3 Pioneers of Modern Marketing: Best of the Best Montage

29:01Yeah, yeah. And they went, great. Love it, John. Ah, I said, look, there's just one thing I haven't told you. What's that? And I said, one of the characters is a fluffy yellow puppet called Flat Eric. And that's the relationship. This guy, cool dude, and a fluffy yellow puppet. And they did think I had gone mad. And they thought, you must be mad. A lot of people in the agency thought I'd gone mad. You sure about this, John? You sure this is going to work? And, of course, you have to say, of course it's going to work. Deep inside you're going, fuck knows if it is going to work because it's really pushing the envelope here.

29:39Anyway, so I went back that second time. They went, no, John, you know, we really, you know, fluffy yellow puppet. No, I don't think it. And so the third time I decided, right, I can't go back and just do it again. So what I did was part of it I wanted for them to take the back cover of things like Vogue. And I said, so I decided what I would do is I'd go back and kind of get the idea alive and make them feel this could be great, is I took back covers of Vogue and I just, instead of it being some handsome Giorgio Armani model or whatever it might have been, you know, looking cool and groovy, I just put Flat Eric and just Levi's, you know.

30:23And I said, and that's what I want you to do. not only TV, buy all the back covers of these style magazines. And they suddenly looked at it and they went, oh, yeah, I kind of get that. I'm still unsure, but I kind of see where you're coming from. And in the end, they were great and they bought it. And it then became hugely good. They were great is very interesting because that's an operative word there. It takes two to tango. Well, it does. It takes bravery from both sides. They did trust us. They did trust that we had their best interests at heart, that we were trying to do something that would stand out, that would be distinctive, and that would capture people's imagination.

31:06And it did. It became quite famous. I am completely confused about why people believe in religion and why they think... You know, I'm often told when people say, oh, I'm a religious person and faith is very important to me. You know, I go, you're fine. But I kind of go, well, why do you believe in a book, you know, when they talk about the Bible, that's so full of the most appalling things in the world? Why should I hold that up as a means of a way of living my life? I don't understand it. And they say, well, what do you believe in? And I say, I believe in the creative being, the ability to create and make beautiful things.

31:56And that's why I admire William Shakespeare. He didn't write once about religion. He wrote about the human condition, why you read Milton or why, you know, Wordsworth or the great poets or those are the people that I think we should follow, not some inane book that tells me, you know, my God's better than your God. And I think that's, but most of my friends are not religious. So I'm answering your... No, it's interesting. I think just... I've got a... I think one of the best things you've ever... I think I listened to a talk you did in Paris where you talked about, like, the best brand is the Catholic brand.

32:38Oh, yeah, brilliant brand. You could just quickly go through that and then we'll wrap this up because it's just... Phenomenal. It's just like, I think it's your masterpiece. It's wonderful. I do love irreverence. It's one of my things. Yeah. And I was in New York where I was on a panel and I lived there for two and a half years, setting BBH up. And I was in, I think it was somewhere in, might have been Denver or Colorado. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I was on this advertising panel and a question from the audience came up. So what's the world's greatest brand? And I kind of, I was lucky. I was the last one to go.

33:11There were about four people in front of me and they came up with Coca-Cola and talked about the brilliance of it. Somebody talked about BMW. Somebody talked about Nike back then and it was Apple was being talked about. And they said, so, John, what about you? And I said, no, I think they're all great brands. For me, they're not the greatest brand. The greatest brand in the world is the Catholic Church. And, of course, you're in America. There's a sort of slight, ooh, steady, John, steady, you know. And anyway, I didn't care. I was in. I said, so, think about it. World's greatest logo, brilliant sign of the cross, Absolutely fantastic.

33:49It could have been, you know, it could have been a carpenter's plane. Jesus was a carpenter. Could have been a fish because the fishermen, the apostles and all that. But no, they went for the cross. And then the genius is they nailed the founder to the cross. What a brilliant idea. Then they put him on the top of every building, logo up there. Fundamentally, they went straight away to, they went global straight away. None of this kind of when do we go global. Seven-day opening. What do you mean you close? You're doing to that? diversified christenings, weddings, funerals, kind of moved it on, get you in.

34:22And, of course, location, location, location. Biggest building in the centre of the town, the village, wherever it was, that was it, you know, understood that. And worked with the greatest artists, worked with the greatest painters, to propagate the church, to propagate the church. Had to go there once a week, you know, just to reaffirm your faith, just like people go to an Apple store today. You know, I worship at the temple called Apple. Catholic Church was there before. Through the line thinking, church was built on the sign of the cross, east-west, you know, the sunrises, you know, that. And just absolute genius, the greatest brand ever.

35:04And saw a bit of competition, you know, the Puritans came along and Seventh-day Adventist and whoever they might be, they're okay. Every brand has a bit of competition. You know, Nike had a few. Nothing like the Catholic Church. 2 ,000 years old, still going strong. And what were they selling? Faith. A very modern brand. Because so often we're buying things today that you can't see. I can't see my bank anymore. I have to believe it's there. I use, you know, I'm on Vodafone. It's vibrating air. I can't see Vodafone. I can't see Google. I can't see Facebook. I don't know building. It's none of that.

35:47Very modern brand. They were selling faith, belief. Brilliant, brilliant. Greatest brand ever. And all the lessons are there. Hi, I'm Kieran, co-founder of Northstar. Accelerator Lab is where data, insights, and deep commercial experience collide to create real action. There's two real areas that are making a real difference. The first is helping you really craft that retail selling story. How do we bring that category element up front? If the buyer doesn't care about your brand but does care about the category, how do we help you nail down that category first approach? The second then is with range reviews.

36:21So for your product to go in, something has to come out. You can either leave that to chance and let the buyer work it out, or you can walk into that meeting having really done your homework. We believe real change in retail comes from the challengers, and we're all in to help them win. Making world-class insight and commercial firepower affordable, accessible, and downright effective.

36:42there's a japanese concept called kano theory by a guy who's at the university of tokyo who argued he did a lot of work in the japanese consumer electronics field back in the day and he argued that products and you could apply this to services as well had three attributes and they're they're very different okay there's table stakes you have to not fail at anything markedly okay so that would be if you bought milk repeatedly and every time you bought this brand of milk the carton leaked right you wouldn't buy it again doesn't matter anything else you've done it's a waste of time because the carton leaks okay yeah and that's what's called i think sort of you could call it table stakes or basic attributes they're what what's required to be in the category in the first place then there are performance attributes which are how good are you at doing the thing that the thing is intended to do how good the milk is within the thing whether people can tell that it's good milk you know whether it you know it has reasonable shelf life all those things and generally yeah there's a linear return on improvement there and then there's this third component of things which would be delight attributes where they're things you weren't even expecting and as a consequence of not expecting them, you really notice them.

37:59And they create a kind of emotional effect, which is out of all proportion to their cost. But they're often quite tangential to the main function of the product. So the example I always give is, if you're in consumer electronics, you have a cassette player. And obviously, it has to play cassettes, and it has to work, and it mustn't mangle the tapes, and it mustn't catch fire, and it mustn't do any of those terrible things, which would basically be you exit the gene pool at that point okay and then you have the performance attributes of the cassette deck are things like battery life and sound quality and you know wattage through the speakers before they start distorting those are the basic performance attributes and then the delight attribute in a cassette deck was the eject mechanism so if you you you won't remember cassettes but you remember dvds do you no i know i know exactly what you're talking about which is you press eject and it goes it has like a counterbalance damping mechanism and it hisses in a beautiful hydraulic way.

38:54You go, ooh, that's lovely. I'd really like that. Nice action, as Alan Partridge once said. On the other hand, if you press eject, it just goes clack. Functionally, there's no difference between the two, okay? There's no reason to spend money on the eject mechanism, but precisely because you can make it lovely and people aren't expecting it, that's where you should spend your money. Now, Will Godara's point was, I think, about the spoons he chose for the ice cream in the central courtyard of a museum. He found these Italian spoons. Everybody went crazy because they were plastic, but they were particularly lovely, and they cost a fortune.

39:26Everyone's saying, do we need to spend X cents per spoon? But as he pointed out, he said, when everybody finished, they couldn't help going on about the spoons. That was the thing they noticed because it was an area of disproportionate – that's why it's called hospitality beyond reason. Yes. There's a certain amount to it, which is service, which you can codify and reduce to an algorithm. them and then there's the thing that you weren't expecting and but why why i love and in mcdonald's by the way that probably isn't anything to do with food it's like handing the kids balloons right or it's the toy and a happy meal or whatever it may be yeah i i actually think for my own personal i i when i'm drunk and i go to the service um i always go to the one the ones worth roundabout for that expectation that's bizarre that ones worth roundabout it's like a little bit of Los Angeles has just descended on London.

40:17I don't understand. Completely bizarre thing. Why, you know, the arch is like totemic. They're like up like that. It is kind of like that cathedral of consumption. It is, yeah, yeah. I mean, when I'm fucked, I'm like looking at it going, oh my God, it's like, I feel like I'm getting pulled into the mothership of gluttony. Because you live in Surrey, do you? Yeah, yeah. So you drive out of London that way. I used to live in Fulham. You used to live in Fulham? Yeah, and all my mates live in sort of Battersea. So I'm always round that part of London. So it's like the perfect place to go. But what I love, the surprise and delight, and I don't know if this is intentional or not, when the chips are in the bag and it feels like there's an overflow of chips.

40:54I don't know. Five Guys is the extreme example. The extra scoop. Yeah, it's the extra scoop. But that does something to you. And also, like, I think the surprise and delight is the wonderful selection of sauces you can get. I think McDonald's sauces are the best. The barbecue, the ketchup, the curry sauce is fantastic. The KFC now does it with the extra hot one, doesn't it? So you've got a choice of those when you have chicken dips. Yes. They've got an extreme one. They've got barbecue, and you typically get some sort of sweet chili thing, don't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But those things are exactly that.

41:29It's that, you know, and actually you can have a meal that's ruined because they forget to put the sauces in the bag. Oh, well, I've had that numerous times. It's rather like the most failed attempt to create a low-budget own-brand version of a product was, I think, Sainsbury's in the 1980s produced their own version of the pot noodle, which was called something like noodle pot or whatever it was. And it was the same packaging, but there was no sachet. And you just opened the lid of this thing, and it was just like you'd been cheated. You felt completely bereft. Yeah, yeah. Because the whole point of the pot noodle is that weird flavor sachet that you put on the top.

42:13Because that creates the yin and the yang of the whole thing. It's the alchemy. I never thought I'd be talking about the Buddhist union of opposites in a pot noodle. But that's the alchemy of the thing. If the pot noodle had never had that sachet, it wouldn't have gone anywhere. The sachet of the pot noodle is their kind of version of hospitality. The other reason I love food is like there's basically every single touch point. there's a unique story to tell. Yeah. But I think the thing I've seen you, I've listened is how Guinness turned their bug into a feature. The fact that it takes ages to serve and is actually a bit of a, you know.

42:53The bar staff don't like saying Guinness. Yeah, but the fact that it takes longer psychologically, that is, the way you say it turns out. Turned into a reward, turned into anticipation. To reframe, reframe it. Have you been to Devonshire yet? Have you ever heard of Devonshire? Oh, don't. Everybody yesterday was talking about the Devonshire, which supposedly does the best Guinness in London. And, of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you sell a lot of Guinness, it's really, really fresh. All this stuff about taste, you've never had it until you've had it in Dublin is kind of contextual bollocks.

43:20But that's my argument, which is why I said you can open a fish restaurant by the sea, is because fish tastes better when you're by the sea. Rosé wine tastes better when you're by the sea. Don't ask me why. But there are a lot of foods which require context to be fully enjoyable. Oh, it's like, yeah, food you have on holiday and you bring it back. It's just fucking amazing. No, no, this is a famous example of someone who was in the Caribbean and bought the rights to a banana liqueur, which while they were in the Caribbean tasted... And Pernod outside France tastes like shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, Ricard Pernod.

43:50You drink them outside a French cafe, it's fantastic. You go buy a litre bottle to take it home, you won't drink it for five years. And the same thing happened with this person who bought the rights to this banana liqueur. They took it back and invited their friends around to South London with great fanfare saying you won't believe it i bought the rights to this drink i think it's the most magical thing and they all basically said this is disgusting yeah because it doesn't work in london yes you see and that and when i say that when you're by the sea it would make sense if this were an evolutionary adaptation though it might not be okay so i asked the question this is the question i always had as a mock question for business school students why are there more fish restaurants by the sea and what you might call the black and white answer is you know low cost of distribution access to raw materials etc but quite a lot of that stuff's probably come or gone all the way to Billingsgate and come all the way back again right yeah it's not really anything like well you know we've got really wonderful supplies of fish necessarily it's simply that when you're by the sea you feel fish and chips by the sea just tastes a lot better than fish and chips in an inland park yeah that's just how it is it's like it's like imagine having a guinness in a costa coffee cup yeah it's the same like it's same thing yeah same thing i mean it's interesting they put a lot of attention into designing that pint glass isn't it the guinness pint glass well and also the have you seen that which i don't know if it's a load of absolute bollocks oh no no the ultrasonic paw with the guinness yeah what's your take on that have i seen it i've owned one i brought my daughter who's 22 my proudest achievement as a parent nothing to do with their educational attainment is the fact that both my daughters drink beer and they're really into beer because i'm not spending the rest of my life buying the little fuckers rosé right okay and um so i'm really proud of that and one of my daughters actually is a major guinness drinker absolutely loves it yes and i'm so proud of that but i actually bought her a nitro surge for christmas but as and but do you um so that take i haven't actually it it it's in first of it makes pouring a joy and it someone's reviewed it and said it's as good as a bad pub pint now actually that's not bad actually at home i think that's a bit unkind i think it's better than that because it does recreate the whole tactile experience to within a fairly high degree of fidelity i think nitro surge i'm a big fan why do you think so guinness have now become the most selling pint i think it was last year the other the other big what happened that what was why Why did Guinness?

46:19It's been around for years. Maybe. They've always wrestled with an interesting problem, which is it's actually the least calorific beer. And yet, because of its dense nature, everybody assumes it's the most calorific beer. Yes. So it may be in part that that message has got through. But you've also got the zero-alcohol Guinness, which is really, really interesting. That's delicious. Now, here's a good tip. the can of guinness zero alcohol okay is slightly less than a pint if you go to the royal sink ports golf club or sink ports no one knows how to pronounce it uh in deal and you ask for a pint of non-alcoholic guinness because golf golf if you think about it golf courses most people drive to a golf club so there's a limit to how much you can drink if you don't want to wrap your car around a tree and so they sell quite a lot of the zero alcohol guinness and then what they do is they pour the whole pint of zero alcohol Guinness and they say do you want me to top that up from the tap so you get the full head and that I actually told Guinness about this because I said that's a really important behavior because first of all zero alcohol Guinness is a very very good approximation of the taste of a Guinness what it is about zero alcohol beer that it's finally got good in the last few years absolutely fascinating there are processes like what's two plus two he always gave this example you don't have to think about it you just go four whereas um 13 times 12 which i think is 156 i'm fine but okay um you actually have to give that a little bit of thought yeah okay so an example of something that's very system one uh would be nearly everything you do while you're driving not yeah the vast majority of what you do while you're driving a car is basically instinctively driven.

48:10You're not consciously thinking there is a right to turn ahead, therefore I will need to turn the steering wheel shortly. You've fundamentally trained your brain to make driving, for the most part, autonomic. Now, you might argue driving in a city like London, why people hate all those 20-mile-an-hour limits, okay, is that a process that was once basically autonomic, and you could basically go, I'm in a city now, I better not go too fast, and 30 miles an hour seemed about right okay suddenly now you're having to pay attention consciously to a load of things which once you could actually take as take for granted okay so and the most extreme sort of system one form of driving is that weird feeling where you suddenly realize you have no memory of driving for the last 10 minutes you've been lost in a kind of dream world and meanwhile your body and eyes have been driving the car and you assume you haven't actually hit anyone or anything okay because that would have actually snapped you back into attention i hope okay but there are we've all had those moments okay if you're if you're if you're a frequent driver if you're an infrequent driver when you first get into a car when you're first learning to drive when you're first learning to ride a bicycle it's system two and through repetition and a kind of automation it gets effectively you know transferred to metaphorically system one and an awful lot of the activities of system one occur effectively they're opaque to inspection they occur below the level of consciousness the point being that a large part of our activity and people always quote weird figures like 95 percent of our decisions are unconscious i'm not sure you realistically put a percentage on that but i don't think it's unreasonable to assert that a very large proportion of decisions we make are either unconscious or under the influence of unconscious processes.

50:00The argument that Kahneman made is that, of course, the system one is faster than system two, and we're not even aware of it in operation. And as a consequence of which, although it's unbelievably valuable and probably essential to our evolutionary survival, Kahneman would argue that sometimes system one gets a jump on system too and causes us to make a suboptimal decision before we've had time to think about it okay so now by the way there are lots and lots of cases where making a decision before you've had time to think about it probably saved your life okay you know jumping out of the way of a bus because you're standing on the road you hear a noise and without actually pausing to think about the consequences of your action you simply jump to safety those kind of behaviors are actually very very necessary in evolutionary terms to our survival.

50:57Kahneman might have argued that in a modern environment where more and more decisions maybe require system two thinking, in other words, we actually need to discipline our thought and decision making processes, that the what you might call the path dependency of decision making, where system one gets to make a decision first may lead to things which are biases or even very bad decisions okay simply because effectively our instinctive heuristically driven okay assumptions override what might be the consequence of a more thoughtful interpretation or evaluation of all the evidence so one very system one thing by the way I think is the idea that you get what you pay for okay so the idea when you're in a shop and you're going to Chipotle and if one thing's more expensive than the other you'll probably assume it's better now there's no actual evidence for that okay I always give this example which is that if you went to a shop to buy a bluetooth speaker and one bluetooth speaker was bigger than the other more powerful than the other and it had more features but it was also cheaper now to a standard economist that's the easiest decision in the world higher utility lower price slam dunk nothing to see here no brainer buy the cheaper better speaker inverted commas move on but humans that would conflict with a human instinct which is something that's more expensive is probably better in some way and actually we'd find that decision deeply confusing in reality we go that's strange because if i'd actually made a better speaker this is of social intelligence I'd probably charge more for it so the fact that this speaker is better and cheaper is now confusing me and I'm probably not going to buy either of them so there are a lot of cases where um our brain whether we like it or not is operating under certain mental assumptions which are kind of almost in hardware, if you like.

53:13Yeah, so what's happening when I go into Chipotle then? Because in terms of that decision with the Bluetooth speaker, right? Yeah. If I go into Chipotle and I order, say, the chicken with extra chorizo and cheese and guacamole up front and they say it's 14 quid, suddenly I'm a bit like, oh, I don't want to do that, right? But then if they get me in with the chicken, right, and then they start fucking loading it up, loading it up and then as they move the bastards along and they say right I want you extra treats so one quid why am I saying yes to that why am I saying yes? It's a sort of sunk cost thing which is quite often for these inverted commas biases there's actually a phrase that sums it up which is kind of in for a penny, in for a pound and the point would be why you spoil the ship for a hapeneath of tar I'm in here anyway now I might as well go the whole hog and get the absolute sandwich I want yes so in other words I mean if you think about it the whole concept of sides okay okay is very similar to that which is um okay you could argue that sides just give people more choice yes that's true but there is the argument that I've got this main thing now having having committed and mentally written off the cost of x i might as well spend a bit extra to make x even better so the classic example would be buying a car okay you can't after market market fit something like a glass roof a glass sunroof or a heated steering wheel or whatever so when you're buying a car you think well i'm spending a five-figure sum already i might as well spend another three or four thousand pounds on extras to make this as good as it possibly can be and because after all i'll never have another chance again for four years and car makers will make inordinately more margin on optional extras than they they will on the base model car yeah so what you're uh and other other examples once you're in that in that sunk once you're sort of that sunk cost thing or in for a pound do you think that's basically your your sort of the system one's activated there where you're just sort of thinking, fuck it, like, I may as well get the roof, I may as well get the extra treat, so.

55:30So, I mean, a classic example would be if you turn up at a hotel... Yeah. ..and they say, you can actually, for£50 a night, you can upgrade to a suite. Obviously, it depends how long you're staying there, to a degree. But you are more likely to go, yeah, fuck it, OK, than you are to buy the suite when at the same time as you're paying for the basic room and the argument for that is that you've already mentally written off the cost of the room because you've paid that in advance okay so i'm in for 200 quid for my three night stay or whatever it might be or two nights day i'm in for that amount of money and now i can make this experience amazing for just a bit more and undoubtedly that is a recurring pattern with marketing pretty much everywhere okay i mean once someone's it's sometimes called in salesmanship the foot in the door thing.

56:26If you can get someone to agree to buy something then either immediately or subsequently getting them to upgrade to a better version of that thing is often easier than selling the better version of that thing from the off. So okay, a brand that mastered that fantastically and which has given them a large shareholding by Warren Buffett and an extraordinary level of success is American Express where there were a lot of people who probably wouldn't get an American Express gold card off the bat but if you sold them the green card and then three years later said for only another x pounds a year okay their attention is focused on the increments not on the overall cost okay so your attention when it's do I want to add the chicken do I want to add the so and so is focused on the incremental cost not the headline amount if I served you an absolutely magnificent meal but one of the prongs of your fork was out of alignment exactly you couldn't enjoy the meal yeah that's what I call a silent irritant yeah because it's not something that you're going to call the waiter over and go excuse me you're going to put up with it, but it still devalues your enjoyment.

57:43And what we try to do is to annihilate those silent irritants. So if you look in the restaurant, for example, all of the tables have three points on the floor. So three legs. They will never wobble. So they can't wobble. So that irritant of the... Oh, my God, that's so good. When you go into a restaurant... Well, that was four, actually. Yeah, well, this is OK. It doesn't wobble because it's on a carpet. So that's the trick. OK, OK, OK, fair enough. Rory, what would you say the silent irritants are in a completely different category? They're very often, I mean, oh, that's really interesting. One of the criticisms I'd make of marketing is it spends a lot of time trying to amplify the positives rather than remove the negatives.

58:23Yeah. And the negatives are interesting because they're often experienced and felt but not really spoken. You don't really capture them in market research. No one would say I was going to have a meal, but the table was wobbly, so I didn't. Or the lies was too bright. You've got an example. Or I smelled something that I didn't know what it was. By the way, in this category, one thing as a 59-year-old is menus you can't fucking read. There's a perfect example. When you see people with their mobile phones shining a torch onto the menu. Even worse, menus you can't understand. You know, chefs are always putting words on there.

58:59I eat out every day and I still find words that I don't know that I've got to look, oh, fucking hell, it's lettuce. Why didn't you say? It's the status thing, I reckon, the status thing of the chef to sort of say, like, I'm not better than you, but we're using ingredients. Why do people do that? I'll give you a silent error today. Calls may be recorded for quality control purposes. Yeah. So particularly if you get cut off and you have to listen to the whole spiel all over again, what I'd like the government to do is literally to say, to email everybody and just say, you now understand that all calls may be recorded for quality control purposes.

59:34Probably not, they are. Check this box and accept it. And literally, you will get two hours of your life back. Unidentified object in the bagging area, by the way. Oh, God. Which also, because it's spoken out loud, this is a classic case, it's not just annoying, it's mildly humiliating. Because it's broadcasting to other people in the checkout, this fucker doesn't know what he's doing. Some things are really interesting in terms of silent irritants, which is something... Can I give you a great one? Go on, yeah, please. You see everywhere. is we take no responsibility for your stuff getting stolen.

1:00:12Thank you. That's so cute. Basically, fuck you, we're not going to look after your back. And also, if it does get nicked, don't come to us about it. Yeah, because, by the way, it happens here all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's obviously not here. But that's what the sign actually says, if you think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, do not enjoy your evening. Spend it in a state of mild anxiety, I think. I mean, clutching your bottle. There's a point of one which is... And, by the way, I by and large venerate Marcus and Spencer's. I think they're extremely good. But Marcus and Spencer's in Sevenoaks, in the elevator, in the lift from the car park, says, if you've got a problem, i.e.

1:00:49being fined in what is effectively their car park, don't come to us. I can't remember the exact word, but it says, you must contact the car park operator directly or whatever. And I kind of go, look, actually, this is your problem. Okay. I won't go into the details about why people get fined unfairly, but it's all to do with number plate recognition and bullshit like that. But no, I mean, really weird silent irritants, which literally nobody knows about, is that a large part of the irritation and stress of being in a queue is the people behind you. Yeah. And it's the feeling that there are people behind you sort of watching you and judging you.

1:01:29So one of the things McDonald's discovered is they discovered that the longer the queue was, the more people sort of fucked up their order. And you go, well, if you've been waiting for six minutes in a queue, you should be word perfect by the time you get to the front of the queue. What it turns out, and I only discovered this by accident before I researched it, and the reason was I used to board the Eurostar at Emsfleet. And I noticed that if you went through security and you were the last person going through, it was a completely unstressful experience. whereas the feeling that other people were going Dickens forgotten to take his belt off or whatever it is that was what made it stressful in part no one would consciously ever say that what I hate about a queue is the people behind me no because it's well it's in your mind it's in your mind you don't want to elucidate and therefore it becomes silent and we have to look out for these things all the time I love your example we do not take responsibility you know what you were saying earlier Roar about how a lot of people amplify the positives in marketing but don't think about negatives.

1:02:33Do you say that basically Amazon, Amazon Prime is basically just removing the negatives? Yeah. Amazon has been pretty astute at removing negatives. This is like the Amazon Primeification of pulling Guinness. Like it just fucking goes out like that. It's like the speed of service here is mad. Well, I've always felt that people... What's the art of that? Well, there's two sides to it. One, it's really annoying when you're waiting at a bar and somebody is slowly pouring one pint at a time when you know that they can pour four or that the beer can be sped up. But secondly, it's a commercial bit. You know, if you can't be good when you're busy, then you're less likely to ever be busy.

1:03:15Because when you're busy, it's the time that people are at the maximum point of enjoying what you're doing. so to be really good when you're busy is the absolute key this thing where you go into like a stadium bar at halftime and you've got to wait 10 minutes to get a blind which means you've already got three at the end before the game kicks off again why yes why can't you they just have the beer ready why can't you be paid for why can't you get there's ways of doing it and we've worked out a way of doing it here that nobody ever waits and that is what is that system do you produce spear in advance of it being no we don't we never do that's very important that we don't well they say that again sorry the batch processing yeah so you could pour a guinness now in anticipation that someone's going to request that's one thing we don't okay what we have done is put extra taps in they're faster taps and when somebody orders it gets it gets um filled immediately the money's taken by somebody else and the next person is done so so we can do multiple orders at the same time rather than doing one at a time here's a silent irritant by the way um coffee shops which is i know why they do it they don't actually charge you until the end okay but as a result while they're making their coffee i'm standing around with my phone in my hand like a dickhead and actually what i want to do is pay scan the loyalty card put my phone away wait for the coffee yeah but instead because they have and i'm sure there's a reason for the policy because they have this policy of people don't like being charged until they've got their coffee but I actually I think that's actually changed I think with cash it might have worked that way I think when you're paying by phone something different happens I don't know whether it's an Irish thing I'm intrigued by the fact that someone else takes the money it just works easier because you've got one person doing that one job, taking the money making sure this is Henry Ford it's a marginal gain fantastic Fantastic.

1:05:17Thank you so, so much for listening to the podcast. I really, really do appreciate it. If you liked that episode, only if you liked it, please do give it five stars, subscribe, tell all your friends, families, foes, next door, but one, cat, dog, whatever. Please tell everyone about this podcast. It means the world to me. And I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands. Please do hit me up on LinkedIn, search Dan Pope, and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands.

1:05:50Thank you so much.