Espresso: Rory Sutherland - Why Brands Are Scared of Humour

0:01Morning, morning, or welcome. Yes, I have grown a tash, I have got a nose ring and I am covered in tattoos. I am your barista for the day. Welcome to Espresso short, snappy Espresso short podcast episodes. I've literally downloaded all the wisdom from all the founders and all the brands like Gurd, Tills, Coconut Collaborative, Candy Kittens, Little Moons, Planet Organic and I've distilled it into this micro, short, snappy wisdom to give you a mahoosive edge on the day to kickstart your day so look, without further ado, let's get cracking and enjoy this espresso shot Humour in brands I think is people are becoming too scared to put humour in brands Yes, I think that one of the problems of purpose is it tended to make too many brands too serious.

0:49And I don't want to live in a world where everything is trying to save the world. Because let's face it, we won't save the world one brand at a time. It will require huge amounts of cooperation and indeed, in some cases, legislation, perhaps. but you know this idea that um uh you know every brand should be effectively seeking to occupy the highest moral ground it possibly can doesn't strike me as fundamentally sustainable as uh you know it's one of those things that's cute when the first 10 brands do it and in the case of some brands dove for example it was entirely appropriate to what the dove is as a brand okay you know it's beauty without artifice um as i think the phrase went um but if if it ends up with you know your sausage rolls effectively uh you know talking about the migrant crisis uh things have gone too far i've always thought about um like you know you've got the have you heard of mr beast yes the guy the youtuber has got that chocolate bar brand i've always thought why isn't a comedian like almost reinventing the penguin right yeah the penguin talking about what happened you can still buy them can you you still buy them but we're not like sorry like nothing happens to them but you know you had like a joke in there right yeah i think in today's society is so um like as you said like all these purpose brands and i think it's amazing absolutely amazing but i do think there's a slight space for um well humor partially else just adds value to communication so if you can make communication both pertinent meaningful persuasive and funny why wouldn't you do that apart from the else of course you know the very best humor bears repetition that's another point which is saying the same thing you know i mean in fact quite a lot of humor sort of relies on repetition to a degree um you know if you take programs like the fast show yeah uh you know what was interesting about the first heineken ad in the in the classic 1970s advertising campaign wasn't actually very funny it wasn't very good but what it is it established the format the almost the catch of the punch line and the format of the joke and then every subsequent ad was a riff on that and in the same way you know if you remember the fast show you know the first instance of jesse's diet where jesse walks out of the shed and goes this week i have mostly been eating pimentos okay it's a completely baffling and nonsensical thing but by the time you've done it 47 times and then you flip it so that it's jesse's fashion and he goes this week i shall be mostly wearing dolce and gabbana right again then you know you've you've really taken it you've imbued it with something fabulous and it's something you own and um you know i mean i think um you know one of the one of the sad things sorry one of the sad things in advertising is we don't have those uh long-running campaigns which are you know variations on a theme to the same extent yeah it's um because it's a far show the one when there's the two builders who are speaking really posh and then when a woman comes yeah they start speaking hello mate hello mate but you're absolutely right there's one where they're discussing a radio three broadcast yeah yeah yeah yeah as soon as a woman walked fast they just suddenly kept a yelling um general sexist abuse and then revert as soon as she's gone past yeah i really do think i mean they're playing this is like blue blue sky thing but i really like i love the office office i think it's the funniest program ever like if they were to create some sort of um it's got such a die-hard for you they were to create an actual product out of that Wernham Hogg.

4:35Wernham Hogg. Like, if you just had David Brent one-liner, so that's the Penguin thing. Like, you know the whole Penguin thing? You opened it up and you had a little shitty joke in there. Do you remember that about the Penguin Bars? Yeah, I always wondered why. I mean, there are a lot of properties, given that we've now seen a movie made out of Barbie, okay? There are a lot of properties out there. I never quite understood why the owners of the James Bond franchise didn't create a kind of adult theme park around it. Yeah, and it's the same. It's like all these comedians have the full-on. and they have the you could definitely create a vegas casino around bort couldn't you the 007 and the vegas strip that would definitely work quick one guys espressos have got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands 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 of clarity on your margins.

5:33Know where your stock is. Don't miss availability. Look, your favorite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone. Candykins, 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. Yeah, it's so weird. So a amount of ideas that just, that just seems so obvious. And it's, um, I suppose the brand has been a sort of famous legal minefield for some time.

6:07And you may, a liar may tell me that I'm being absolutely stupid, because, you know, you need the permission of this state of this and the so and so is that and cubby broccolis, this man, the other. But, um, I don't know. I mean, uh, I mean, one of the most interesting facets of brands that makes them valuable is their power to spawn a kind of, you know, a bleak spinoffs. hmm as someone said it's not you don't necessarily have to have a brand extension you can also have a brand bounce i mean you know an extraordinary case of brand bounce was caterpillar where you know the entry-level caterpillar device was probably half a million dollars and then they went into workwear and boots wait so sorry what's the difference jcb has done the same yeah but perhaps a brand bounce what does that brand a brand extension is where you go from uh you know one flavor variant right okay yeah you produce light a light variant okay that's where you're basically staying within your tram lines you're staying within the category brand bounce is where you go into a completely different category and use your brand effectively as instant credentials to operate in that category so caterpillar someone who makes you know 20 million dollar earth moving equipment patently knows a thing or two about you know work wear or boots or whatever it may be and therefore almost from day one bizarrely they can operate with a big with far more credibility in that category than a newcomer could that's so i've we should probably just jump in because there's stuff i can talk about on that as well um well particularly in food as well which is interesting but it's like that you know that i know i listened to a podcast she did where he talked about that algorithms for to live by book yeah it's a very interesting book and i i mean i tried to get my head around it but this is a bit too mathematical for my liking but that his whole thing of explore versus exploit yeah like so that that's a great example of caterpillar where they've exploited in in like machinery but then they've actually had the nice balance of explore and gone into hardware or wearable stuff to be someone licensed their brand yeah obviously that happened people like videl susun and so forth you know it was png who went along and realized that videl susun when i met once absolutely delightful fabulous man by the way um videl susun he was a very famous hairdresser of the 19 uh probably 60s 70s 80s um and he was the tony and guy of the right 1980s but vidal susun somebody spotted the fact that he had fame which went way beyond his capacity to exploit it within his particular field of men's and women essentially headdressing okay and so presumably it was procter and gamble who just went along and said we'll pay you some money if we can call a brand of premium shampoos vidal susun which is exactly what they did um i don't know whether caterpillar was a decision by caterpillar itself or whether it was licensed i've got a vague memory it might have been the former but it's just a very interesting thing to do you know i i think ogilvy should do it as a brand because we have probably more worldwide we probably have more um prompted and unprompted name recognition than any other agency, partly because David was brilliant at publicizing things.

9:37And to me, it seems a bit silly to waste that. You know, there are areas like, for example, e-learning we could get into, which other agencies couldn't. So why wouldn't you? Have you got a podcast? I host one. I know you host one, but I do. I've got one of my own. And we have a very interesting one historically called O Behave, which is the behavioral science podcast right uh which we did for a long time uh with an ogilvy um we're quite early to it actually i mean i'm a fan i mean what i don't understand is why no one's produced a tv program the best of the week's podcasts or you know i mean actually all radio program would be perfectly adequate in some cases not all but it seems kind of weird to me that there isn't a kind of podcast because you have genuinely um uh an extraordinarily high quality and the okay the quality isn't perfect and the but the quality quantity factor is extraordinary actually 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 fun 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 it means the world to me Thank you.