Transcription
We've talked a lot about sort of anchoring, uh, context, price. I think you said price is feeling. What are some of these variables you can people can press and press or press down or lean into that can get, get potentially not great ideas to spread?
And I think let's maybe use, like, say we were trying to create, like, a Polish food, right? For example. Yeah. Polish food isn't big in the UK. Polish food is probably like Korean food 20 years ago, whereas Korean food now is getting bigger and bigger. Although they're very good at running British cafes, of course, because it's a sort of similar, if you're doing a kind of, you know, similar bacon and eggs, you know, egg and cheese.
But say, say you were trying to, I were trying to create, like, a Polish Nando, right? So, it's like, people start, I don't know, what sort of food they do? They do like lots of sausage. You probably have to have a hero item, don't you? I'm, how would you do that? Is basically it's a really, really good question.
One thing you can do, which I think is one of the central insights, although there are many, from Will Gdara's book, is it's called Unreasonable Hospitality. And he argues that in the hospitality industry in general, one very good strategy. Now, it would be very easy to misunderstand this strategy by saying you can be [ __ ] at everything so long as you're brilliant at one thing. No, not saying that. What I'm saying is that there is a certain component of your offering which has to be unreasonably, ably good. Mhm.
And so, I mean, I always thought it was fascinating. Um, there's, there's a fascinating hotel chain which I often talk about because I think it's just interesting psychologically, which is the Moxy hotel chain. I don't know if you've ever stayed in one. Where are they like? Okay. They're all over the place. They're in pretty good locations. The rooms are tiny. Uh, the rooms are extremely basic. There's no laundry. There's no room service. I think there's a kind of ironing room. There might be a laundry room, but there's an ironing room. There's no actual laundry. They're not intended for you to stay there for a week. They're intended for one, two, maybe three night stays. Yeah. And the rooms are actually smaller than you get in a Travelodge. Then now they've got a very good TV. They got very good Wi-Fi. The bed's very comfortable. It's all quite modern and minimalist, but they're small. Okay.
The location is good generally. And it can be, because the rooms are small, and the entire differentiation is the ground floor, which is kind of like a 24-hour barista-run coffee bar, serving also alcoholic drinks, sometimes serving food. There's a little shop. There are loads of desks, chairs. It's a bit like an ad agency, basically, the ground floor. And you can hang out there, work. So, you don't mind that your room's so small because you can basically hang out on the ground floor, invite friends around to join you if you want to. Um, when you check in, you don't check in at a check-in desk. You check in at the bar, and they typically, I don't want to overpromise here, but most of the time they offer you a welcome cocktail, which is their signature cocktail of the day, which is generally delicious. And so, you drink that and you check in, and you go up and dump your stuff in the room. And then you don't sit in your room with your laptop like a sad as you would do in most hotels. Okay.
The ground floor is basically it. It even has lockers. Okay. So you could lock your laptop in the ground floor if you wanted to. Um, uh, and, um, uh, you basically sit down, you know, get your laptop out on the ground floor, order a really good coffee, charge at your room, maybe you have a cocktail, maybe you have a pizza. But for anybody, I'm to be honest, I mean, I, um, I'm probably way too old for their target demographic, but it still appeals to me what they're doing, which is make everything basic, acceptable, and decent, and have one thing that's remarkable.
So say that was Polish food. What would that be? Um, would you start with a crossover product, which is like the Polish bacon sandwich? The Polish B version of, I know I'm obsessed with this idea of bacon sandwich as a restaurant, cuz the bacon roll or bacon sandwich, the other restaurant, Bangers. So that's a sausage restaurant, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, it's kind of is what you were saying, but they just don't have the champagne and they don't have the brown sauce, which is what we. No. No. And and no. And that would that would be interesting. And then you probably have one killer, uh, maybe you start with something crossover, which is kind of, it's where Raymond Lurvy, the designer, called it mayor, which is maximally advanced yet acceptable. So you take people, uh, if you like, you allow them to keep one foot in the familiarity camp while putting another foot into the experimental side. So you may look, you may raid Polish cuisine, which is not something I know a huge amount about. Yeah, neither do I. There's a very good, actually very good Polish, like a schnitzel burger would be an example of. Was it mayor? Uh, yeah, mayor would be exactly that. Yeah, a schnitzel burger would be exactly that kind of thing, which is both mayor, stand, maximally advanced yet acceptable.
And it comes from the idea of product design, which is you want something to be as good as it possibly can be without making it so different to what preceded it that people can't get their heads around the idea. Yes. With you. Now, that doesn't always seem to be the case because there are weird things like bubble tea, um, which seem to come from absolutely nowhere. I guess it's Korean. Kombucha. Um, kombucha came from virtually nowhere, right? Um, I met someone, I have to confess this, um, which is I met someone about 12 or 14 years ago who was, I think, Russian, and had this idea of making kombucha a thing in the UK. I remember listening and half of me thinking she was completely mad because I thought, I'm not sure people are ready for fermented cold tea.
Now, interestingly, um, uh, John Evans, who you ought to interview, who is the marketing director of Britvic, um, he made Lipton's cold iced tea, uh, a big success against all the odds, because all research and all his colleagues told him there was no way that a hot drink, tea-drinking country like the UK would actually have an appetite for cold tea. How did he do it? So, so it's worth noting. Um, I did I did say to him that a little bit of the appeal of cold tea is possibly rather like Starbucks in a can or Red Bull is that sometimes we're just too lazy to make a cup of coffee. We want a bit of a perk, but we're either too time-starved or we're in a car, okay? And we just haven't got time or or the energy to make a cup of coffee. So, an instant caffeinated drink is going to have some appeal anyway, simply on the grounds of laziness. But you can promote these things and, um, what becomes popular. I think market research, conventional market research is probably not a very reliable guide to what becomes popular because if you'd asked people, um, you know, would you like bubble tea? Most people will go, that's the stupid idea, the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. And of course, what the research doesn't capture is that when there are lots of places serving bubble tea, people's own curiosity and social proof goes, "This seems to be a thing. I better find out what it is." M okay. It's not the same as researching something in the abstract, which I think can be dangerously misleading because, you know, none of the, you know, Dyson, as we say, Dyson, Red Bull, Nespresso, none of those things would actually have succeeded in research in advance of their own existence. But it, um, so some things do spring out of nowhere. I, you know, but I mean, that one way of trying it is you try, as you said, the schnitzel burger. You, you, what else would you do? What other levers would you push on?
We could maybe talk about context. We could talk about, you know, I think one of the ways you'd get high-status chefs like your Gordon Ramsay to say, "Oh, this new Polish schnitzel place is amazing." Like, what other, what other levers would you press to get that idea to spread? So we end up with like 100 Polish Nando sites.
You might want to cheat a bit, okay, and go a bit Eastern European and include Hungarian things like, um, you know, cherry soup. Um, cherry soup in a bowl. Hungarian. It's fantastic. Soup made of cherries. Really? What is it? Savory or sweet? Uh, it's kind of, you generally put a bit of cream or sour cream, I think, in it. God, it's a long time since I've had it because I last had it in Hungary, which is bloody years ago. Yeah. Um, you could probably, I'm sure you could get it if you went to the, is the Gay Hussar still there? I wonder if that's closed down. That used to be the, you know, the sort of left-wing restaurant par excellence in London, the Gay Hussar in Soho, back in, back in the sort of 70s and 80s. You know, that's where Labour politicians typically went to eat. Um, uh, I mean, you might want to cheat a bit because no one actually knows, okay, what's authentically Polish and what isn't. So, there's no reason you couldn't borrow from neighboring cuisines and get away with it.
Well, you could almost apply the Pan-Asian to the Pan-Eastern European. You know, you know, you go to those Pan-Asian places where it's actually a hodgepodge of Korean, then you have bao, then you have sushi, and it's just a cornucopia of different, um, Asian cuisines. I think that's clever because that brings, as you say, you're borrowing from slightly different areas, but brings people into the Eastern European category versus just the Polish category. And then there's the question of, you know, what to what extent does fish play in the whole thing? You've got a whole load of questions going on there. Okay. Um, but it would be, I, it would, I mean, it's an, it's a very interesting point, which is maybe I'm going to, that that's a bit of an uphill challenge because Polish food doesn't have, Eastern European food, with the exception of Hungarian, generally doesn't have a fantastic reputation, which may be nothing to do with the quality of their cuisine, but simply because they, you know, while they were part of the Warsaw Pact, okay, there was probably a general deterioration in food, in in the standards of kind of culinary innovation.
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