Espresso: Rory Sutherland - The Behavioural Economics of Bubble Tea

0:04I think one of the reasons why bubble tea, the behavioural economics of bubble tea is its variable reinforcement theory in a cup. which is it's a bit like the chocolate at the bottom of the cornetto which actually i think is there to prevent leakage but it's like the final little unexpected treat at the it's the easter egg at the end and we seem to like certain foods that are kind of slightly uneven okay so i'll go back to the uneven texture so there was an experiment with pigeons where they basically trained pigeons so if they pecked a switch they got a a couple of pellets of food yeah and the pigeons would basically peck the switch have a couple of pellets of food peck it again have another couple of pellets of food and after about three pecks they get a bit sated and a bit bored and they wander off to do some other pigeon stuff whatever they do other pigeon stuff shitting on people or whatever it is okay and then there was a weird glitch in the experiment where they kind of ran out of food pellets and so they made the thing a bit random where when the pigeons pecked the thing they couldn't afford to give them two pellets every time sometimes the pellet the pigeons will get no pellets, sometimes they get one, sometimes they get two.

1:13And at that point, the pellets was like a bloody pigeon fruit machine. They became completely addicted to this because the return was no longer constant and predictable. It was uncertain. The pigeons got addicted to it? The pigeons basically were just pecked and pecked and pecked and pecked. And you basically created pigeon Vegas for these bloody things. And they were just going and pecking and pecking away. And there seems to be some component in variable reinforcement theory, which may explain the appeal of bubble tea, which is that it's different. It keeps changing all the way down. Sometimes you get one of these big lumps of tapioca shooting up.

1:48The texture of it. Well, it's just that no two sips are completely alike. I interviewed Margot Henderson, who's Fergus Henderson's wife, who obviously did St. John. And we were talking about... That, would you believe, it was my local. We were actually in St. John Street as an agency. Oh, really? Back in the mid-90s. And my God, I was grateful to that place. So a couple of things. So she talks about the art of drinking a Negroni and why a Negroni is so good. So it's like you're quite stressed. The first sip of a Negroni is actually super strong and punches you, and you get the thing of the lemon, or sorry, the orange or the lemon.

2:20So that really hits you. And then you have two of those. And actually, as you get slightly more drunk from the big hits, by the time you get the end of the Negroni, the ice cubes will begin to melt. So it's actually a much softer drink. So what we were saying is it sort of dances with your mood. Well, I mean, when I drink a gin and tonic, I like to have the tonic bottle so I can vary the strength as I go through. I like to start with something. Basically, you start with something which is, you know, a bit of a depth charge, and then you end up with something that's a soft drink. Yeah. And interestingly, that may explain why, actually, if you make a really good Bloody Mary, you shouldn't mix it perfectly, conceivably.

2:56In other words, the Tabasco should be slightly unevenly distributed. I don't know. What do you think? Okay. Now, this is a bit weird, because you know one of the things I say, which is that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea yeah right um the interesting thing with food is there's mcdonald's food where the success is that it's completely predictable there are no surprises in other words there's nothing there to make you uneasy okay and then there's another kind of food which is you know it's never the same twice and weirdly depending on whatever mental frame of perception it may be sometimes we seem to want one and sometimes we seem to want the other and you might argue there's a theory about the brain that most of what we perceive is actually a prediction and we only really turn our senses up in into gear when something surprises us so then this is a really interesting philosophical question don't ask me ask a guy called say charles spence at oxford who does a huge amount of research into this So he will do wonderful, wonderful experiments.

4:02Anybody in the food industry, get this guy in and pay him a lot of money because he's fantastic. What does he do? He will make a strawberry flavoured sorbet, make it yellow and put it inside a frozen lemon. So your brain is entirely expecting the thing to be citric and bitter and instead it's sweet. and the interplay between expectation and delivery basically creates a new taste that that doesn't really exist in the natural world it creates essentially a brain a brain stimulus around taste the contrast between what you're expecting and what you get generates something on what you might call a third dimension of taste have you heard about stephen pinker's strawberry cheesecake principle hit me i know so one of my when i got fucking obsessed with why illustration works so well with food not sometimes well obviously all these products around us as illustration and uh in in lots of lots of these sort of hips to pizza restaurants now they on their box they'll use illustration and i was everywhere i looked you know noble rot the wine by uses illustration a bit of that may simply be uh it's that you're effectively tapping into heuristic assumptions that have been established by other artisan brands which use illustration so illustration and hand drawing kind of says handmade a little bit i mean charlie biggum's genius i think uh was putting the thing in a bamboo thing rather than a plastic pot okay fundamentally that completely changed our perception of what that food might be and what it might deliver okay and it made us feel that it was kind of handmade because the container didn't say factory yeah and indeed the packaging didn't say it's designed an apple mac it suggests it was designed by hand but what often happens then is that this then creates a consumer assumption that food that's packaged like that is that kind of food and people who therefore an example would be you're having guests around okay you'd probably rather serve them hand illustrated crisps okay or crisps that have a kind of artisanal quality rather than crisps that look like they're produced by a multinational thank you so much for listening to that espresso I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day.

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