a fresh space without being beholden to a landlord or some other kind of extractive entity that takes away most of the fruits of your labor. And sometimes that simply means taking on new land. Sometimes it means benefiting from a technology which opens up a new space. So arguably the second frontier was probably the railway. The third frontier, uh, was the car. Suddenly you could start a business somewhere and actually where you were was some new kind of space. The Chinese even have a phrase which they call the low-altitude economy and it's the economy which consists of drones in particular, either delivering goods or indeed delivering people. And the Chinese have this idea of a low-altitude economy which is a whole new, as yet underoccupied space. And the people who benefit... And I would argue you're in a new frontier. I would call it effectively the Zoom economy. And I did predict this would happen.

Hey, real quick. If you're enjoying this content and you like the idea of being in this room, we have our next AdCon conference coming up here real soon at the end of April. It's happening here in London. We have some incredible speakers. We have some unbelievable plans for you. And the experience in this room is unlike anything you've seen before. So, if you want to come and learn what's working right now in 2026 to grow and scale your business and do it surrounded by like-minded people that get you, your mission, and what you're trying to achieve, the details are at the link in the description box. But be quick, AdCon 2026 is happening April the 28th to the 30th and I hope you can come and join us because you're not going to believe this.

The marketing director of Zoom came to me in August 2019 and the whole question was, it was a behavioral science question. How do we get people to video conference more than they do? And there were a whole load of problems there. I mean, until about four or five years ago, video conferencing hadn't been good enough quite. It was too likely to go wrong that no one would confidently hold a meeting on that kind of technology. But for about four years, particularly with the advent of Zoom and a few other technologies like Webex, it had actually reached the level of kind of tolerable reliability or even better. And so we looked at all the things that were stopping people and one of them was simply that, you know, every Zoom call was the quality effectively had the quality of its most incompetent participant. So you only needed one person on a Zoom call to be on mute all the time or having trouble getting into the call in the first place and it kind of ruined it for everybody else. And then we said, well, the trouble is that when people are in the office, you can't do a Zoom call because you're sitting at an open-plan desk and you disturb everybody else, but you feel a bit of an idiot booking a 20-seat meeting room just to hold a Zoom call on your own. And so we came up with a few ideas. One of them was, for example, you make Friday Zoom Day. People were already working from home fairly commonly. So we said if we could actually create a norm that Friday is the day where people do their Zoom calls, they can all stay at home and they'll be in an appropriate place to do it. And bear in mind this was August 2019. I thought, you know, just as she was leaving, I said, "Of course, this is going to take years to take off. I said, what you really need is either a massive transport strike or a minor pandemic." And I look back on that, that was August 2019, and a bit of sick comes into my mouth. Obviously, obviously we're a full-service agency. So, we put her in touch with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and they were able to sort something out.

But something's fascinating about that and it's something I'm going to remind you of all the time that actually, by the way, sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time. An enormous amount of business success is actually luck. But a huge part of it is timing. In fact, they looked at why otherwise very good businesses often failed. And the single largest factor was they'd actually got a really, really good idea, but they were either too early or they were too late. I think one of the brilliant things you all have in this business is you've clocked something where that there is a Zoom economy. Once you take away the need to be physically co-located, okay, you can actually sell one to many, not one to one.

I also think, by the way, I think that this technology has created what you might call a spot market in human talent. Most people on the planet, when you think about it, will give an hour of their time online for somewhere around $1,000. Most people on the planet won't actually attend somewhere in person for that same amount of money because there are transport costs, there are obligations. You can't go on holiday that week. The cost of meeting someone for an hour physically is a day out of their life. The cost of meeting someone for an hour on Zoom is an hour of their time. And what's strange about this is everybody's talking about AI. I don't think that's inappropriate at all, but nobody's talking about this. And when you think about it, what's interesting is you suddenly can coach people or teach people or advise people one to many, not one to one. Now that's a kind of industrial revolution, I would argue, for professional services. My, I keep telling my colleagues this and they keep ignoring me. But I make the point that the reason marketing exists and the reason marketing is important is because you have some sort of revolution in your business which means you no longer need to wait to be asked.

Now, if you think about it, the industrial revolution in the UK was also a marketing revolution. We always talk about the industrial component of it because you can still see the smoke stacks and you can still see the railway lines and we're all familiar with the steam engine. But what really happened was that people worked out that it didn't make any sense when you could manufacture something one to many in large quantities to wait to be asked to do it. And so probably the first people were actually, in some ways, if you went back to Stoke, the pottery makers, the Wedgwoods. Now, historically, pottery was sold a bit like a Fabergé egg. You sat there, you established a name for yourself, and you waited for someone to come along with an enormous budget to say, "I want an egg." Okay? And it didn't happen very often. And when they did buy one of those eggs, it cost them a fortune. And pottery, pretty much high-quality China, would have worked exactly like that. And then they worked out that using effectively, you know, um, gains to scale, obviously, gains to specialization and technology, you could produce very high-quality plates in enormous quantities. It didn't make any sense anymore to wait to be asked. So you, what you had to do is you had to go out and sell. And that's why, in many ways, the industrial revolution only happened because there was also a marketing revolution. They produced catalogs. They sent salespeople out all over the world. They went to expensive houses and showed them their range of different pottery wares. Because what had happened is the business had reversed. Rather than sitting there and waiting to be asked, you designed things and made them in advance and then found people who'd buy them. People, it wasn't a case where the buyer came in and said, "This is what I want." You actually designed something in advance and then you found willing buyers.

And I would argue that what's happening and what all of you have spotted, which I would argue McKinsey and everybody else hasn't really spotted because they're too wedded to their existing model, is this is the same thing for professional services and advice. You know, why talk to one person at a time in a meeting room when you can talk to a hundred people simultaneously? You can also make more money that way because you don't have to talk to procurement first. Okay? And actually, I would argue that what you, what you all represent is just as there's a low-altitude economy um in China, I think this Zoom economy, which is, in other words, there are now inordinately 10x more efficient ways of actually advising people, coaching people, counseling people, etc. And that this fundamentally changes the rules. The last people to pick this up will be the large incumbents. Okay. The large conventional businesses are too wedded because fundamentally, you only take advantage of technology if your business systems are completely reinvented to take advantage of what the technology can do.

Really important thing to know about, by the way, quite often what happens when a new technology comes in, large organizations just try and impose it on their existing processes. That happened with the electric motor. So historically, large factories will run off an enormous steam engine. You'll notice, by the way, I'm making eye contact in direct proportion to how much you paid for your seats. I just thought I'd... Very, very good price discrimination on the seat. You got a mini-fridge down the front here. Is that right? Woo. Okay. Now, um, what happened with electrification is you had an enormous steam engine and lots and lots of shafts went round and then belts were attached to the shaft and that ran lots of machinery all simultaneously, all off the same huge steam engine. And the original thing the large companies did is they went and bought a massive electric motor and replaced the steam engine. And it didn't really work very well. In some cases, it was more expensive. In some cases, it was less reliable. The steam engine is very simple. After all, it wasn't that great. The real gains only came when people changed the processes in response to the electrification. So you had lots of little machines all with little electric motors which you could turn off and on and you could turn them off when they weren't needed. And you no longer needed all your industrial processes to take place in the same place all rooted around the steam engine. You could actually distribute them all over the country or all over the world if necessary. So it went from central and big to many and small. And it's always interesting that fundamentally new technologies only really deliver the goods when people actually say, "Right, we're not going to simply impose this technology on something we did before. What we're going to do instead is we're going to change the way we go to market. We're going to change the way we sell. We're going to change the way we make things."

I mean, I would argue that the future of the advertising agency may well be with AI. That if you can produce advertising very, very quickly, does it make sense to wait to be asked? You, at the moment, you go to the Cannes Advertising Festival, it's a retrospective. It's, "This is what we managed to do last year. Here's a statuette." Maybe the future of an advertising festival should be a trade fair where people come along, "We've got this really great ad campaign for KFC, for KFC, or for any chicken shop who would like to buy it." That's how the TV market already works. You go to MIP TV and Cannes. People have programs either in pilot or already made and they find willing buyers. They don't wait to be asked. So I think you're in a fantastically interesting part of the economy. And I think, obviously, as in any part of the economy like that where you have a new frontier, marketing, I think, becomes really important.

Now, this is what you mustn't lose when you become big and successful. By the way, for the... I know I've talked about the Zoom economy, but for those of you who organize physical events, I should make the same point that Zoom is in many ways the gateway drug for physical events. But if you actually look at it, one of the strangest things is that since the pandemic, we have the option to do things online and we do in enormous quantities. But the actual demand for physical co-location for events, by which I mean specific moments of time in which everybody's in the same place, that hasn't gone away at all. It's grown. By the way, we often make that mistake about how economies work. Everybody predicted that home video... [clears throat] would kill cinema. What they weirdly discovered unexpectedly was that home cinema massively rekindled people's interest in feature films. Sorry, sorry. The video, VHS video rekindled people's interest in feature films and cinema attendance actually went up because it actually restored the balance between what you might call a big Hollywood film versus television entertainment.

But one of the things I'm going to warn anybody when you get to a certain size is there are roughly speaking two lots of people. I don't specifically mean ad agencies here. I mean two different cultures that could be of interest to your business. When you start, here are a bunch of people from the cast of Mad Men. What is interesting and still true about working in advertising and marketing is every now and then you can have an idea that's worth millions of dollars in an afternoon. Now, I'll be honest with you, it's not a reliable process. You, I cannot guarantee that. Okay? Marketing is a casino, but it's a casino with really good odds. Now, what happens as businesses get bigger and bigger is they become less and less comfortable with what you might call the high-stakes, um, probabilistic world and they go and get in management consultants, which is it's like a casino with really, really boring odds where after ages and spending a fortune, you probably come out with a really small gain. Okay? Now, what tends to happen is the bigger a business becomes, the more it values certainty, predictability over what you might call probabilistic business.

Any fans here of Roger L. Martin? Brilliant business writer. He was the dean of the Rotman School in, uh, in Toronto. Absolutely fantastic business writer. He makes the simple point that he said, "What distinguishes a good CEO from a bad CEO?" Number one on his list of five. Number five is loved by his employees, by the way. Number one on his list of five is he acknowledges that business is probabilistic, not deterministic. That actually, you cannot only make decisions on the basis of a known mathematical certainty. Not least because there's no data about the future. Okay? And actually, if you look at data, what you, what you've got to be really careful of is all big data comes from the same place. It comes from the past. And so by being obsessed with what happened in the past where you have reliable data, you often become completely misaligned with the future. One of the worst things you can do, I think, is look at your business, say, "What makes money? Okay, that's where we're going to add value." Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's a really dangerous assumption. That's, by the way, why it often goes wrong. Not always, but it often goes wrong when the CFO of a business becomes the CEO of a business. [laughter] Okay, few of you had that happen because the CFO, not unreasonably, given his job description, has spent the whole time dealing in a world of certainty, sure data, reliable numbers, and now has to move into a role where it's much less McKinsey and more casino. And the only point I make is that just because you have these people in or just because you need to improve things incrementally doesn't mean you should stop taking those big gambles and particularly not when they're very one-sided bets.

They're an awful lot of things. Anybody familiar with Jeff Bezos's idea of the two-way door? >> Yeah. So Jeff Bezos has a very, very interesting decision-making style and quite often they'll be arguing something to death and they'll be looking at everything through an incredibly complicated lens and Bezos just goes, "This is a two-way door." By which I mean it's cheaper to try it than it is to argue about it. Now, a lot of business decisions aren't two-way doors. If Jeff decides to build a million square foot warehouse 15 miles north of Nashville or something, that's not an easily reversible decision. But a lot of decisions are actually. The question is, well, what's the potential upside? Well, unlikely but potentially immense. What's the downside? We try it for six months. We discover it doesn't work. We give up. That is a massively asymmetric bet because the worst-case scenario downside is much, much smaller than the best-case scenario upside. But because of the level of uncertainty entailed, people tend to run away.

Amazon Web Services, by the way, came about because somebody came up with a proposal for it. It wasn't a brilliant proposal, apparently. Everybody was arguing it to death. And Jeff just said, "I don't understand why we're arguing about this at all. It's a two-way door. We're Amazon. We got to spend a load of money on processing power. We've got to spend a load of money on bandwidth. If we can sell that on to other people at a profit, whoop-de-doo, fine and dandy. And if we can't, well, we would have had to do most of it anyway." That's really, really shrewd decision-making. There's a very good book by Annie Duke, by the way, called Thinking in Bets. She's a professional poker player, and she actually recommends exactly this thing. It's not a question of what's the most likely outcome. You also have to factor in the worst-case scenario if you get it wrong and the best-case scenario if you get it right and the ratio between those two. What mature businesses tend to do is they tend to prefer boring certainty over bets. Even when the bet is massively asymmetrical like that, where the best thing that can happen is you make a fortune. The worst thing that can happen is actually not that bad.

And so I'll give you an example of this where you can have a good idea. One of the things I'd say is that the saddest business in the world is a brilliant business that hasn't worked out how to market itself. And one of the interesting things is that you can have a very good business idea. Don't stop experimenting with seemingly trivial things like price, um, range, offer, um, uh, you know, guarantees, v, there are a hundred different ways to sell the same thing. Okay?

Now, I often argue, by the way, that Klarna, you're all familiar with Klarna. And most e, most economists would look at Klarna and go, well, it's perfectly obvious economically it's you can pay in three interest-free payments rather than pay on a credit card and paying a lot of money. Okay, that's true at a very boring level. But all of you who know who've ever bought anything know that psychologically buying something for three payments of £150 feels totally different to buying something for one payment of £450. I have to confess, I was, I was buying one of those Dyson air purifier fans and I looked at it and thought, "£450? That's too much for an air purifier fan." And then it said, "You can pay in three payments of £150." I said, "Brilliant, I'll have one of those." [laughter] Now, you don't have to be brilliantly mathematically astute to realize they're pretty much the same thing. However, to economists, price is a number. To consumers, price is a feeling. Okay? There are things that feel expensive and there are things that feel cheap, okay? And sometimes they're the same price.

You've probably seen me saying this. Famously, I think Rolls-Royce and Maserati stopped selling their cars at car shows because they look really expensive. And they tried selling them at yacht and aircraft shows because, you know, a Rolls-Royce Cullinan is a really, really expensive car if it's next to a load of cars, but next to a Lear Jet or a Sunseeker yacht, it's basically an impulse buy. It's like putting the sweets next to the till, you know, or I didn't buy, I didn't buy a jet today, so I'll have a couple of those, right? It's the consolation buy, you know, and things feel different, even if ostensibly, objectively, they're actually the same. This is why it annoys me that what you might call the Mad Men approach to business is still valuable. People don't like it not because it doesn't work. They don't like it because it's uncertain.

Great book by Margaret Heffernon called Embracing Uncertainty. As you said, if you're, if you're a chief executive, nearly all entrepreneurs have one defining characteristic, which is they're really, really content with a degree of uncertainty. They know that most of the future hasn't actually happened yet. And as I was saying, there are billion-dollar businesses that have been built on a single marketing idea. Um, somebody at Ogilvy years back in the '60s wrote an acquisition letter for the American Express card which started, "Frankly, the American Express card is not for everyone." Okay? Now, that gets your attention immediately. First of all, that positioned the card completely. It made them so much money. It ran for something over 10 years. That single sentence made American Express billions, literally billions of dollars. So out there somewhere, keep looking. Even if your business is already really successful and you're really happy and you're assuming the best thing you can do is optimize what you've already got, out there somewhere, there's an even better idea. And so part of your marketing activity, don't get me wrong, part of your marketing activity is incremental improvement. Let's make this a bit more efficient. Let's move a bit more money over here, a bit more money over there. Maybe we'll get rid of a bit of the spend here. That's fine. We've got to do that. Okay. But never get rid of the budget entirely where you're looking for a miracle. One of the reasons finance people never like looking for miracles is they don't believe in them. But the truth of the matter is, and the other problem with finance people is when you present them with a miracle, they refuse to believe it. I, I'm not making this up. If you actually go to a finance person and say, "We've come up with this new ad line and actually the ROI is 57 to 1," they refuse to accept that. They go, "No, ROIs aren't that high." Now [clears throat] in a logistical world, they generally aren't because everything is a trade-off. In a psychological world, if you somehow unlock part of the brain that's previously been closed, literally the returns can be absolutely monumental.

And here's an example. Okay. So Blockbuster Video are always ridiculed because they were offered the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million and they turned it down and everybody laughs at them and says, "What stupid people you were?" But actually Netflix wasn't that special a business when they tried to sell for $50 million because they hadn't come up with their killer idea. Netflix was basically like a DVD store, only you did it by post. Okay? You had late fees, you had all that kind of stuff. Okay? You, you chose a video, they posted it to you the next day. And they had a couple of little insights after they, after they'd met with Blockbuster Video. The two co-founders, one of them said, "The problem is is that you don't know what film you want a day in advance." Okay? Fundamentally, you know, you're in the mood to watch a film, you're not prepared to wait 24 hours to watch the same thing. That was his first problem. The second thing is they went to a warehouse and they saw all their DVDs. You, you do know what DVDs are, don't you? Because occasionally I, occasionally I find myself with younger audiences explaining what a fax machine is. Or, or for younger people, if you've got kids, if a phone rings, you [ __ ] answer it. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. Um, I mean, I, I grew up, my father ran a small business and it was a criminal offense not to answer the phone because that was money. Seriously, if you wanted to run a really good business school in the UK, the first term would consist of one course, um, Business 101, which is "Answer the [ __ ] phone," repeated over and over again. Because repeatedly I thought a fish and chip shop in my village was closed. I said, "Why are you closed on Wednesdays?" "We're not." I said, "I rang. Nobody answered." They said, "Oh, no. We don't answer the phone when we're busy." Okay? That's one of the most extraordinary elementary mistakes that that that people make. Anyway, sorry. Let me get back to Netflix. Um, it really, some of this stuff really isn't difficult, right?

So, they looked at the warehouses and someone had this brilliant point. They said, "We're paying all this money to warehouse all these DVDs before people request them. Wouldn't it be much better and cheaper if we could store them in our customers' homes rather than storing them in the warehouse?" Now, it happened that one of the co-founders of, of Netflix was probably America's greatest single expert on subscription marketing. So, he said, rather than charging one film at a time, let's do a subscription, three DVDs at any one time. Change them as often as you like. $19.95 a month, I think it was. No late fees ever. That was the magic trick. It wasn't the idea of DVDs by post. It was the idea that you could change them as often as you like. Now, it's a risk, of course, because a few people will indeed watch 27 films a month. Okay? And, uh, you got a bit of a problem, but that magical thing where you already have a choice of three films to watch at any one time, the price per month was about the same price as you'd pay to buy a DVD. So, it automatically seemed like brilliantly good value. Okay? For, for the price of one DVD every month, which they were probably buying anyway, okay, I suddenly get access to all the DVDs. Now, the finance person, as you can imagine, had a heebie-jeebie because he said, "What if all our customers start just, you know, watching 27 films a month?" They took the same bet which everybody takes when they open a gym, which is they might do that for the first few weeks, but 99% of people will fall back into a reasonable, uh, state. And it was that idea which they hadn't had when they went to Blockbuster Video, that was the breakthrough marketing idea. And I think there are a lot of companies where every now and then, every couple of years, don't just look for incremental improvement in your marketing, look for something totally new and amazing. It doesn't have to be advertising. It could be how you price yourself, how you position yourself. It could be a completely new channel of distribution. It could be a completely new place, uh, in which to do business.

Uh, one thing, by the way, finance people will always get wrong. They always think that when you offer new channels of business that the customers are the same, they're just using a different channel. Have you come across this? They call it things like revenue abstraction or cannibalization. Argos, by the way, got that accusation because every time they introduced click and collect, ring and reserve, everybody said, "All you're doing is allowing customers to buy things they would have bought already, but in a plethora of different ways." And they did the research. They found that when you open a new channel, a new mode of interaction, 50% of the sales are incremental. Okay? Yep. There are people at the McDonald's drive-through window who would have gone into the restaurant if the drive-thru hadn't been open, but there are a hell of a lot of them who wouldn't have done. And so generally, you know, everywhere, all the time, you know, isn't a totally ridiculous thing to do. It's not all about efficiency.

But the really important thing, by the way, they did also try, they kept trying other things. So they said, "A lot of people think $19.95 is too much." So they tried one which I think was $9.99 a month and it was only one DVD at any one time. Again, that didn't work because you don't know what you want to watch immediately. But they had an additional problem which was called the Hotel Rwanda effect, which is eventually you get sent a film which was pretty heavy. Okay? You wanted to watch it. It was the kind of film you wanted to watch, but you really, really had to be in the mood for it. You know, you can't really go, "Hey, Valentine's evening, right love, let's watch a film about genocide." Right? It doesn't really work. So that didn't work either. So what they'd happened on was just this brilliant combination of price, service, product, and positioning which was just the sweet spot. And you can continue to do this.

Um, one of the most extraordinary things we did with an airline is we said, "Very important thing to know about anybody buying anything," and I think this is, by the way, really important in the question of AI, is that people can't really choose something unless they can compare it to something else. Okay? Anybody who's been an estate agent or a real estate agent will know this completely. You could go along and see the first house you were shown and it could be your perfect house, but you wouldn't be happy until you'd seen three other houses. And so what often I think will happen with AI is a lot of people think the way AI should work is to come up with the perfect answer for the consumer. I think the consumer doesn't want that. I think the consumer wants three really good answers so they can choose the best one. It's a bit like, it's a bit like your satnav. Okay? You look at the satnav. Sometimes it has a really good idea, but you kind of look at the alternative routes just for the purposes, you know, if the alternative route is a bit more scenic and it's 2 minutes longer, you choose that one. Okay? If on the other hand, it's 25 minutes longer, you go, you revert to the original one. But you need to have a choice before you can choose. And I think, I think that's one of the ways in which AI will probably be misdirected by marketers because they think people just want to be told what the best thing is. They don't. They want three different things, uh, from which to choose.

And so we made this discovery with air travel, which is that every airline website looked like this. Okay. What room do you want? Um, sorry. Uh, yeah, where do you want to go? When do you want to go? And, um, what class of travel do you want? And that's fine if you're a business traveler because you know where you need to go and you know when you need to go, okay? Because your boss doesn't usually say, "I'd like you to go somewhere sunny in late August." They generally have a specific mission. Okay? And you also know what class of travel you can go in because that's the one you're allowed to travel in. Okay? By the way, you're all entrepreneurs. Keep an eye out for this because sometimes so many people's companies forbid them from flying first class that now first class is sometimes cheaper than business. Bit weird. Keep an eye out. Um, the, um, but what happened there was that we said, "You can't, as a consumer, choose a premium economy or business class flight unless you know what the economy class flight would have cost. You need a comparison." So we changed the design of the website. So rather than everybody just looking at an economy price and deciding whether or not to go, we also showed them the two classes up. That made the airline £10 million a year on just from their website, £10 million a year in incremental high-margin premium revenue in terms of the number of consumers who are now going. And it's weird, by the way, isn't it? Because logically, it should be a set amount you're prepared to pay to go premium economy, but it kind of isn't. It's a ratio of the economy price, you know what I mean? It's, if economy's £900 and premium economy is £1,200, you go, "Yeah, what the hell?" Whereas if it's £300 and £600, you go, "I'm not paying double." Now, logically, if you're an economist, you should have a set amount for any length of flight you're prepared to pay to upgrade, and it should be the same regardless of how much the economy price was. The human brain doesn't work like that. It looks at things proportionately. So, you can literally make...

So, one of the first things to understand about psychology is the annoying thing about psychology is people don't have a sense of proportion. You know that if you manage people, right? You can give them a huge pay rise but a slightly crap mobile phone and they hate you. Right? People don't, the human brain doesn't have a great sense of proportion. The good thing is the human brain doesn't have a huge sense of proportion. So that you can do really, really small things and people go, "Oh, I thought that was [ __ ] but now I need, now I realize it's brilliant." Okay? The same thing can mean something different. This is one of the best ideas I've seen recently. This is so clever. Right? Because I was booking a hotel and previously, all the rooms were was simply ranked by how good they were. You know, premium, junior suite, standard, king, double. You've all done this. You go to an alumni. This hotel suddenly realized some of our rooms are closer to the pool. Some of the rooms are closer to the gym. Some people like to go to the pool. Some people, probably different people actually, like to go to the gym. So why don't we call our gym-close rooms "Gym Access" and our pool-close rooms "Pool Access" and we can get both classes of people to pay a premium for something that we were just giving away for free before? That's what I mean about when I called my book Alchemy. You can literally turn lead into gold. You can conjure up value simply with words and pixels. Now, my guess is that idea is probably worth, you know, I don't know, it'll probably worth a billion to the worldwide hotel industry as more and more people pick up on it. Okay.

How many of you pool access or how many... Okay, how many of you gym access? What incredibly healthy group. What a weird ratio. Okay.

Now, one of the other problems as businesses get bigger is as an entrepreneur, you can resolve lots of incomparable bits of data and come up to with a decision and you do that intuitively and instinctively. You do it through feel. As businesses get bigger, there are specialist people who are in charge of procurement and logistics and they all have their own metrics which aren't comparable with each other. And what then happens in business is this: the art of getting anything to happen in business is no longer about solving a problem. It's about winning an argument. And the tools you need to win an argument aren't the same mental tools you need to solve a problem. You'll solve problems with imagination, with instinct, with intuition, with, um, all kinds of mechanisms. But you won't fundamentally solve many problems with a spreadsheet. But when you win an argument, everything has to be reduced to what works on a spreadsheet or what works in PowerPoint. And the best solutions aren't always strictly logical. They, you arrive at them through some feat of the imagination. And this is where it goes really wrong because once you have to win an argument, you're not allowed to be nearly as creative as you're allowed to be when you solve a problem.

I'll skip this. So what happens in business as you get bigger is everybody pretends that things are logical. They know they're not logical, but in order to win the argument, you have to pretend that things are logical. You have to pretend that consumers are completely rational economic actors, um, possessed of absolutely no emotions whatsoever. For example, the reason you pretend these things is not really because you believe them. It's because you win arguments for this way. And then the worst thing starts to happen. This is my great hero Roger Martin, who's speaking at Nudgestock this June in the UK. Um, you start benchmarking yourself against the competition. So what I'm going to tell you very shortly is fundamentally a little idea which everybody can play and you can play it at the smallest level. You can play it with a budget of $10,000. You can play it with a budget of $10 million. But it's something which is worth doing as an exercise, which is what I call the opposite of benchmarking. And Martin makes the point that management consultants come in, they've done a load of work with your competitors, they benchmark you against them. What they then do is make you more similar to your competitors. If you want to make money, you want differentiation. You want to be different. And so Martin writes this fantastic piece called "Benchmarking is for Losers," which makes exactly the point.

Whoops. Can are we going? There we are. I'm going to suggest something called reverse benchmarking. Okay. Now, just to give the background, it's worth knowing a bit about neuroscience, which is that most of what we perceive in our brains, according to this Andy Clark book, which I think is very believable, is a prediction. Okay? Most of what we actually see is our expectation of what we expect to see. And we use the limited bandwidth in our eyes, our ears, our noses, etc., just to correct for prediction error. That's, by the way, how a JPEG works. Is how your TV works. Okay? And so if you want to surprise people, if you want people to notice you, do things they didn't expect. Okay?

Now, the thing you do that's unexpected, some of you may be familiar with the DoubleTree cookie, right? You check into a DoubleTree hotel, they have an oven under the desk. Actually, things like that, the finance people have been trying to kill it for ages, apparently. Okay? It's valuable, precise. Now, McKinsey would go and say, "Well, there's nothing in our kind of service level agreement in the hotel that says you have to give people hot cookies, so why are you doing something that nobody's asked you to do?" That's exactly why you do it because they notice it because they weren't expecting it. And they certainly weren't expecting them to be warm. They've got an oven underneath the check-in desk. Okay. Now, I last stayed at a DoubleTree Hotel 20 years ago. That's the only thing apart from the fact that it was in Chicago. That's the only thing I can remember. If my PA came to me now, 20 years later, and said, "Do you want to go and stay at the DoubleTree or the Marriott?" All other things being equal, I go DoubleTree. >> Okay, that cookie had a...

Now, measuring the effectiveness of the cookie is going to be really slow because measuring things that have an effect on loyalty and repeat business is always much slower than measuring things that affect acquisition. As a consequence, nearly all businesses are underinvested in loyalty and repeat business and overinvested in acquisition simply because the one delivers results that are really, really quick and also really easy to attribute because they're quick. Whereas the loyalty effect is much, much slower. I know, um, John Roberts of AO quite well. He's the UK's largest buyer of teddy bears, and that's because they deliver the washing machines themselves. Every single van has a box of little branded AO teddy bears in the back. And the drivers know that if there are kids in the household, okay, uh, you give each of them a bear. If you really want to screw things up, you give one of the kids a bear. No, you give each of the kids a bear. Right? Now, as John says, "I can't really measure that." He says, "I admit if someone asked me to do the ROI on that, the finance people would kill that in a heartbeat if they could because you can't quantify the value." You could quantify the value. You'd have a control cell where you didn't hand out bears and then you'd wait 15 years and see if they were, or I suppose you could have a third control cell where you went to the kids and said, "Here's a bear." Which I'm not going to give to you. Okay? You know, that would be the opposite. Okay. Um, the point is, okay, that things that affect loyalty and retention and, and actually word of mouth and evangelism often are things like the DoubleTree cookie, which are very hard to quantify, but they are at least really, really high. You're optimizing not for efficiency, you're optimizing for attention.

Now, when I talk about reverse benchmarking, which is an exercise I think every business should try. This is a great book if you run a customer service business. It's by Will Guidara and it describes how between 2011 and 2017 he took his restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, from number 50 in the world in the Pellegrino best restaurant awards and he took it to number one. And this is the story he told me, which is why he's a brilliant marketer. His wife's obviously a brilliant marketer because she invented something called cereal milk, which tastes like the milk you get in the bottom of a bowl of Cocoa Pops without the Cocoa Pops, which is arguably the most delicious thing known to man. Okay? Right. The actual Cocoa Pop flavored milk is more delicious than Cocoa Pops. But somehow no one's noticed that until Will's wife came along. But here's what he did. When they're the number 50 restaurant in the world, he takes his team and mixture of his team, chefs, etc. He takes them to the best restaurant in the world, the number one. And as you expect, it was really, really amazingly good. And at the end of it, all the staff are saying, "I really like this. We should copy this. I really like that. We should benchmark against this. We should do this as well. That was really good. Let's do more of this." And Guidara said, "I'm not interested in that." He said, "Not interested in any of that." Said, "What were the things, if any, that were just slightly disappointing?" Now, sometimes that requires a bit of, because you've been blinded with all the stuff that's amazing. Okay? You don't notice the stuff that's a bit meh. And they came up with two things. Now, he'd taken a load of chefs along. Chefs actually often like to...

drink beer rather than wine. And all the beer drinkers in the party just felt shortchanged. You know, the wine drinkers were getting a whole load of [ __ ] about vintages and terois. And the beer drinkers were being told, like, we got Sam Adams in bottles, right? That was number one.

Secondly, there was nothing amazing about the coffee. It was just all right. Okay, so he goes back to his own restaurant. He's got one waiter who's a coffee obsessive. He appoints him the coffee seller. And there was someone in the kitchens who was an absolute craft beer nut. He's the beer seller. Now imagine that you're a beer drinker. You're in a restaurant. You say, "Have you got anything in the way of beers?" because you're used to being treated like [ __ ] by Michelin three-star restaurants, right? And instead of the usual, "We've got this in bottles and that on draft," a guy comes up to you and suggests food pairings, like, "This citric IPA, which we've just got hold of, goes really well with fish." Okay, you're blown out of the water by that because, to go back to this guy, you weren't expecting it.

And I think that business of taking a few things you do and just optimizing. I always say this, actually, by the way. Um, I often, I, I often recommend people go on holiday in Wales, right? And the reason is because, actually, whatever you think about Wales, it's usually better than you expect. You know what I mean? You know, particularly if you're, I'm Welsh, okay? But English people go, "Oh, this is going to be [ __ ]" and then you actually discover there's a really, really good restaurant, or the hotel is fantastic. I think in life, we should actually optimize for pleasant surprises. You know, actually, Texas, by the way, I've just come back. I thought that's absolutely fantastic. In the same way, it's just full of really, really surprising things. And so that basic principle is what I call reverse benchmarking. Don't copy the things your competitors are doing well. Go and find a few things your competitors aren't doing really well and then effectively market the hell out of them.

Um, this was a case which was, uh, a hotel. I, I, I, I was presenting this same slide to, um, the people at Expedia, and they own Hotels.com. And I, I, I, I left it too late to cancel a hotel room because my father-in-law was ill and we had to postpone our holiday, and they basically charged me for all three nights at the hotel, or two nights at the hotel, because I left it about three hours too late. So I went onto Hotels.com and said, "Look, I realize I'm not really entitled to a refund." They said, "We'll contact the hotel and see what we can do." They then got back to me and said, "We've contacted the hotel. Unfortunately, they won't give you a refund." Okay. Oh, well, okay. Well, at least you tried. Okay. Four days later, I get another email saying, "I thought you were a bit hard done by there, so I contacted the hotel again, and they've agreed to give you the first night back." Now, I don't know if anybody's being cunning here, but actually, you could do that anyway, couldn't you? You could pretend they'd said no and then come back four days later and say, "I give it a second try, right?" And but with that, I actually said to them at Expedia, I said, "That's where I'll be booking my hotels in future." Because the fact that they sort of tried, that was expected. The fact that after I'd said, "Don't worry, my bad, you know, you did your best." The fact that four days later the guy goes back and tries again, that's totally, that's your DoubleTree cookie moment. That's like, wow.

Um, this is, any, the people from Texas, you're probably familiar with Buc-ee's. Are you the >> Sorry. See, see what I mean? Okay. Now, okay, we've got a lot of people going, "Woo!" Okay, now I want to just point out that Buc-ee's is actually a gas station chain. You [laughter] see? See what I mean? Okay. There's similarly a Turkish one founded by two teachers. They did very simple reverse benchmarking. They said, "Okay, all gas stations, whatever the price and everything else, the toilets are terrible." Okay. If you run one of these, um, Opet toilets in Turkey, your great terror is, and this literally happens, the chief executive turns up at 8:00 in the morning and goes, "Not interested in your your returns or your financial figures, straight into the toilets." And if there's anything there that isn't perfect, that's a catastrophe. It's taking something that everybody else. Now, what tends to happen in benchmarking is we do the things that people are already focused on and we do a bit more of it. The really successful businesses, I would argue, um, Moxy Hotels, any fans? >> You see, this is interesting. What I think Moxy does brilliantly is they go, "Look, okay, the location's great. The room, by the way, what I'm not suggesting with reverse benchmarking is you can be [ __ ] at things if you're good at one thing. Don't interpret it. The rooms are totally like Travelodge, but but a bit cooler. But they're very small. They got a good TV. They got good Wi-Fi. The rooms are tiny. There's no room service. There's no laundry, right? But the one problem with hotels, okay, is that when you check out of the hotel, or when you want to go and work, you feel a bit unwanted. Their public space is like a funkier WeWork. Okay? It's a really, really good hotel because it's like the opposite of what most hotels do. You have a really fancy room, but when you're in the public space, it's kind of [ __ ] The Moxy is the absolute opposite. Your room's perfectly serviceable but very small and very basic, which allows them to be in quite a good location, and the ground floor is fantastic. I did this with JRA Group. Um, I said, "There's one thing that no hotels manage to do well, which is checkout." You know, there are hotels that make a real fuss of you at check-in. There hotels that do amazing things, but checkout always feels a bit meh, even if you're staying at a really fancy hotel. And I said, you know, the problem with checkout, okay, 50% of people just want to get the hell out because they got a business meeting to go to and they're flying home that evening. But said 50% of us have to check out of our room at 11:00 so you can clean it, but our flight doesn't leave until 10:00 at night. So, we're sort of homeless. So, my reverse benchmarking was with them was, "Have you thought of having a departure lounge?" Now, they're in the Middle East, so land is not at a premium, right? Have you thought of just having a lounge, which is exclusively a place where people can go after they've checked out for the rest of the day? You know, you have a barista, you have some toilets, you have lockers where they can keep their stuff, you have a bit of Wi-Fi. Now, imagine you're checking out of a hotel. You know, it's the DoubleTree in reverse. And they say, "By the way, when's your flight?" "Oh, not until 10:00 at night." "Why don't you make use of this facility completely free that you weren't expecting?" You're going to go, "Oh [ __ ] I never thought of that, but that's amazing." Okay. It's and the reason reverse benchmarking, the reason McKinsey do standard benchmarking is reverse benchmarking requires imagination. Okay? Being a bit rude there, but it does. You've got to actually think, "What could we do that nobody else is doing?" One thing that might kill reverse benchmarking is often procurement, by the way, because procurement is mostly interested in having five people bidding for the same idea which are exactly the same as each other so they can compare their own price. Procurement is one of the biggest enemies to innovation imaginable. Okay? Because you come along and say, "You don't need that. We've got a better idea that costs half as much." And they go, "We don't want to know because because your idea is different, we now can't compare you on price and beat you down." The hidden cost of procurement departments in large organizations is immense. I met someone who's got a really brilliant, in, in innovation they want to take to the NHS. To get it approved in the NHS, it has to be approved by 11 people in sequence. Any one of whom saying no kills the whole idea. Okay. Now, this is, I, when I started looking back on it, I suddenly realized that a lot of great innovative businesses were reverse benchmarking. Okay. Uber. Everybody else is worried about how, what the c, what the taxis look like, how quickly they turn up, da da da da. They said, "No, no. We'll make waiting for a taxi much less boring and stressful because we'll show you where it is on a map." See, none of that would feature in procurement, would it? They go, "How quickly do your cabs turn up on average?" Uber answered a different question, which is, "How does it feel like to wait for a cab?" And conventionally, that was the worst bit of having a cab because you're either standing in the rain, or you're looking out of the window and going, "Is that my cab over there? Have they forgotten me?" Suddenly Uber come along with this. You look at it, 2.5 miles away. "Oh, look. It's those traffic lights. I'll have another pint." So, it doesn't change the quantity. Okay. It doesn't change the quantity of waiting. It changes the quality of the time while you're waiting. And quite often, again, procurement and benchmarkers and McKinsey people are only interested in the things you can quantify. And the problem is we don't have numbers for human emotions. Okay? Not yet. I mean, potentially it's possible. So, human emotions always involve a degree of subjectivity. Okay. I did think of creating units for human emotions, and I came up with one which is the Millie Best, which is named after Pete Best. A Best is the unit of regret you experience through nearly being in the Beatles, but not quite being there. And therefore, a mill, if you just miss your train, you might experience a pico Best, which is a millionth of the regret you'd experience through not quite being in the Beatles. But it didn't go anywhere.

Um, finally, optimize for perception, not reality. As I said to economists, price is a number. To consumers, price is a feeling. If you express the same thing in different ways, I mentioned this about Cler. If you express the same thing in different ways, you totally change how people, how people see it. The reason I show this slide at every conference is twofold. It illustrates my point perfectly, right? But secondly, I'm convinced that every 100,000 people I show it to who see it, it'll save somebody's life, right? On the outside, we're all familiar with that. It's a speedometer, right? And it shows speed in a perfectly objective way, which is miles per hour. And that's how we always describe speed in, in, in every country, kilometers per hour, miles per hour. But equally, you could express speed the other way round, which is minutes per 10 miles. Now, that's called, on the inside, it's invented by two behavioral scientists in Cambridge. It's called, they call it a Pomodoro. Okay? And it shows exactly the same speed, but it does it the other way round. Now, have you noticed something? The numbers going around the outside are all evenly spaced. The numbers on the Pomodoro are unbelievably uneven. Now, this is why I show everybody this thing, right? If you're, if you're going at 10 miles an hour, it will take you, predictably enough, an hour to go 10 miles. If you go at 20 miles an hour, you save 30 minutes. If you save, uh, go at 30 miles an hour, you save 40 minutes. If you go at 40 miles an hour, you save, I think it's 45 minutes. The faster you're going already, the less time you save by going 10 miles an hour faster for any given distance. It's mathematically trivial, but it's completely counterintuitive. Okay? That's why they shouldn't have made High Speed 2 that fast because you add a huge amount of cost, and once the train's going at 150 mph to Manchester, I'm not saying if the train's going a thousand miles, but to Manchester, it's fast enough. No one goes, "Oh, I go to Manchester today, but it takes five minutes too long." Okay? That's just stupid. Okay. Now, actually, the reason that's important, you may have noticed this if you've got a satnav in your car because you're running late. Your satnav says, "Estimated time of arrival 12:03," and you go, "Oh no, I'm going to be late." So you, you're going at 70 already, and you well it up to 90. Okay? And after about four minutes, your arrival time drops by one minute. Okay? That's because when you're already going fast, going a bit faster makes sod all difference to your arrival time. By contrast, Sadiq Khan's plan of making everybody London drive around at [ __ ] 20 miles an hour is actually wasting a massive amount of people's time. Okay? Because the amount of time spent on the road between 20 miles an hour and 30, that's a big deal. For 10 miles, it's 30 minutes, sorry, it's, uh, 10 minutes time saved for every 10 miles you go. You're wasting a minute a mile by making people go at 20 rather than 30 over that period. Okay. Now, once you see it like that, I think you're all going to drive differently, aren't you? You suddenly realize that going quite fast is really, really good. It saves you a lot of time. Not being stationary, that's fantastic. But actually, once you're going at 60, 70, going faster than that, it's massively more dangerous to you. It's more dangerous to other people. It uses vastly more fuel. Okay? It's more stressful. And the actual amount of time you save is barely detectable. Has anybody else been on a speed awareness course? Okay. My goodness. Okay. I'll tell you a lovely story about speed awareness courses because they are, they are quite informed by behavioral science. And there's this fantastic thing on a speed awareness course where they ask everybody to rank themselves as the, as a driver between naught and 10. When five is an average driver, 10 is a perfect driver. Okay? And they go around the room and everybody, of course, nobody ranks themselves a five or below. The lowest anybody will say of themselves is they're a slightly above average driver. And they did this in one, one course in Oxfordshire, and a guy said, "Where would you rank yourself in, you know, naught to 10?" He said, "Nine." And then other people, "Eight, seven, six, nine, eight, seven." "You, sir, you rank yourself a nine. What makes you think that?" He said, "Well, actually, I'm being modest. He said, "My name is Jody Shakar, and I was Formula 1 World Champion." [laughter] But that's one of those bits of information where, go and look at price. Okay? Literally, when I said that Cler, "three payments of £150" is totally different. If you're a B2B business, I've always said, don't discount. Offer people a rebate. And the reason is, finance people love rebates because it's money you can put anywhere, right? Literally, you know, every way in which you express a price, even though it's economically identical, can be emotionally totally different. So, I'll skip through this. I've only got a few minutes left, but I'll just show you. With Dash, we have a prize for their loyal customers where we give them a dice, and if they throw a six on any meal before 6 p.m. Monday to Thursday, they get the meal for free. And now, mathematically, that's a 16.6% discount. Okay? Psychologically, there are people who are multi-millionaires who obsessively go there for the chance of winning a free meal. Okay? These people wouldn't cross the road to save 16.6%. There's a group there from a bank in Chicago who actually take a colleague along from the London office because they think he's got a hot hand. Okay. What I'm saying is, come up with really, really interesting ways of pricing, and you can always change. It's difficult to change people's minds, but sometimes you just change the context. Okay. Range anxiety is funny because everybody's focused on range. And I keep pointing out, who are the electric car converts? Anybody? Yeah, a few. Yeah. The interesting thing is, you never go back. It's, it's the British were exactly the same with automatic transmission. Everybody goes, "No, no, it's terrible. I lose sense of control." It's awful. Once someone has an automatic car, they never go back. Right. Okay. Now, one way of doing that is to change the context. And I've often said, look, why don't we spend a few million pounds reducing anxiety rather than all spending all our money in engineering trying to increase range? You know, range anxiety, increase range, reduce anxiety. Same thing. Recontextualizing problems is a really great way to solve it. Um, I've made that point about electric cars with high-speed rail. Why don't you say, "What's the quality like on board?" Okay. It doesn't matter how fast a train is in Britain, you can't make a mobile phone call for more than four minutes, right, without being cut off. Wouldn't it be better to work on that at a cost of £50 million rather than spending £120 billion on on making the train faster?

>> Okay, here is, probably I'll end with this. It's the perfect film because it shows that even in politics, you can do this thing of reverse benchmarking. Take the thing that's your, take the thing that's a weakness, turn it into a strength. Okay? You can just do that using words. If you just play that video now, it's probably the perfect moment on which to end where someone >> In 1984, October 1984, Ronald Reagan is running for reelection. He's the oldest candidate ever to be running for president. He's 73 years old. There are some concerns about his ability, especially mentally, to keep doing the job. Nobody knew anything about Alzheimer's at this point, but there were some concerns that were out there. In the first debate, Reagan against Mondale. There are moments when Reagan seems he's lost for words. He seems to go blank. >> The system is still where it was with regard to, uh, the, uh, with regard to the, the, uh, progressivity. As I've said, >> Walter Mondale says, looking back, he said that was the one moment he believed he really could win that election. Today, we have a brand new race. >> They got two weeks to get ready for the next debate. There is one more debate and [music] Reagan has one challenge. He has got to reassure the country that what they saw in that first debate was an aberration, that he'll be fine getting a second term as president. And so he shows up, uh, for the second debate. [music] He knows the questions coming. The people around him were trying to coach him. He told them before, "No, no, no. I got it." They didn't know what he had [music] had in store. So the question comes up, the moderator says to him, "You already are the oldest president in history, and some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mr. Mondale. Um, I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuba missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?" "Not at all, Mr. Tru. And I, and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." [cheering] >> It's a great moment because obviously there's, it's a great line. The crowd loves it. >> I'll just end now because I'm out of time. But this is the perfect case. Amusingly, Saga Holidays has basically stolen from Ronald Reagan, and their slogan is "Experience is everything." So, Saga always suffered from that one downside, which is, I, I did tell Saga, by the way, very simple thing. They're currently holidays for the over 50s, and I said, "Make it holidays for the over 49s," because it sounds totally different. Right? There's a wonderful example in marketing where someone advertised keep-fit classes for the over 70s. Okay, nobody turned up. Okay. We better widen the basket and widen our reach. Widen the net a bit. Keep-fit classes for the over 60s. Nobody turned up. Desperation. Keep-fit classes for the over 50s. Loads of people turned up, all of whom were over 70. Okay? So this is just, this is a case of just taking something and rebranding it. Don't change the thing itself. Change how people think of it. That carries as many people as the Overground, as the Elizabeth Line. It cost £120 million, or maybe £200 million. The Elizabeth Line cost £20 billion. 1% of the cost. It carries as many people. How did they do that? It nearly all always existed. It was loads of railway lines. It's called Silver Link Metro. Now, they improved the rolling stock. They tidied up the stations. They improved the disabled access. They improved the lighting. Here's what they did. They pretended it was a tube line, and they called it the Overground. Now, I don't know if you know any Londoners, but Londoners basically think the tube map is a map of London. And when they go and find a house, they go, "Is it close to the tube?" So, nobody goes to Southeast London, despite the fact that Southeast London has an excellent rail network, because Londoners don't know that trains exist, basically. So, what they did is they took a load of trains and they pretended it was a tube. On the first day it appeared on the tube map, usage went up by 400%. I had a friend who lived in Clapham who used to travel to Canary Wharf on the Northern Line and the Jubilee Line, which was absolutely horrible, when he could have just walked another five, five or 10 yards and traveled Overground all the way to Canada Water. Okay. Literally, sometimes the problem with your product is nothing to do with your product. It's how you're presenting it. Literally true. And so keeping on experimenting with that is the way to go. There is probably a psychological solution to everything. I'm going to end here because I'm at time, but this is a question which a brilliant psychologist called Kevin Dutton asked. Is there a psychological solution to every single problem? We're just not looking for it. And the reason he asked that question is he heard a story about Winston Churchill in about 1954, I think it was, or '53. Churchill was Prime Minister, Queen was newly crowned, massive dinner at Buckingham Palace, uh, for the Commonwealth Heads of Government and various dignitaries. And during the dinner, Churchill sitting next to the Queen. One of the footmen comes up and says, "We got a bit of a problem. One of the guests has stolen a pepper pot." Okay. Now, that sounds a bit trivial, but they're solid gold. They date back to George III. They're worth about £5,000. What the hell do you do? Do you let it go? Do you take the hit? Okay? Or do you go and accuse them of theft, which creates a major diplomatic incident? They're then forced to deny it, and the whole thing creates a huge amount of embarrassment. Churchill goes, "Don't worry, leave this to me." And Churchill then, a few minutes later, just reaches onto the table, takes the matching salt shaker off the table, and puts it in his breast pocket, and he waits. And the woman who'd stolen the pepper pot, okay, after, you know, after dinner, she's standing by the window, and Churchill just sidles up to her, pulls the salt shaker out of his pocket, and says, "I think we've both been spotted. We probably better put these back." Okay. Now, the sheer genius of that, which is if you present yourself as an accuser, okay, it's a totally different psychological response to if you present yourself as a fellow offender. You know, the one of them is accusatorial. The other one is conspiratorial. In the second case, you've kind of made a friend. In the first case, you've made an enemy. The actual behavioral result is exactly the same. And I'll end with a wonderful story about how magical copywriting can be. There's a restaurant somewhere in Santa Fe where they wanted people not to use mobile phones, and every restaurant in the world would do the same thing. "Please do not use mobile phones. Mobile phones are forbidden." We, you know, now that's bossing people around. People don't like it. So here's what they did. They put a single sign on the door which was ostensibly aimed at people leaving the restaurant, but everybody could see it as they came in. And it simply said, "Please don't forget to turn your mobile phone back on when leaving the restaurant." Same result, totally different emotional response. You can do that surprisingly often. I'll end on that. Rather than trying to change the world, change how people see the world. When people see the world differently, they behave differently. That then changes the world. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.