Espresso: Rory Sutherland on KFC and McDonald's Marketing

0:05So the question I wanted to ask you is, in food specifically, 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 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 mmm and it's loads of m's and it's like that to me is like that is that uh the mmm of the morning like waking up the mmm 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 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 changed 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.

3:23Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get to. 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.

4:00Every 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 and 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.

4:43Okay. So that I've probably done a complete disservice to the genius people who who do 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.

5:29If it's right, it's not a new theory. Clarke admits this. It was advanced first by people, I think, like William James and Herman von Helmholtz in the 19th century. Herman von Helmholtz and Co. 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 width and 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.

6:19And there's a guy you must get on the show who's called Charles Spence at the University of Oxford, who's a kind of, how would you describe it? I suppose you call it psychophysics, or else you might call it phenomenology. But it's all about the science of how, not the science of how we measure the world as scientists, i.e. 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, feel 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 when 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 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.

7:43And the only scientific way to describe the human reaction to this is it fucks with people's heads. So in other words, you don't go, gosh, that looked like a lemon, but it's actually strawberry. That's how you'd expect if the anti-Clark theory isn't true. Instead, 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, you know, the 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.

8:23We'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. It'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.

9:02Yes. That's Nando's. 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. Because, you know, Nassim Taleb 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 you have to be absolutely fascistically consistent in what you deliver yeah but but so then to your point that this one thing you notice when you try mcdonald's or and or burger king a different country is you have the similarities of home but the differences yes yes and i've always found that how you keep consistency yet let yet tailor a tailorized to localized markets that conundrum fascinating the mcdonald's i got mcdonald's delivery on uh rappy which is their equipment of deliveroo yeah i i was like i may as well be an ejaculate when i was eating it because it was so it was exactly it was i was like i could have gone down to um 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 do you know what i 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 you want to walk in and you know you know how the shower works you know you don't you don't have that battle of kind of uh you know confronting surprises or unexpected components you know to the experience and actually you know this this concept of satisficing which was coined by a guy called herbert simon i was kind of polymathics won the new bill prize for economics um interestingly but his um a surprisingly interesting person to win the award actually um but um he um uh he interestingly made the point that in making decisions under uncertainty his old sort of shtick was decision making under uncertainty the avoidance of a negative probably looms larger than the attainment of a positive you know yes yeah um and uh it is um it's a useful tool to understand human behavior because everybody in describing their own behaviour always talks about, I chose this because it was the best.

11:33And actually, it probably isn't the best, OK? You buy a Samsung television, not because for the same money you might not be able to get a slight, you know, you probably could get a slight and better television, but there's a 10%, 5%, whatever it is risk, with that other television that it might be a piece of shit. Yes.

11:55two months free yep that's what espresso sponsors unleashed are offering they are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your e-com and accounting software it's helped islands cut admin time in half get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability brands like candy kittens tarquins gin minor figures and trip all use unleashed and i reckon you should too as i said two months free in the show notes click there and you're gonna get two months for free