Espresso: Rory Sutherland, 5 Ways To Destroy Your Brand Overnight (please avoid these)

0:06Do you know Charlie Munger who's Warren Buffett? recently unfortunately one of the greats one of his rules that i absolutely love is this inversion rule so basically always invert always invert yeah and i was writing about this in my newsletter so he he does the famous commencement speech at the university of southern california and he basically says um he's asked to do a talk to a kind of bug-eyed wide-eyed american students and he goes this is how to live a life of misery and he i think the five things he's like in inhale alcohol and chemicals be resentful and envious be unreliable uh and don't stand on the shoulders and and do not stand on the shoulders of others i.e learn from those mistakes do those five things you'll live a life of misery so the whole point is his famous quote is wisdom wisdom is prevention so if you avoid those things you will live a good life and i've been thinking about that so like i've added some for myself as i rush everywhere so when i rush i'm just like i'm not enjoying my life basically so so one of my things if i if i rush everywhere but i would love to apply this to brand building in food so like what would you say uh like the if we're using the rule of inversion what are the ways a brand could absolutely fuck itself so say say say we were to kind of cannibal um to take how how could coca-cola essentially dismantle themselves with the inversion rules like what were the things they'd have to do this is similar to a game that was this was in this is similar to a game that was invented by a guy called jeremy bullmore i think who was a great creative guy at the agency jay walter thompson and he called this brandicide which is i love that in order to discover what a brand is one useful mode of inquiry is what you might call to decide what the brand isn't and all i can remember is you've got to remember this was 1980s and you had after eight minutes as a sort of premium after dinner mint sold by round trees in the little individual envelopes you know that yeah i know i love them yeah and the question was um what would you do if you wanted to kill the um after eight brand and the first suggestion was uh you introduce a um after eight chewing gum okay you move the brand in and then someone decided they thought that actually an upmarket mint flavored chewing gum might actually do quite well and then someone else suggested after eight bubble gum okay and that's the kind of that that's the kind of piece of brand aside you know it's so totally inappropriate to what the brand is about um and what's interesting about mcdonald's actually is that it's it is innovated significantly but it's always gone to the adjacent possible so what the mistake that mcdonald's hasn't made is it's introduced screen ordering and it's introduced table service but it hasn't removed face-to-face ordering and it hasn't removed order at the counter now what a lot of supermarkets have done is they've gone god it's cheaper to actually have self-service checkout self-checkout than it is to have people so we're going to have really few tills and we're going to have loads and loads of self-service checkout okay now i think okay this is an example of where i think companies get it really badly wrong which is their whole areas of company decision making which are made by procurement or by the finance function with no input from marketing okay uh which are made entirely on the basis of financial expediency with no consideration given for the customer experience so an example of this is when you park at my local m &s now m &s has got a lot of things right recently and they're undoubtedly on a bit of a role the new chief executive who comes from a very strong lifetime retailer um uh you know what do you think they've got right like because what yeah what just quality of food general general the clothing they finally uh started to crack clothing i think they still make a few mistakes i think the uh the the way in which they decorate and lay out the clothing stores is fundamentally inimical to selling premium goods okay yeah there's certain rules in premium fashion which is you know if you're paying um over the odds for something you want carpets and you don't want industrial lighting above your head and when you pay your 80 quid you want a rope handle bag and i think i think margaret spencer's could learn from that there are certain just heuristic rules you know that i mean you always notice this the first rule of being an upmarket turkish restaurant is you don't sell donor kebabs but it slightly annoys me because i really like the donor kebab yeah i think it's a great great thing yeah but it's now what happens at m &s in seven oaks is that someone no one no one with a marketing or customer focused mindset has any say in this decision and someone says who are we going to get to run the car park because we can't make the car park free because if we do people just part there all day and go shopping in seven oaks or work in seven oaks and the car park will be full so they obviously go to the person who is uh who offers the highest bid to manage the car park okay if you let us collect the money we'll um uh we'll pay you a certain amount of money to manage this car park the person who offers the highest bid is almost certainly likely to be the person most ready to issue fines to people for overstaying or in this case what happens is uh bear in mind i'm not criticizing m &s here i'm simply showing it as an exemplar of what even really good brands do where they get it wrong by handing decisions out to people who are purely motivated by the financial side of the question and have no responsibility for the consumer experience and that would be the people who who put in lots and lots of self-checkout tills okay which has now led to an epidemic of shoplifting okay but those people can lay claim to the financial saving but they're not around to be responsible for the adverse consequences apart from anything else in waitrose and seven oaks quite a lot of people it's fairly minted area do a whole weekly shop there it's quite difficult to do a whole weekly shop in a self-checkout till have you seen you need a trolley you need a bloody and i do the self-scanning but there are a lot of people who are over 60 they don't want to get an app and you know and and scanning your own groceries with a bloody mobile phone is a pain in the arse anyway because you need three hands okay now in the m &s car park you come in there's a you pay you use the app to pay for an hour and the app says you have an hour left you drive out after precisely an hour and then you get issued a fine through the post because number plate recognition why because the number plate recognition system judges your duration of parking from entry to exit not from the moment you pay now obviously if you're a bit slow getting out of the car you pay two or three minutes later than you actually enter the car park right yeah now in every single car park whether it's pay and display whether it's an app or whatever which is normally policed by a human being if you pay for an hour you've got an hour from the moment you pay right they don't count the four minutes you were dicking around finding the ticket machine or whatever it is yeah but in this system because it's done by anpr they'll issue a fine if you if you arrive pay three minutes later and then leave 60 minutes later now locally on my local next door that's driving people apoplectic that you know for a long time i think this is now they finally got rid of it no may still be the case in that same store you needed a pound to have a trolley now nobody carries fucking coins anymore right the luck i do not have a pound on my person at this moment uh i might have one in the car if i remember those are the kind of utterly ridiculous things that even great brands do you know utterly ridiculous because what you've got to remember is that even if 95 of your customers 95 of the time are really happy if you enrage someone three times in a row you lose a customer almost for life and so that's another back they're not looking at they're not looking at the you know the the the long-term consequences of doing what they've done they're simply looking at the short-term cost savings and that's the real way to kill any brand which is to focus so narrowly on short-term financial expediency that you forget the fact that you're in a relationship so that that will be a case where for example um uh you know a a restaurant business nobody expects you know uh you know a personal welcome in a motorway service station there are places like mcdonald's which are relatively impersonal okay but failing to recognize people and just failing to recognize the nature of a relationship so that each transaction basically starts from scratch that's one really big failing i think you can i mean the other one is is you know simply by um uh anything you do that diminishes the i'll go back to the scarf model okay there's this great model neuroscientist david rock and the model of human things that humans care about that aren't really quantified and aren't well understood by economists it's SCARF, which stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness.

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Don't miss availability. look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kins tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you and okay and people care about those things with to the depth of their being if you do something in a restaurant which is an affront to someone's status effectively that will that will arouse far more ire and likelihood of a boycott uh than uh having slightly bad food what are the other ones status certainty so what do you mean by that that's kind of like predictability a good example of certainty would be um signs on the tube platform which say next tube seven minutes okay uh in restaurants we'd rather we'd rather i mean okay if if we're in an airport and it says flight delayed 47 minutes we're going here flight's delayed 47 minutes i'll go and find a gonna have a drink or i'll go to the lounge or whatever okay if it just says delayed we're in a state of uncertainty yes and we find that inordinately more painful yes then we we've you know so quite often you can manage a downside in advance i mean there's a huge difference if you think about it between being handed a menu and being told that the hake's off okay off the menu and then or versus ordering hake and then 10 minutes later they come back and say the hake's off the menu oh my god i listen to i listen to a podcast with a mission star chef and one of they go through their food icks and that's that's one of the icks in terms of managing expectations it's totally fine if you hand someone a menu and say i'm terribly sorry yeah but why but for some reason apparently in loads of restaurants they uh they say that they the staff know from day dot that there's no fucking hank right but they still go around the tables and say order the person orders the expectation becomes here yeah and then suddenly you'll go go to the kitchen come back i mean the brilliant book you must have read the book by will gadara called unreasonable so i tried to get him on the podcast actually and in terms of hospitality because i asked that that brilliant observation that the things you deliver that the person wasn't expecting yeah that you have in a sense the mind of a game theorist with the customer not the mind of a you know of a kind of uh of a rule follower what do you mean by what do you mean by the mind of game theorists i loved the way in which he went to you know one of the best restaurants in the world and said okay all of this was as you'd expect absolutely amazing but where could we do better than them we can't do better than them when the food because their food is already top notch but he said when i ordered coffee at the end of the meal it was just bog standard coffee and he went and appointed one of his staff as kind of like the coffee sommelier basically yeah you know and and you know got in some massive you know pavoni cappuccino machine he also appointed i think one of the waiters as their beer guy because he said that all these restaurants wank on about wine endlessly yeah but 20 percent of people prefer beer yeah we were talking about this last time so he there were these sort of craft breweries who are literally so delighted they were more like sending them a free beer i think because they were so delighted that a leading new york restaurant had finally decided to take beer seriously but also i like about that book he says he talks about the story much rather have a conversation with a beer sommelier than the wine sommelier because wine conversations are kind of wanky aren't they whereas beer conversations that's like the the status game in like all its tomfoolery isn't it you've never had um joe fatterini he's coming on he's coming on brilliant okay so i will give a i will give a pre-plug here for someone i consider one of the greatest exponents of uh particularly of drink and behavioral science in that he's utterly brilliant in his knowledge of both and so he's fascinating on either topic but when the two topics overlap it's absolutely pure magic yeah well he's because i think he lives in stockholm now so he was yeah you're right yeah he did something like that i need in fact i'm gonna message him after this so he's coming on but the other thing i like about um what will does is he talks about the story of the remembering something um about how uh like a significant fact and he realizes the story of the couple who've been in new york and they're in these this union square absolutely right and then he brings out someone goes around the back and brings around one of those shitty hot dogs from the hot dog stand goes to them and says oh here's a hot dog they put it on like a nice plate it doesn't make sense it's like a juxtaposition of a shitty hot dog for a burger stand with sweaty onions on a meatless and style plate but at that moment of magic you can't create again in terms back to the self-checkout thing and the and sort of the perversity of it do you know booths retailer up north yeah in totally a bit like the coffee thing it's like okay where what are our competitors where what's the achilles heel in our competitors or like where are they what's their strength that could be their weakness so booths i think like back in the last year got rid of got rid of all self checkouts and i interesting they're only 30 they're about 20 stores all up north they make their own um food because i've got a vague memory that they sell to amazon fresh is that right that i think you get booths kind of what yeah you know they've got their own they've got their own brand of certain why why what sorry one more fun let we'll go back to the we just go back to the scarf thing so yeah so we've done we've done status consistency autonomy now an example of that would be people prefer a table they've chosen to a table that's imposed on them even if it's the same table okay so one nice thing a restaurant can do is say where would you rather sit or you can have any of these three tables people are just happier with that not because necessarily they get to choose the table well sorry not because they wouldn't have chosen the table you wouldn't would have allocated them anyway but simply because the act of making the choice make you like something you've chosen more than something you that's imposed on you yeah okay even if it's the same thing okay it's why we used to work with a ford and ford always had lower customer satisfaction figures than a few competitors and we had to explain that and they got annoyed because they couldn't get this satisfaction figure above a certain amount even though they'd made the cars better and better and better and we had to explain it's because so many of your customers are fleet customers they haven't chosen a ford they've been told they're driving a ford and it's not the same even if you would have chosen a ford you won't like a car as much if your employer tells you that's the car you've got to drive versus if you've chosen that car um uh that's autonomy people people don't like being railroaded or tram railed um relatedness you could actually a better phrase might be reciprocality or relationship which is people don't like a series of standalone transactions they like an acknowledgement of their past custom um you know and so treating regular customers differentially better than you treat in treat treat treat people who are just in off the street and you know at scale that's a loyalty program perhaps but in an in an independent restaurant simple recognition simple as that and then fairness is fairness uh you know well okay what really pisses people off is that those people got their food first but they ordered after we did those kind of things really really upset people yes now it might be that the thing you've ordered is a completely different thing but again you can overcome that by pre-warning people in advance perhaps thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the full episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave friends as well means the world to me