Espresso: Rory Sutherland, Decoding The Marketing Genius of KFC and McDonalds

0:06So the question I wanted to ask you is in food specifically I think I think you can do it a lot with food the biggest example is it's almost like why what is happening in the human brain like why do humans love kind of alliteration and onomatopoeia with when buying things like what's actually happening so the i think it's the fucking best and it generally it does something palpable to my it kind of gets me drooling like a famished rottweiler when i drive past the mcdonald's uh it's the McMuffin sign and it says 745 a and it's loads of m's and it's like that to me is like that is that uh the of the morning like waking up the um of the like you have to make by the way in marketing terms McDonald's have played a blinder really yeah they're the best they're the best but what yeah but unlike I don't know if you know what that but what is happening like why why is it when when humans and it happens a lot in food and just in marketing um the other example kfc i i um i had one of the second guys i've had on the podcast is um he's like a language um he built this ai tool that's obsessed with language and he had three different versions of language he had um uh since no what did he have he had factual language which which is words that a bit on the wanky side right is what companies love but humans hate so it'd be like corporate social responsibility or yeah really hard words to digest sensory language is is words like in terms of food it would be like let's use kfc as an example it would be like warm finger licking good well yeah so that's that though it'd be warm like warm um warm delicious chicken would be picture um sensory language picture language which is like the most persuasive form of language he says is something that creates a picture so finger licking good like it's almost the hard consonant sounds it's almost like the cantankerous crispy chicken finger licking good like that really i don't know but i'm trying to work out from you it's authentically kind of southern it's got yeah in terms of three words that do the job it's genius have you seen when kfc run out of chicken yeah and they change the name to fck fuck yeah it's so good yeah so what is happening with when when what's happening to humans when we see onomatopoeia we see alliteration well i mean the language around food is fascinating because you know i mean one of the things is that there are various things that will increase the price that people are willing to pay for food on a menu one of them is provenance if you put pembrokeshire potatoes or jersey this or whatever anything that has a place of origin commands a premium and weirdly just you know seemingly meaningless words like succulent carrots rather than just carrots also uh there's a whole extraordinary science of menu design which goes into detail like you know you don't put the pound sign you spell the price out in words rather than doing it in digits you get rid of you get rid of the second two digits so you just have round pound pricing people experiment enormously with this which is what conveys promise but you're right in that um it you can't separate okay i'll get into a tiny bit into the neuroscience of this yeah that's what i'm trying to get which is that it looks as though most of what we perceive is a prediction and that we use our senses to error correct where the prediction deviates from the reality and that's a more efficient data architecture for the brain than effectively me looking at the picture in front of me and processing every pixel if you're into digital photography you'll be familiar with something called raw mode if you've got a fancy digital camera you can shoot in raw mode where there's basically a few bits are used to describe each pixel in painstaking intricate detail every single pixel is described the reason you do that as a professional photographer is for editing it's better the way you achieve a jpeg or an mpeg is through a form of data compression where there is a likely value for each pixel based on the pixel that precedes it or adjoins it, okay?

4:19And you only use data to describe the extent to which the pixel value differs from the expected value. And that's a much more economical use of data, because if you've got a blue wall, you don't need the data going blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue for every pixel, okay? You just go blue and then one single bit same again okay same again same again same again same again same again yeah okay so that i've probably done a complete disservice to the genius people who um who do um effectively data compression and photography that effectively is you have an expected value for everything and you use data to only to the extent that the reality differs from the expectation the book you need to read on this is by a guy called andy clark it's called the experience machine he's an academic at the university of sussex he's a philosopher as well as being a kind of neuroscientist um and andy clark's book the experience machine effectively takes this model of human perception which is the brain generates an expectation and then the senses then convey the contrast between the reality and the expectation if it's right it's not a new theory clark admits this it was advanced first by people i think like william james and herman von helmholtz in the 19th century um herman von helmholtz and sco didn't have the advantages of jpegs and mpegs to understand data architecture they didn't have really the advantage of information theory to understand why the brain would work that way but we've got limited bandwidth in the optic nerve it makes more sense for the optic nerve to concentrate on surprising information than to concentrate on all information and if that's true it explains essentially i'd say the verdict of that is the science is in and the marketers were right all along that things don't taste how they taste they taste a strange combination of how they taste and how you expected them to taste and there's a guy you must get on the show who's called charles spence of the university of oxford who's a kind of um how would you describe it i suppose you call it psychophysics or or else you might call it phenomenology but it's all about the science of how not not the science of how we measure the world as scientists i degrees centigrade but how we experience reality as human beings you'll know this if you've been to america the weather forecast will say you know tomorrow scottsdale it's going to be 97 field but it feels like 92 and american weather forecasts often have a feels like temperature which is not the actual objective temperature of the air it factors in things like whether there's a breeze and the level of humidity both of which affect how we as humans experience heat you know high humidity no breeze is a really painfully hot day if you add a breeze and reduce the humidity and leave the temperature the same i've wandered around places like phoenix arizona where it's 100 degrees but because the humidity is really low you basically wander around perfectly comfortable the same temperature in singapore you're sweating like a sex offender right okay you know and so the so spence's work particularly around taste he'll do things like wonderful experiments where you produce something that looks like a lemon okay looks exactly like a bitter citrus fruit but you flavor it with strawberry essence and the only scientific way to describe the human reaction to this is it fucks with people's heads it so in other words you don't go gosh that look like a lemon but it's actually strawberry That's how you'd expect if the Andy Clark theory isn't true.

7:59Instead, it almost creates a completely new taste, which is the taste of something that's strawberry-like when you expected it to be lemon. So the marketing of food,

8:13the expectation you create when somebody goes in has a huge bearing on what they perceive, just as they always used to say about lager, people don't drink the beer, they drink the advertising. quick one guys Espresso's got a brand new sponsor Unleashed Unleashed is inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use Unleashed daily at Ireland I bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it? save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability look your favourite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh he's a 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 so the onomatopoeia or because let's let's use kfc as an example finger licking good right so i was in columbia and um before costa rica i was in columbia the food in santa mata was um was repugnant like and i and i was just which was the food was amazing but in santa martin this other seaside town which as you said was like as your wife says like watching narcos right got mugged there as well but i won't tell you about that but that same sort of thing but i was like i just need some sort of formal um normality i need yeah and i saw the finger licking good signs i saw the kfc the kind of the lurid lights yeah and i was like oh my god that's the promise and as you were saying about um your friend at the university of sussex because it's like we're waiting for that kind of what we expect and we're almost like speeding up to what we actually get well i can remember a similar experience getting stuck in quite heavy snow crossing the rockies between taos new mexico and farmington new mexico and all i can remember is we were terrified because there's no mobile signal if you went off the road this was a road where It's incomprehensible to Brits, but you're driving through northern New Mexico, and you will go for 40 miles without seeing a car or a house or a building of any kind.

10:23You know, once after about 50 miles, you come across a truck stop. You go another 50 miles, not a single house, just wood, and the snow was falling and the temperature was dropping. And I was convinced we were going to, you know, because it was getting increasingly snowy. We weren't in a four by four. We're going to get off the road. I remember finally getting into Farmington and seeing a sign saying Burger King. and it was seriously it was it was you my reaction was you know it was like the promised land you know at last you know and um and and of course we've got to understand of course with food that there is the food that gets written about which is the food that is remarkably good okay typically yeah most of the time when we eat our deepest unconscious psychology isn't attempting to effectively use food as a form of status signaling or a form of, you know, extraordinary entertainment.

11:14It's actually, is this okay to eat? That's our evolutionary instinct. You know, basically, the great thing about it, this is called satisficing, okay? Yes. And the reason McDonald's is so successful is not because it's the best restaurant in the world. Yes. It's because it's incredibly good at not being bad. So when you go there, you know what you get. It's going to be entirely expected. It's going to be very predictable. The bun has been toasted for one minute and 39 seconds. There are no surprises. It's exactly as it was last time. It's exactly what you expect it to be. And as a consequence, it's a very, very successful mind hack.

11:57Because, you know, Nassim Talib writes about this. He was baffled to see people eating at McDonald's at Milan Railway Station. You know, Milan, pretty good foodie city. and the point was the people weren't looking for great food they were looking for food that definitely wasn't bad but but also that's that we talked about the promise the promised land so i eventually go to this kfc in san san sanata and i'm craving it i the food arrives i get this i get the full full shebang i get wings i get tenders i get fucking everything it was horrendously bad it was the chicken was rank the kfc and i was like i couldn't believe it but what in terms of like the promise and then we know you know we've talked about like we want these things the kind of what we've got in our head and the expectation to be met with it with a chain when you when it is kind of that you see you have to be absolutely you know this was i suppose ray crock's great you know insight you have to be absolutely fascistically consistent in what you deliver yeah and i mean it might have been a fake kfc or else the local franchisee has gone rogue i don't but so then to your point that this one's that you notice when you try mcdonald's or and or Burger King in a different country, is you have the similarities of home, but the differences.

13:09Yes, yes. And I've always found that, how you keep consistency, yet tailorised to localised markets, that conundrum is fascinating. The McDonald's, I got McDonald's delivery on Rappi, which is Eric Levin with Deliveroo. Yeah. I was like, I may as well have been ejaculating when I was eating it, because it was so... It was exactly... It's like I could have gone down to the McDonald's in Liverpool Street. Do you know what I mean? it was exactly the same i was like and that is the promise i wanted to mean of course of course and that that and of course that's also true of hotel chains yeah that we forget you know if you're a frequent hotel stayer quite often what you want is absolute predictability 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 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.