Espresso: Rory Sutherland - The Marketing Model you SIMPLY NEED to know about

0:03I'll go back to the SCARF model, okay? There's this great model, neuroscientist David Rock, are the model of 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. Okay, and people care about those things to the depth of their being. If you do something in a restaurant which is an affront to someone's status, effectively, that will arouse far more ire and likelihood of a boycott than having slightly bad food. What are the other ones? Status certainty. So what do you mean by that?

0:46That's kind of like predictability. A good example of certainty would be signs on the tube platform which say next tube, seven minutes. In restaurants. We'd rather, okay, if we're at an airport and it says flight delayed, 47 minutes, we go, flight delayed, 47 minutes. I'll go and have a drink or I'll go to the lounge or whatever. OK. If it just says delayed, we're in a state of uncertainty. Yes. And we find that inordinately more painful. Yes. Then 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.

1:29OK. Off the menu. 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 a podcast with a Michelin star chef, and they go through their food icks, and that's one of the icks in terms of managing expectations. It's totally fine. You hand someone a menu and say, I'm terribly sorry. But for some reason, apparently in loads of restaurants, they say, the staff know from day dot that there's no fucking hake, 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 to the kitchen, come back.

2:06I mean, the brilliant book. You must have read the book by Will Godara called Unleasable Hospitality. So I tried to get him on the podcast, actually. And in terms of hospitality, because I asked quite... 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, and not the mind of a rule follower. What do you mean by the mind of the game theorists? I loved the way in which he went to 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?

2:43We can't do better than them in 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, you know, got into 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 % of people prefer beer. Yeah, we were talking about this last time. And so there were these sort of craft breweries who are literally so delighted.

3:20They 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. Can we just go back to the scarf thing? So 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. OK, 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 um ford and ford always had lower um 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 in 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 You treat people who are just in off the street.

5:10And, you know, at scale, that's a loyalty program, perhaps. But in an independent restaurant, simple recognition. Simple as that. And then fairness is fairness. You know, well, OK, 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. Two months free. Yeah, 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.

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