Rory Sutherland Talks Marketing With Britain’s Most Famous Landlord Oisin Rogers

24:45But it's so bloody dead obvious, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because what we're trying to do, if you go to the actual core of what we're trying to do, we're trying to make people feel comfortable, safe, happy, well looked after. That's their perception. We have to give them that perception. And we have to understand that when that perception is not received by them, then we have failed. Go into that, sink into that a bit deeper, because that's what I'm trying to get into, because I understand the macro principle, but when their perceptions are off of the reality you're trying to create, that experience.

25:16The other thing I think you could say, which is, you know, we're a retail business, but people go away with not a physical product, a shareable story. Yeah. If that's not working, what's going on there? Well, just to clarify that one, and I have said it loads of times, other retailers whether it's Tesco or Levi's or Burberry or whoever it is you decide what you want you go in you have a lovely time talking to the to the to the person who signs it to you you buy the pair of jeans for 100 pounds or the shopping for 50 pounds and you have a physical kind of token with you as to what it was you brought and that is the thing you bought but when you come to a pub or a restaurant or a coffee shop what you've bought is the pleasure of consuming what they gave you in the place and you actually leave with nothing tangible.

26:05Unless you nick a glass. Well, there you are. That happens. Actually, that's an interesting question, which is I always think that hotels should bring back those stickers that you put on your luggage so you have a small amount of tangible proof of the experience. So a little bit of branded merch from a pub, something to take away that costs nothing. You know old suitcases always have Shepherd's Hotel Cairo or whatever, stuck all over them. Well, that's why we put the beer mats out. People take them all the time. People take them all the time. Brilliant. OK, excellent. We just ordered another 40 ,000 beer mats, which will last us about two months.

26:39Two months. Two months with 40 ,000. Wow. I mean, they do have a shelf life from being on the table anyway. There's a few over there, mate. A few over there. OK. No, no. You see that? So, oddly, little symbolic keepsakes are actually probably quite useful. And to be honest with you, you said you might nick a glass. I did not. I said, unless you nick a glass. We go through 900 Guinness glasses per month. Gone. Yeah, gone, disappeared. And we don't break that many. No. Wow. Interesting. That's mad. I've read somewhere that the Beaver Town, I think the Beaver Town marketing director was talking about how we actually want you to nick the glass because it built the brand presence when you're at home.

27:15So I've got a Beaver Glass Town at home. I'll only have water out. A Beaver Glass Town. Yeah. Lovely. Yeah. This is purely anecdotal, OK? And so do not take this as gospel. but I heard a rumour that Tommy Hilfiger slightly encouraged a moderate degree of shoplifting and the reason was that the people who stole the clothes were cooler than the people who bought them. That is brilliant. Anyway, I'll leave that as purely a piece of anecdote. Yeah, so sorry, so their perception is your reality. When it's not clicking, talk to me about that because I think... Well, you're losing. Yeah, but how do you solve that?

27:55because I think there'll be a lot of people listening to this. You've got amazing restaurants. You can't, it's one of those things you don't know. Sometimes you don't know why you're doing something so well. It seems like it comes naturally to you. Well, I think there's a few things you need to do, I think, as an owner of a looking after people type business. And it's hard and you have to really try to do it. You genuinely have to put yourself in customer's point of view. Use the eyes of the customer. yeah so when you come into the business you look at it from the outside as if you've never seen it before you look at the tables as if you've never seen them before you look at the service as if you've never seen them before because if you don't then you you know you've seen it before and you miss all this all the moves you you see it from internal i'll call it the internal four walls thing you're used to it and therefore that's fine but what you have to do is continuously challenge how everything is how are the tables set up how is the flow of people how is the lighting how are the staff um uh sort of holding themselves is the beer going out right is everything the right temperature it's constant constant looking at the tiny tiny details and if you don't get all the tiny of you know on the tiny details then it all falls apart and falls apart really really quickly yeah so we are always looking at margin gains on the tiny things so let's make a general here, I think, which is that all...

29:19I think it's safe to say that all organisations over-invest in customer acquisition and under-invest in customer experience. And retention. And retention. Yeah. For a variety of reasons, I think. One of them is that a lot of the activities that make for experience and retention, you don't get bollocked for not doing them. You see what I mean? Yeah. way safe so what do you mean by that okay so if you fail first of all i feel sorry for anybody in the inverted commas hospitality industry because let's face it marketing is always the thing you can put off till tomorrow you have a load of fires to fight right here and now and marketing comes into that category of things that are important but which you can always it's the equivalent of that email which you know is important but you can always click snooze yeah for one more day Then you have things which are very measurable.

30:12And, you know, generally in a business, customer acquisition is very measurable. And therefore, it's very easy to justify the expenditure, albeit often using fairly fatuous metrics. Whereas customer lifetime value, if you like, or relational value, as opposed to transactional value, is slow to measure. And it's hard to prove. And also, as you said, involves often doing things which are difficult. they're not expensive necessarily but they're difficult to do and require acts of imagination to do it well i think yeah act of imagination and time investment yeah because you've actually got to be there to make those customer moments better and i always quite often get asked what's the best way of marketing a pub i'll tell you what it is is you buy someone a pub you know but to actually go out there and buy you know 10 people a pint it takes an hour because you've got to say great to see you how are you what are you having have you tried this there you go by the way and the the impact of that by the way it only caused a cardo found that giving people a tea towel was just insane in terms of because the great thing with the cardo is you can measure the effect of an act of kindness on future relational sales.

31:34But the impact of... Has a pub land art bought you a pint recently? Funnily enough, no, but someone at the wonderful... I'll plug them here. Go on. Eat and Mess coffee shop just outside Sevenoaks brought me back some speciality coffee and gave me a bag. You've just proved the point I was trying to make. Yeah. You do that to someone, they tell everybody. Yeah. And they go and they tell their friends and they say, that's a good place, you know? because that happened. And pubs are about relationships. And you have a relationship with the pub in the same way as you have a relationship with a friend when you get it right.

32:09When you get it right and you create that kind of advocacy that turns someone into a regular, their value is way, way bigger. The Angel Hotel in Abidveni also gave me soda bread to take away. There you go, another brilliant place. Isn't that fantastic? Yeah. Absolutely joyous, yeah. What's so good about it? By the way, yeah, soda bread. Oh, well, it was Sunday Times Food Pub of the Year, so they don't need me to recommend it, I think. Foodie Pub of the Year. They certainly won't complain. But it's... First of all... OK, this is a bit of a joke, but it's true. I always recommend people, English people, go on a holiday in Wales, OK?

32:47And the reason is that all English people think that Wales is a bit shit, and it isn't. So when you go to Wales as an English person, it's full of pleasant surprises. It's always, always. And just Welsh people are just nicer. You know, Celtic fringe people are just a bit nicer. So it naturally under-promises and over-delivers, which is exactly what we always try and do. Exactly what you're trying to do. So what's really interesting, I was talking to Will Goddara about this, and he said that companies have these things called loyalty programmes, but they're not. They're transactional. If you do this, we will give you that.

33:22And the whole point of real loyalty is it's the discretionary act of generosity. And an unexpected. An unexpected. Which is the real killer. Paul Graham's got that thing, which is do things that don't scale, i.e. which is the way you build like sticky businesses. Paul Graham did it. He did, invested in... I can. What did he do? He did Dropbox. He's like Silicon Valley tech guy. But even in those businesses, again, this is back to that cross category. What can pubs teach us about other businesses? He goes, it's hand-to-hand combat to get those first diehard evangelist fans. And then they become so loyal to the business that they tell everyone.

33:55and it's the same thing as you. It's like the best marketing is walking around here and buying five people a pint. It may take an hour, but that depth and that connection, that stickiness is just, it builds that burning furnace of diehard fans. It should be possible as a really good waiter, bar person, or indeed telephone call centre operative, right, to earn six figures. I know that's going to play havoc with your business model. No, no, we have some. You have some, right. Let me explain the logic behind this, which is, I think there's a company called something like Category Pirates, and they talk about a thing called a brand quake, which is a single...

34:30A brand quake. A brand quake is a single experience which just has a completely disproportionate effect on your attitude going forwards towards whatever that entity is. I'll give you a very strange example of this. I love the way they've come up with a new word for it, rather than saying just a really successful thing. No, no, no, no. I usually mean by giving it a name. So my weird experience is, okay, so two stories about this which are relevant. One of which is Alex Batchelor, wonderful guy who used to be the marketing director of Royal Mail. They did lots of advertising and marketing communication.

35:03They could never really make sense of what determined Royal Mail's brand perception until they had an idea and they researched it, discovered that the vast majority of anybody's attitude to Royal Mail was effectively driven by whether they liked their postman or posty. I'll be gender neutral. If you liked your post person, you basically thought Royal Mail was great. The human, the person to person, fundamentally trumps anything else in terms of a brand perception. It could be on the telephone, OK? Now, I'll give you a second example. I think Southern Water is a brilliant company. OK. I know absolutely nothing about them.

35:41I don't read about their financials in the Financial Times, OK? All that happened was my wife was walking through teal and suddenly there was this huge fountain of water coming out of the street. So she rings me and she says, look, I'm actually walking, but can you go and report this massive water leak on the corner of so-and-so and so-and-so? I'm at home, go online, find the Southern Water emergency number. It's a Sunday. Somebody answers, they're actually Northern, oddly. Maybe if you ring Northern Water, you get someone from Cheltenham. I don't know. But she was just absolutely charming and brilliant and really, really efficient.

36:16She said, actually, you're the second person to report this. Don't worry, it's an emergency. We'll have someone there in two hours. And then thanked me for letting them know in just a way that was just extraordinarily engaging and charming. Now, literally, 98 % of my, you know, I am a customer because I've got a little flattened deal, 98 % of my brand perception of that thing has been driven by that phone call. Yeah. You know. Consequently, you know, it's also true of, you know, car dealerships estate agents everything else i mean actually taking your philosophy to the property and the property industry would be fascinating how so but well one interesting thing if you talk to um uh uh people who know the psychology of house buying is the weird emotional shit plays an extraordinarily high part in what happens so one of the reasons i think estate agents try and keep buyers and sellers away from each other as long as they can is that if the buyer if the seller doesn't like the buyer or the buyer doesn't like the seller it's not happening it's not happening no it's totally irrelevant right the person is moving out you should not care at all who it is who's selling your hat i would i would say of course you should care because that's going to affect exactly what you think of the property forever forever because Because you'll always remember the people who were there before and what they were.

37:44And if they were horrid, then you just don't want to live. It seems obvious to me. I'll give you an example. My parents-in-law are fanatical gardeners. And if anybody wants to buy their house, just mug up on gardening for about six months and go in and name the plants with their Latin names. You'll get it at 200 ,000 off. If you came along and said, oh, we can put a helipad over there, right? I'm thinking of having a carting track. They won't sell to you at any price. Well, it's not really. You're right. You're right. Maybe we are all... You've created a garden which is a legacy. Your garden is, to some extent, a legacy.

38:25And therefore, effectively, you're pissing on someone's life, you know, an achievement of their life. If you move into a house and basically... I sold a flat in London, fatally, in about 1994, and we'd only had a kitchen put in two months later, a year earlier, with a slab of fantastic Canadian maple on the counter. The people who moved in, who are passionate environmentalists, immediately trashed the whole kitchen when it was about six months old, and the bit of maple got thrown out. I still haven't forgiven them for it. I still resent this. That's none of my business. It's not my apartment anymore.

39:06I still find that painful. is so my parents I told them my parents moving house in Bookham yeah he's a little bit miles from you they were looking and looking and looking and looking and they found this place anyway long story longer it found out that it was the guy who works with my dad it was his stepdaughter who was the it was their house originally it was a little shitty shed that they developed into this nice house as soon as mum found that out she was like it's meant to be there's a cosmic intervention and like even to this day she's like oh my god it's so true she's like oh my god this is how they've done it I mean, she's going crazy about it.

39:39And then you justify all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't know. Yes. No, no, no, no. You can keep the fridge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. The one thing I'd love to explore about getting to pubs is the, I know you write about in your book, Roar, about 10 times one is not the same as one times 10. No. How would you apply that to pubs? I mean, the obvious one is like having 10 pints, one pint 10 times over 10 days is not the same as one night having 10 and getting absolutely sloshed. You talk about 10 pounds. I just want to make a point here about our type of marketing and what we do.

40:11Pubs are great if you get them going because people have three, four, five, six pounds. They genuinely do. You open a burger place that does the best burger you've ever had and you go and you taste it. And it's absolutely, insanely beautiful. It's the best burger you've ever, ever wanted. And it's completely delicious and you're going to tell everyone about it. you might have a second but you're definitely not having a third or a fourth I do get two at Shake Shack where if you if you have a pint of Budvar or a pint of Timpy Taylor or a pint of Guinness and you think it's really great and you've genuinely only come in for one the number of people who stay for five or say I can't fucking believe I'm still here like four hours later is extraordinary and that is something that pubs can really do and I can't think of any other the cheeky pint sometimes it's called a cheeky five because of course it's never a pie yeah yeah i mean if you ask someone if you're going for a pint that definitely means you're having two two yeah yeah and if you're going for a few pints that means you're definitely having five so you know it's it's it's and you think about that as well as actual the consumption but also the investment in time yeah they're there for two hours there's a james that's a big thing james dean quote i think it is which is um one pints one pints perfect two's too many three's not enough yeah And it's like, as soon as you get to your third, you're like, let's fucking send it.

41:33And that's basically what it is. I think it's about cocktails, though. I don't think it's about pints. That's so interesting. So that is the, I suppose, the hardest bit, then it's getting the person in for the cheeky pint. Once they're in, it's game, set, match, pass me the oranges. You say that, but in most pubs, I can't do a pub to go into for one pint. You can't wait to get out of them. You know, and that's the problem with pubs, actually. What are some of the pubs that you really revere in terms of, like, just who kind of echo your principles? I mean, I come from a Dublin culture. Right. I was actually in Dublin a couple of months ago with Charlie and Ash.

42:14And, you know, just that feeling of homeliness, that feeling of belonging. Yes. That feeling of timelessness that you get in some of those old pubs in central Dublin is just beyond. and that comes from culture and it comes from knowing what they're doing and a sense of looking after that timeless arc of what they are and there are a good few in London too don't get me wrong I don't want to be negative about pubs in general but a lot of pubs that are run by chains don't have that and they don't look after it as well as they should there are great exceptions like my favourite pub where we had a pub before Norman's Coach and Horses Ali there really looks after that in terms of it feeling like it should.

42:59You know, making places feel like they should is a part. So I know we've talked about gratuitous perversity, so doing random things that don't really make sense. The French House only do half points. Yeah. What's the thinking of that? Have you been to the French House? Yes, of course. Yeah, I used to work in Soho Square, yeah. Like, what's that? Is there like a... I love the French House and I love Leslie. of course the French house goes back a really long way it used to be called the York Minster yeah and it became the French house after World War II because it had the association with the French resistance and De Gaulle actually had meetings upstairs and all sorts of yes the history is absolutely fabulous but the Berlimo family ran it and Gaston was still there up until about 25 years ago 30 years ago got it after the war the Berlimo family That was the landlords who lived upstairs.

43:54They were French, were they? They were French, yes. They may have been Belgian, but I'm pretty sure they were French. And then they passed on to Leslie, follower Leslie over there. She's wonderful. She's been there for 31 years, I believe. Amazing. But the reason why they do have is because when the demobbed English soldiers came back after the war, they were causing a little bit of trouble around, so on, now and again, and they always wanted pints. And Gaston wanted to look after the French and the Belgians and the artists and people like that. So it was who you kept out. He just decided to do halves because he didn't want to have Rabel in.

44:27And it worked perfectly and it became habitual. And it's part of what the business is. And it's part of its DNA. And it gives it a real sense of difference. And everybody loves it. And it can only be done there. And it's a great example of something that can't be copied or rolled out because it belongs in that place. Unless there's a custodian of that. Of that harassment. a full pint, right? When you're abroad, a smaller pint or a small, I don't know what they call it begins with a C. I was just having them in Spain. Canyon. Yeah. Yeah. That's the perfect... Or in Portugal, those tiny little...

45:01Those tiny little... I don't understand why they don't pour it to the top though. You know, like, you know when you get a pint they just fucking go like that? Yeah. And it's never pulled to the top. It starts winding up. Well, there's a thing called a schooner in Australia which is two thirds of a pint. Well, the theory is it's because it warms up too quick. Yes. You know, because the place is so hot. I see. Because in Australia, the schooner, which I think is two-thirds of a pint... It's around that, but I believe it changes from state to state in Australia as well. You never know how much...

45:27That is not a bad idea, actually, as an alternative, as a halfway house between a half and a pint. Yeah, but we're creatures of habit, aren't we? Yeah, yeah. And having a pint is a habitual thing, and having it in the right glass is a thing of habit. Yes. And people who like to drink pints and like to drink pints... Of course, when they go on holiday and they're in Portugal or northern Spain... When in Rome. Yeah, exactly. but you come to an English pub where the atmosphere is dark and wooden and beautiful and you can hide and it's got all the panels and the different features and fixtures. You wouldn't generally feel that it was right to drink a tiny beer unless, of course, you're in the French house.

46:06Yeah, but that's what I'm trying to... That's the genius of the French house. You know what I mean? Because when you're there, and I suppose you're out the front of that little... You know, behind the fucking thing. Yeah. It just feels, maybe it's because you're outside, but it feels right. I think it's intangible sometimes. But it's not always intangible. It's totally ubiquitous and absolutely unique. That's why it's so popular. But occasionally those sort of whimsical, we talked about, I think it's the Thrasher's French Fries in Ocean City, New Jersey, is it? It doesn't do ketchup. Maryland, I think it is.

46:39No, they don't do ketchup and they only do salt and vinegar, which in America is really weird. Yeah. And occasionally there's that very clever thing of what you do. Well, in a sense, OK, what you don't do is also a form of communication. So if we're being absolutely objective about this, what makes Waitrose posher than Tesco? Right. To some extent is not what they sell. It's what they don't sell or what isn't prominent on the shelves. OK, so one of the things that always amuses me by local Waitrose is going around looking for pork scratchings. are totally delicious but not very fashionable food until recently.

47:16And it's always right on the bottom shelf. And you don't have, if you go to Waitrose, you don't have three yards of Pop-Tarts. And so a large part of the curation of Waitrose is actually the hiding or absence of naff foods rather than the presence of posh foods. Yes, interesting. Why else does Waitrose make you feel like you're having a posh shop rather than Tesco's where you might not always feel that. Why is it? And I'll tell you it's all about what you feel and it's all about the senses. Yeah, it is. And it's about symmetries and it's about the width of the aisles and it's about the colour and it's about the lighting.

47:56That's about what you smell and what you feel and what you would taste if you go to the cheese counter. And those little things all add up to an esoteric feeling of yes, this has a higher value. So it's very interesting about that because I had a colleague who worked on the Marks & Spencers account for ages. What he wanted to say, he never had the balls to do it, and I don't blame him. But he always wanted to say to Marks & Spencer, look, I'm not going to work on any advertising for you at all until you sort out your flooring and lighting in your clothing department. Yeah. Because Marks & Spencers obviously have some sort of procurement which does the flooring and the lighting for food and for clothing in the same way.

48:34I totally agree, and I know exactly what you mean. It feels like being in a dentist's chair. It's like being in a dentist's chair. It's like being in a dentist's chair. Yeah, it does. And I'm kind of going, you can't charge, you know, you can't get someone to spend 250 quid on clothes and shoes if you have basically industrial lighting and a bloody easy clean floor. Totally agree. And it's a perfect example of a silent irritant. Yeah, interesting, isn't it? Yeah. It doesn't feel like a premium experience. Despite the fact that the clothes are often excellent, they're very well priced. It's one of those weird, you know, I always made a joke about the weird rule, which is in clothing retail, if you spend£100 or more, they have to give you a rope-handled bag.

49:12It makes no sense. It's just one of those kind of things. If you spent£200 and you get a polythene bag, something feels wrong fundamentally. I want to go back into the five cents. One extra point. I think in any form of capitalist exchange, there's a necessary level of bullshit for any level of expenditure so that it feels... What I'm saying is that to buy a car online is a perfectly rational thing to do, OK? But it feels wrong. If I'm going to spend a five-figure sum on a car, I just want someone to just do a little bit of... And by the way, this is the glove compartment. Likewise with estate.

49:54Why are estate agents posh, OK? Because if you're going to spend a six-figure sum, OK, you kind of want someone a bit posh just to make a bit of a fuss of you because it's just a level of bullshit that seems commensurate with the amount you're spending. And the experience of the transaction is something that you want to be able to memorise and tell people about. That goes back to the shareable story. It's all about stories. But by the way, one reason for low economic growth is that more and more companies have outsourced work to their customers. So I had to get a loan to buy this car. It was a partial loan.

50:34basically it's a day's work. OK? Dealing with the documents, signing with them, taking a photograph of your driving licence, taking a photograph of this, proving your identity. That work used to be done by companies. It's now off, outsourced to their own customers. Now, I remember thinking, OK, to buy a car is two days of work, roughly speaking. One. OK? If I were to move house, I'd probably have to take at least a week's holiday, maybe two, just to deal with the administrative bullshit, which used to be taken care of by other people, but now basically lands on you. The extent to which I think that's a barrier to economic activity, because it's loads of silent irritants, is difficult to calculate.

51:18But it wouldn't surprise me at all to know that one reason there's a lot less labour market mobility is literally that people just can't face the pain of moving house anymore, because it will literally mean, you know, probably 12 hours on various web pages proving you are who you said you are. You know, you open a bank account, you've got to prove you're not Pablo Escobar, right? So everything is calibrated for a very low level of trust, which leads to a very high level of bureaucracy with the additional curse that the bureaucratic work now falls on you. You know, I mean, you know, there used to be insurance brokers.

51:56You rang up and said, can you get an insurance quote for my car now you're there typing in bullshit about you know the car registration number and whether it's garaged overnight you know the um what i want to go back into is the the five senses and i think we've talked about like how with smell right like you know you go to a banging restaurant let's see six there's proper reception which is how comfortable you feel in yourself but i'll yeah it was also warm and cold yeah good point yeah what are the um because i think we've talked about rory about when you could almost go into um the way you could spruce up any restaurant is just make the make the bogs smell nice you make the bogs look really good perceived value of the restaurant will go through the roof no bogs are bogs are pretty important because i think when you go to the toilet and it's not it doesn't look clean you it's way bigger than a silent irritant you start to leave you thinking what is the what's in the food yeah what are the stuff like are they do they care why don't they care about me.

52:52Because this is a public space which should be clean, tidy. I should have nice soap. It should be... I shouldn't be able to see... Indian restaurants are famously bad at that, aren't they? With the exception of Kesa and Sevenoaks, which has clearly over-invested intelligently on its loo. The Indian restaurants... Everyone get down. Basically, the... I mean, the whole thing of Bucky's in Texas, the gas station chain, the entire business was predicated around restrooms. They started with the restroom experience and everything else was reverse engineered from that. Isn't that great? They got the Japanese bones or something.

53:28Well, no, it's particularly the women's loos. The whole thing was, how are you a successful gas station? You have to be attractive enough for people to wait an extra 10 miles with a full bladder to go to you rather than the intervening gas stations. And then the entire thing, a guy called Beaver something or other, the logo is a bit. The entire thing was predicated on that. Rush the hairdresser. chain overspend on loo's precisely because it's what you might call reverse benchmarking. It's an unexpected bonus because you go into a hairdresser's loo and you used partly as a storeroom with a mop leaning against the wall and instead you go in and the thing's marble and it's, as you said, it's under promise over deliver.

54:10Yeah. You know the BP garages that got the M &S in? Every single one's got a toilet. And Birdsong, actually. And Birdsong, yeah, which is weird. But now, if I drive to a petrol station, it's not even a cylinder, it's fucking annoying. When you walk in, you get out of your car, and there's no bog, and they're like, for fuck's sake, you don't know what it is. BP, I don't know if it was a masterstroke. It was a decision by BP Connect. Because you know there's going to be a good toilet, and there's going to be a good M &S, well, usually an M &S set. Super interesting. But you've got... That, by the way, as a grand partnership, that is absolutely gold dust, isn't it?

54:45Could you licence your approach to Guinness serving and actually, you know how White Castle started in the US? And you call it the system. And so basically you actually have a, you licence the Devonshire system to other pubs. You're making me think like, you feel like the guy on the quay in the Caribbean. You're trying to get me to do another job. And so if you franchised the Devonshire system of Guinness delivery, you'd basically be there asleep while the money rolled in per pint. I don't know.

55:20I like what I do and I spend all my time doing what I do when I'm asleep I'm asleep do you know what I mean I've got the best job ever you know I literally spend my whole time in the pub making sure people are having a nice time I've had a nice time myself so I'm not complaining about franchising out of Devonshire that would be hilarious the going back to that it is actually I mean interesting there's great brand partnership which is Nespresso and Starbucks. So all those Starbucks drinks are made by Nestle. And the argument was very simple. Nestle knew how to distribute and how to manufacture ready-to-drink coffee.

56:03Starbucks didn't. Starbucks had a brand for that kind of coffee. Nestle didn't. Partnership. Ka-ching. Beautiful. Yeah. In terms, one thing I wanted to speak to you about is, and getting both your takes on this is interviewed john hegarty the other week and he was basically saying that the rise of the alcohol free movement and actually just more more more pertinently the loss of the long boozy lunch has kind of killed creativity obviously if you're a fucking sesh head and alky then obviously stick away from it but he says creativity is a generous convivial act yeah and i think i think we've talked about before like with creativity ideas need to fucking have sex with each other to blossom into these things.

56:47He's right, by the way. I actually have a theory that that's a load of bollocks. Which is? Which is that people are crying wolf about the fact that people aren't drinking anymore and that people aren't having lunch anymore because some restaurants aren't doing well at lunchtime and some pubs aren't selling a lot of booze and there is loads of marketing and babble about people moving completely over to zero their 0 % beer. I don't see it. I just don't see it. I don't know what's... Well, you wouldn't see it at a pub, in fact. Well, I mean, for every 20 ,000... By the way, our Guinness Zero is delicious.

57:25And I drink it all the time. And it's really great because I can use it as a placebo. Do you do a bit of zebra-stripe drinking as well? Occasionally, yeah, I do, yeah. And I also have semi-skimmed, which is you get a zero up to two-thirds and then you top it up with the real stuff occasionally. Oh, that's fucking good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fabulous drink. And honestly, we did a blind tasting with six journalists here, drinks journalists, and we gave them zero against the regular Guinness and not one of them got it correct. They all thought the zero was the alcoholic. So as a drink, it's perfect.

57:59Yeah, it works really well. But for every 20 ,000 pints of Guinness we sell, and that's about what we sell a week, we sell between 300 and 500 pints of zero. Zero. So it is little proportion, you know, in terms of... And for the market to be going, oh, we're all fucked because everyone's drinking zero, it's just... By the way, in fairness to John Hegarty, what he was saying is that the discretionary time and the boozy luncheon advertising was what made it... Was where you got the remarkable breakthroughs. Basically, what he was saying... What he was saying is, like, I think that the idea of...

58:37We were saying that ideas need to have sex. that was kind of this Matt Ridley's thing, right? Idea to have sex. And basically, if you go into banal... It's serendipity. Serendipity. If you go into a boardroom, which is like full of glass and there's a thing there, it's like trying to have sex with a straight jacket on. Do you know what I mean? It's just the ideas can't spread. Nothing wrong with that. And really minor fallacies here. You've offended the entire bondage community. The entire bondage community now is being absolutely outraged. But anyway, he was saying the ideas can't spread. And I think the thing with the lunch is it created this almost as a separate point to the rise of the alcohol free movement.

59:16But how would you say in terms of creative ideas, kind of booze is laces that create to that, I think. If you take the advertising industry, I think if you get rid of the 10 percent of waste. OK, which is ostensible waste. In other words, people doing things which aren't specifically billable or demanded from a client. If you take away the 10, 20 % of discretionary time and money, it's no longer the advertising industry, nor is it a rewarding place in which to work. So what happens is that in the efforts to cut costs, those things which are magical, discretionary, unnecessary, are the first to get cut.

1:00:02but actually if you take it's the icing on the cake without which you haven't got much of a cake OK. And it's very it's very complicated because the real I won't go into this because this isn't an advertising podcast, but I can do a separate whole session on this that actually John's absolutely right. Incidentally, you're absolutely right in the sense that I've also read some better demographic analysis on all that stuff that Gen Z don't drink. I think there's a huge bias in the media to say because something new has come along, then everybody's doing the new thing, you know? And the old thing is now to Ed and Cole.

1:00:43And I think it's a bias. It's a complete bias, yeah. And it's just not true. I mean, I always think that. There is one thing which I think is the decline in the really heavy drinker. Well, there's no doubt, but that's a good thing, right? That's a good thing, yeah. That's a good thing. Yeah. in other words you know there would have been people routinely okay um 20 i mean companies would employ people 20 30 years ago because i've worked with some of them who are basically high functioning alcoholics yeah and he went he said if you got if you're going to brief them go in the morning because they're not much use after lunch now sometimes by the way those people were very good in other ways but you it would be much much harder to maintain uh i mean there's there's a But I think once again, yes, we remember those and we know them and they all became a little bit famous and, you know, they became like Rat Pack and whatever, but they were a tiny proportion of the people doing the work.

1:01:41Also, I think it was very, very time-consuming to be that heavy a boozer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You had to be a journalist. I was talking to the taxi driver who brought me here and she said, I'm not giving away anything, she said, my dad worked for CID and he became an alcoholic. CID? the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, because a lot of his work was basically observation. And so your job involved being in a pub for hours every day and effectively, you know, there were a lot of jobs where you either had a huge amount of time, I mean, football was often getting into trouble with this because you actually got a lot of money and a lot of spare time.

1:02:17It's pretty time... There's a wonderful book, by the way, I really recommend on this, Poor Me, P-O-U-R, me, by A.A. Gill. Oh, that's one of the best books I've ever read. Yeah, absolutely fantastic book. Gil was the best writer ever. Extraordinary, yeah. Did you ever meet him? I did. I met him at a couple times. God bless him. What was he? Because I interviewed Jeremy Lee, and he said he went in there with Anthony Quo Vadis. Yeah. Probably about a year, because I think they died a year between each other. And, I mean, I've read everything by... His essay about the ivy, as it's opening up in the morning, is just...

1:02:52Well, I haven't read that one. OK, I'll go and get that. Yeah, fantastic. He talks about the ovens as, like, I think Wales, it's beautiful. He wrote one about the warning about Brexit as well. Yes. Which is an incredible read. Yes. But he was an absolute darling man. Yes. Beautifully dressed, always really well presented, incredibly erudite and real gentleman. He was a lovely man. Because he didn't actually, I think he didn't actually write. He verbalised. He was to dictate. He dictates it, yeah. Yeah, his essay about when he's in Charing Cross Hospital, like it's proper sad, but the way he writes about kind of his last...

1:03:26I think he described his cancer as, like, I've got the full English, which is just, like... Oh, devastating. Devastating. By the way, there's a lovely thing which I always find fabulous, which is you dictate to the Times copy-takers, which all newspapers used to have before you had laptops. So most people would write by hand and then dictate, I think, to some extent. Wait, what do you mean? He was dyslexic, famously dyslexic. So he actually took... He did scribble notes, but he... and he'd be dictating this absolutely immortal prose to the Times copy taker and they'd go and he'd finish a paragraph and the copy taker would say is there much more of this?

1:04:02I love the fact that you can be that good and yet fundamentally it's like no man is a hero to his valour to whatever it is the copy takers are there going yeah okay yeah yeah yeah yeah is there much more of this? I love that but no I mean it's astonishing as a writer PJ O 'Rourke would have been the British equivalent or the American equivalent, I suppose. And Brendan Behan was the Irish one. You've got it exactly, yeah. Who's the right? Brendan... Brendan Behan. Yeah. I need to read that. It's a bit like A.A. Gill. Fabulous. But that book, Poor Me, is... But one of the things he says is never say of an alcoholic or a drug addict that they're lazy, because the amount of work and ingenuity that has to go into actually maintaining your habit is extraordinary, you know.

1:04:44It's actually an incredibly industrial... Being an alcoholic is actually extraordinarily hard work, you know. so you said you met him what was that experience like so I think

1:04:57I need to remember Stevie Parle was opening a restaurant in Canary Wharf and I was very I was lucky to be invited by Faye Marshall who was the restaurant critic at the Evening Standard God bless her she's one of my very best friends she did 42 years there so she said we're going to this this restaurant Tim Canary Wharf the name escapes me Stevie will be upset that I've forgotten the name but when we got there Adrian was was already sat so poor poor poor restaurant had to cope with two you know national food critics at the same time at the same lunch yeah yeah so it was it was a stressful time for them but I I managed to have a good old chat with him and yeah top top man yeah amazing because I don't know what didn't he because he went to was the AA for the alcohol enormous.

1:05:49I don't think so. Doesn't he say that in his book? I don't know that because that's his name, David, isn't it? No, he was, those were his initials, I think. But I think he adopted AA because he was actually, he didn't drink, did he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He gave it up, yeah. Yeah, no, because he was, I think he went into, he started writing quite late as well. It was like 31 or something. Extraordinary story, yeah. Yeah, yeah, he was insane. I want to go. He had this most unbelievable tailored to tweet suits and beautiful suits. he was so elegant really really top guy I can't think of anybody now as well presented as he always was really yeah wow and I believe his daughter Flora has had a number of his suits retailed for her and she wears them and they're all fantastic absolutely fabulous yes she's a great journalist too oh really amazing yeah he was like just a true British well he was a British icon wasn't he really yeah Rory I want to go back to the sort of 10 times one is not the same as one times 10 because i think that's a really interesting way of like i know it's a failing when you accumulate statistics yeah for example uh one repeat customer is not the same as 10 one off customers at a very true level absolutely correct it's just a really good way of like viewing things slightly differently i really like it well i'll give you an example of this it also applies to pricing okay right which is one of the reasons you have a season ticket is that uh well as like a train season so that a hundred people who take a train journey once are going to be less price sensitive than one person who takes the same journey a hundred times so one of my arguments would be against high speed two and in favor of high speed one so if you invest money in improving commuter journeys okay um then When someone, if you live in Folkestone, high speed one saves you as a Folkestone commuter probably half an hour, roughly 300 times a year, 150 times two, maybe 200 times a year, times two.

1:07:51That's life-changing. If you take high speed two, not that many people go to Manchester every day. That would be silly. And most people will go to Manchester three, four, five times a year. There is therefore a difference between saving one person 200 hours a year and saving 200 people one hour a year. In terms of the mathematical models they use for time saving in journey time, the value of time saved is exactly the same. It obviously isn't. OK. I mean, high speed one means that if you wanted to, you could move to Folkestone. It fundamentally changes behavior. Yeah. And you could argue, you know, that things like the Concorde, which save a few, you know, people very infrequently, save them quite a lot of time, are not the same as saving people a little time repeatedly.

1:08:46So it's a fundamental failure of most mathematical models that they assume that in maths, multiplication is commutative. One times ten is the same as ten times one. Yeah. The reason you need a season ticket, OK, is that someone who makes that journey 200 times a year... I'll give you a perfect example of this, OK? There's an autoroute in France which they charge for. They charge for their motorways. And the route, I think it's the A10 down from Calais, is always known as the Autoroute des Anglais. And you drive on this, and if you're in the summer, every single car is an English car. And you kind of go, this is a bit weird, why don't French people use this motorway?

1:09:27And then, of course, you realise that the English people are using the autoroute twice a year, once in each direction. OK, they're paying€25,€30 for the trip. It doesn't really matter. It's a small amount compared to the rest of my holiday. Off we go. I'd probably save half an hour. If you're a French person and you use the motorway every day, €5 a day for a short motorway journey multiplied by 200 is a significant bite out of your disposable income. And so that's why you have season tickets, because you can obviously charge someone more for a journey they make once a year, whereas if that person is going to make the journey 200 times a year, you need...

1:10:02Now, Amazon Prime is kind of a recognition of that. OK, there's a difference between 10 people paying for delivery once and one person paying for delivery 10 times in a row. So what Amazon Prime is, in a sense, is it's the realisation by Jeff Bezos that if we want to have frequent customers, we need to find a different way of charging for delivery. And it is, in a sense, it's a reward for frequency, I suppose, Amazon Prime. I mean, it's a very simple idea. And by the way, I've never understood why restaurants and pubs don't occasionally try it. You know, in other words, join this pub, it's£10 a month, and in return you get free X.

1:10:37Oh, she's reading the skin. I know. My answer to that is that people who come to pubs don't like things changing too much. No, no, no. And that's good, you know. By the way, there is a strength of the pub, if you think about it, extraordinary strength of the pub, despite the fact that pubs are majorly beleaguered, which is it is a timeless concept It is, it is I mean it always fascinates me that a lot of pubs are Victorian in decor, my kids love them, my kids love pubs which is fabulous And we're finding that loads of Chen Zeds are coming in here and having a really great time Skewed though because of Covid I read an article that basically it's like no one was drinking because of Covid or those 18 year olds who would have gone to uni during Covid and being when they started getting on it, essentially.

1:11:25They didn't have that two-year period. I think the economists pulled that apart. Was that what that was? I remember reading something about it. Basically, there's a lag in the data because those 18-year-olds or gen X were... They weren't able to go in. The data difference, this idea of this huge generational shift in drinking patterns is massively overstated by a couple of freak, what you might call outlier years in the data. Yeah. So the COVID years, I think, formed part of the data set. Now, once you have a weird outlier in your data set like that, you can't really reliably draw influences from it.

1:12:00I mean, obviously, there are factors like, obviously, economic cost, the availability of other drugs, preloading, da-da-da-da-da. They've always been there. But they've always been there to an extent. Yeah, they have. I think one of the things that a lot of the pubcos are missing out on is the price of entry. so one of the things that we've done is while our Guinness might be slightly less than everyone else and our lager might be slightly less we're still around$750 for premium lager and our Guinness is$690 but we keep Bex on as an entry lager for$495 and the same with our Star Apartment which comes in a schooner we talked about earlier comes in two thirds of the pint that's$495 so the actual the barrier to entry is much lower than going to a chain pub.

1:12:52Wetherspoon's accepted, by the way, big fan of Tim Martin, where you go to one of the London chain pubs and their cheapest point is around$7.50. So there's a big difference between$4.95 and$7.50. This is... Because actually there's a very interesting... There's a restaurant in Miami which is the most profitable per square metre and it's called Something Stone Crab. Have you come across this? It's occasionally researched. And one of the weird things is they've always... A lot of business consultants went in and said, obviously you have this stone crab, which is pretty profitable. What is it? It's a weird restaurant because rather like Chick-fil-A not being open on Sunday, they close for three months of the year because it's out of crab season or something.

1:13:37Right. I love crab, by the way. I think it's a magnificent thing. I'd go there like a shot if I were in Miami. But the other thing they do is they've always done this kind of chicken sandwich, which is the entry level product, which is much cheaper. And all the consultants go to them and say, you have to get rid of this because it's a lower margin item. And their argument is no, because the whole nature of our restaurant depends on us having cops eating here. OK, if we take away the low cost items, we're no longer the same place because the kind of milieu and the clientele would basically become a load of arseholes.

1:14:12on Valentine's Day, you know, on their wedding anniversary. Correct. And you no longer have the same vibe. And you have to have diversity and a range of different, not just occasions, but different types of people. Got it. You know, whether they're from near or far away, whether they're from a low economic or high economic, or whether they are, you know, having a long visit or a short walk. That's actually a criteria for a great pub, isn't it? Yeah. That the demography is mixed. It has to be inclusive. Everybody has to have an opportunity to be able to get there. And that's why we do the three-course set menu in the restaurant.

1:14:51And we won't change the price of that, despite the fact that the margin is low. Remind me what it is. It's 20... 29 for three courses, 25 for two. 25 for two. And you get a full-size, absolutely brilliant brawn cocktail. You get the skirt steak and chips with the bernese. And you get the sticky toffee pudding. And, you know, it counts for 25 % of everybody who goes in the restaurant. And it's low margin items. It's a low margin, but we fill the sea and we make some money on it. Interesting. And the people have a brilliant time. And we get a lot of people come in and they just have water. Yeah.

1:15:19And their entire bill for two is 60 quid plus, a little bit of service. And they're delighted. And we are delighted too. Because the same as the cops and the chicken sandwich. You have to have that sort of diversity of democracy, of demographic. Yeah. in the place in order for it to feel real and feel chaotic. You probably know a pub called in Kinerton Street called The Nags Head. I love Kevin Moran. Absolutely fantastic. I love him, yeah. By the way, total bit of irrelevance. It's the only time I've ever had that practical joke played on me. This is quite a few years ago because there was a payphone there and I had to use the payphone where someone puts a whelk inside the mouthpiece of the phone.

1:16:04OK. What happens is the whelk decomposes and then when you actually go to make a phone call, you're practically sick. And so that was... It must have been Kevin Moran is the only person who my member said, I'm terribly sorry, but there's a whelk in your receiver. And it sounds like something from a French surrealist thing. But what's fantastic about that pub, it's in Mayfair. So, you know, one or two of the clientele will be authentic billionaires, won't they? OK. And yet, funnily enough, it was the local for Haig, the acid bath murderer. OK, so it's even got a... He was a 1930s guy. So he's actually got a serial killer among his past, Cleontel.

1:16:41But that's exactly as it should be, you know. The last time I was in there, I went in with my daughter about a year ago or so at 11 o 'clock. And she, famously Lara, the AGM here, she was running another pub actually at the time. So it was about a year and a half ago. Went in there, he's having a coffee on the bar. And I've introduced Lara. And obviously he's this huge, bombastic, brilliant character. and he was lovely to her and we were just having a little chat and he's gone, I've got a little lesson for you. What's that? And he got his coffee, milky coffee in a mug and he put it behind on the old optics, you know, you click on it and you hear the click and you hear the whiskey dropping into his coffee.

1:17:21Brilliant. And then he does it again. He goes, click. And then he goes, what's that? He goes to Lara and she goes, well, that's a cup of coffee with whiskey. And he said, no, this is a wuzzer. A wuzzer? A wuzzer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she goes, why? Because it was a cup of coffee.

1:17:42That is so good. It's brilliant. I love it. Well, because that's just for listeners. It's down like the back streets, like near Pimlico, isn't it? It's kind of old. If you find the Barclay Hotel, there's a little... Little side street. Side street. And then it goes around... Really little restaurant on the corner. Yeah. Barclay restaurant saloon, which does Halim Akbari, which is the greatest single... That's what you ordered when we went to ambassadors. Yeah, I'm absolutely obsessed with that dish, yeah. It's like porridge and lamb, isn't it? Yeah, it's lamb porridge. No, no, no, no, but you pimp it because it's...

1:18:11This is why I think KFC is superior to McDonald's, OK? Because McDonald's is kind of fascistic. It's de registe. This is what you eat and this is how you eat it. With KFC, you can kind of mix the gravy up with the fries and everything else, OK? And Halim Akbari, at a much more elevated level, you get little bowls of chilli, little bowls of ground ginger, little bowls of this, and you can basically sprinkle it on and vary the flavouring. Because the personalisation increases perceived value, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah, because I told you the marketing director of Nando's in Oz interviewed him the other week.

1:18:44He was basically saying half their genius is the personalisation. You go there and each dish, we could all order a half chicken, but we go up to that little fucking station and there's all our different bits and it increases the... That's one of their genius. And actually, I mean... That's why I love a curry, because you can just fucking... You get so many different little varieties of... You get the non-bread. It's combinator. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. You get variable reinforcement sort of stimulus, which is more interesting. I know every bit of podcast that we ever hear of Rory, he always talks about Indian food being your favourite and the best iteration of restaurant food in the UK.

1:19:23And, of course, you're right. And you've mentioned Gymkhana and Virashwami and Ambassadors Clubhouse. But I think that Chinese food is better. And I think Chinese food is the most underrated cuisine in the UK because there is incredible Chinese food and most people never get to try it. That's kind of true. It's actually, you're right. OK, I don't think it's as good as Indians, so I'm not going to accept that. I knew you were. But when you say it's underrated, I think that's fair because it became slightly naff through ubiquity and through... Yeah, that's fair, actually. No, I think... Actually, I mean, there probably is scope for someone to actually effectively do a dishoom on Chinese food.

1:20:15There's no doubt about that. And I think it'll probably... What do you think we get... So you said, like, most people in Britain will never get to try it. Like, where's good to go? And what are the misconceptions about, like, Chinese food, in your opinion? I think the barrier to going into a Chinese is weirdly high because you see these great big menus. And while you know as a customer what Singapore noodles is and what beef chow mein is and what dim sum is, you go in there and you can be kind of, there's too much information, there's too many things quite often to choose. And if you go into regional stuff, you might know a couple of bits and you might know what to order.

1:20:55But if you look at the regional menus, whether it's the Sichuan or the, you know, the Jan or... Is Sichuan just a region or is it a spice? It's both. OK, sorry. But then you start seeing things you don't quite understand and there's words you don't get and then you feel a little bit, oh, I'm not sure. But when you... Yeah, the choice architecture is a total fuck-up, isn't it? I wouldn't say it is because it's for people who know. Yeah. But most people don't know. No. And I think that's a slight barrier to entry. But then when you do find one that you love and you like and you know the dishes that you like...

1:21:33You're right. And you go back again, it's the best restaurant in the world. I've got a couple down here that are just absolutely... I'm still in Queensway. Do you remember that one in Queensway when Chad used to have fish painted on the wing there? My mate, it's there because my mate, I don't know if the names escaped me, but my mate went for his leaving due. Do you know what my most depressing story? So we've just seen Marks and Spencer's in Whiteleys. This is years ago, my wife. And we walked past that restaurant. and she said, oh, should we go in and go and eat there? Well, no, we just bought all this Marks & Spencers food.

1:22:00So we went home, ate the Marks & Spencers food. 20 minutes later, bloody Marlon Brando went in. So I've never got to... In fact, that was his favourite Chinese... favourite restaurant in London. Now, I think we can confidently say that Marlon probably knew his food. The late Marlon Brando probably knew how to eat. What would you say are the best Chinese restaurants in London?

1:22:21The best. Well, like the ones that you frequent the most. the ones I like the best I mean Dumplings Legend on Gerrard Street it's absolutely fabulous really really good there's a number of four seasons around the place there's one famously in the Hippodrome there's one on Gerrard Street but the one on the one on Wardock Street just down from O 'Neill's for some reason tastes a million times better than all of them and the Singapore noodles in there the down new with garlic on the Sichuan chicken and the one with all the chillies and the cloud mushrooms and the lotus root, absolutely sensational.

1:23:00And they do the barbecue duck as well and rice with that amazing rich sauce on top. And I can eat it all the time. Have you been to Beer and Noodles? Oh, it's great. You like this, Rory. You know your do one thing well? They've got this hero product, which is essentially like a bowl of noodles and they bring up this fuck-off big beef shit. They pull it at the table and they slice it with a pair of scissors and it goes into a dish, but the noodles are like thick, fat noodles and then it's just beer. It's such a simple concept. Why is there a faux or faux trend where laxer is much better? What's going on there?

1:23:35Malaysian food's underrepresented, isn't it? There's a brilliant Malaysian down here. Oh, right, OK. Come back to me in a second. Because that's an absolute... But, of course, you asked me about the best Chinese. Of course it's Andrew Wong. It's A Wong. I mean, he's just absolutely delicious. I like the good earth too but I think that's kind of like Waitrose of Chinese food it's all the stuff you recognise and it's done the best way of putting it my neighbour in Deal said in the late 1960s he was an ad guy kind of in the Madman era and he said in the 1960s there were two questions that were important which is Indian or Chinese and Beatles or Stones and he always believed the correct answer was Indian and Stones.

1:24:22But anyway, we can... What would yours be on that? Yeah, I'd probably, I'd probably, I'd have to confess, I'd probably be Indian and Stones. Well, that's right, because I would definitely be Chinese and Beatles. You'd be Chinese and Beatles. I'm Indian and Beatles, yeah. You're Indian and Beatles. Okay, right. That's the other thing is what, again, John Higgy was saying there's two documentaries to watch about creativity, and this links to the booze, is there's the Beatles one which was like, they're kind of the get back, which they're kind of mechanical, and they're like in the studio. Then he goes, go and watch the Stones one.

1:24:50They just get fucking off their head and they would get so creative out of all these ideas. He's like, there's no wrong or right way. It's like the opposite to a good idea. There's another good idea. I don't know where I heard that. By the way, it's not me. I thought it was me. It's weirder than that. It's actually, weirdly, Einstein and Niels Bohr. So they had this weird thing, because I googled it eventually. It's obviously somebody else must have said this and I was just thinking it would be some random bloke. And it turned out they had this discussion, they said in kind of boring physics, the opposite of a good idea is wrong, but in high-level physics, the opposite of a good idea is another good idea.

1:25:31Wow. It's some conversation recorded between Einstein and Niels Bohr, but it's true in marketing, obviously. It's true in psychology. In other words, there's high touch and there's no touch, but medium touch doesn't work. You know what I mean? You have to be either one or the other. You've got to be one or the other. the one thing i wanted to speak about we're talking about is like how and again a lot of listeners the message me you've got their own restaurant for like where it's i'm not going to say who but it's struggle street right now like it's really it's very very tough and maybe bring in some behavioral science here but like how restaurants can use utilize space effectively to generate more revenue i think what we're talking about is no trinity in clapham yeah like yes he's got brilliant trinity downstairs trinity upstairs which is probably more as you say um approachable or entry level and then in the summer that courtyard last year he turned it into trinity outside essentially three restaurants in one place now they've got a sarni truck which does these you know huge delicious sandwiches but i think again a lot of people are like we can't get punters through the door or we're like we're just we're just struggling i'd love rory if you can and then also you can jump in on this as well it's like what are some of the creative ways or what would you do um to get partners through the door i think one thing that i've always believed i've is like working from pubs not somewhere like here working from pubs is better than working from cafes because one you know they tried to do co-working spaces in pubs or like getting people in like you get a free coffee one it's less quiet two you always get a fucking plug three you're not surrounded like sardines and four if you're having a bad day you can have a pint like There are much better places, but what are some of the ways you'd creatively use space for you?

1:27:16I mean, there are a lot of questions we could ask, which is, are in Britain, outside London, are pub car parks massively underused real estate? So if you don't, even if you serve food in your pub, should you allow food trucks to come along? As a kind of once a week destination thing. Why don't pubs sell milk? Why don't pubs sell vapes? Right? I mean, it was a major part of footfall in pubs, was getting people in to buy cigarettes from the machine. Yeah. I just ask these questions. Maybe they're legal reasons, maybe I'm talking total shit. But it does strike me as strange that a pub is a community hub, which would be, by the way, a perfect place to relocate a post office as well.

1:27:55I thought that would be really cute. OK. Just as, in a sense, farmers, it all depends, but farmers investigate multiple sources of revenue. Basically, you know, in other words, you've got a couple of Airbnbs and a converted stables and then you've got a bit of office space in what used to be the barn. And then you farm and then you open a farmer's market that ultimately, you know, you know, one obvious thing is what capitalism should be. Capitalism isn't the efficient provision of what you already do, which is what it's turned into. It should be a process of discovery of how you create the most value possible with your available resources.

1:28:34which is really an experimental process. Now, obviously, there are pubs like this which absolutely know what they are and make money doing it. But it does strike me as strange that country pubs could try and become a bit more variegated on the grounds that if I went to get a pint of milk at 10 o 'clock at night from the pub, I'd now be able to park because there's a car park. Let's be honest, I go in and have a pint. Yes. OK? There was a famous thing, by the way, famous very weird finding from consumer data from 7-Eleven which was the huge correlation between men late at night buying nappies and buying lager.

1:29:10Yeah. OK. And the theory was, roughly speaking, that you'd been sent out by your wife who had a young baby to buy nappies, and you kind of reasserted your masculinity by buying a six-pack. OK. Now, you know, there are... I mean, it's just an interesting question, which is it is worth asking the question. And sometimes you have tied houses, sometimes... Obviously, the terms of the lease are totally different. One thing that's really interesting, which I was talking about to a pub co only this week, was you can get the lease of a pub, and often accommodation provided, for 5 ,000 quid up front, okay, and then a share of the sales.

1:29:49Yeah. I think if people under 30 knew that, okay, I think you get a load of people under 30 who go and do it and try it. and I think that 80 % of them would fail horrendously. Yeah, it's a shame. But 20 % of them. Are young people aware of this? Because it tends to be the retired cop, doesn't it? Who takes on a pub lease. Or the couple who've retired. Or the couple who've retired. Or the worst possible case is people who really enjoy being this side of the bar who assume it'll be just as enjoyable the other side. I think I'd like to go back to the question about, you know, how you can get more customers in.

1:30:30Yes. The one piece of advice that always sticks with me and all my staff and everybody is we get them to watch Simon Sinek's little presentation. I think it's eight minutes long. Start with why? Start with why. And obviously... You used to work at Ogilvy. I'll give them a bit of a... Top, top, top thing. And, you know, he goes into the psychology of why you're doing it, thinking really strong about why you're doing it and the why being the centre rather than how and what you think. It's all about why. There's a really interesting segue in there that doesn't get talked about that much, where he has this graph of the people on the very far left being the most influential and the ones who almost decide your popularity.

1:31:20And then you have the early adopters who really get in early and help you out and buy loads. and then you have the sort of, you know, slightly less fanatical. Then you've got the ones who don't really care and then you've got the lacquards. Oh, the lacquards. Yeah. So I think he divides it in six, actually. Okay. But I have always thought that that bottom left-hand corner are so visible, if you think about it, because they give a shit. They care about the pub. They're on Instagram. They'll be in on the first day. They'll introduce themselves as your neighbour. they will say what they do they will ask you all about the beer they will be fanatical about you and they're the ones who will give you the most influence and if you look after them particularly and make sure they feel looked after, part of it comfortable, give them memories, buy them a pint they'll bring in their friends not just their friends, they'll bring in everybody

1:32:24it's almost that do things that don't scale which is that over-investing in that bottom corner of that graph. There's a thousand true facts. What is it? Kevin Kesey says a thousand true facts. Which you can build a whole business of a thousand people. Yeah, and just make sure that they feel brilliant. Obviously, make sure everybody feels brilliant. But we always watch out for those. Yes. And they might know about pubs or be in the industry or have spoken about the industry or written a thing or have an Instagram with loads of pints on, for example. You know, you look at people like From Ross, people like Topjaw, the Guinness Guru, the Schooner Scorer, Easy with Todd, Somebody Feed Phil.

1:33:07You're a Hoffman fan on coffee. James Hoffman. Absolutely. Absolutely. By the way, kids, don't watch that. Seriously, take up crack or something. What is it? What is it? No, no, no, seriously, it'll be cheaper in the long term. OK, because if you get into James Hoffman videos, and I did it during lockdown, the next thing you know, You're ordering a£2 ,000 grinder where the burrs are, like, massaged by Lithuanian nuns or something. I'm not seeing this one. The only thing I disagree with him on is the weighing of the beans. For the listeners, who is it? OK. Oh, James Hoffman is the... He was, I think, world barista champion, wasn't he, about a few years ago.

1:33:43And he's one of these absolute coffee influencer gurus on YouTube. Yep. And it's incredibly compelling. It's the coffee equivalent of Matt's RV reviews. Have you ever watched that American guy? Matt Fox. You've got too much time on your hands, Matt. This was lockdown. This was lockdown. Literally, four of us as a family sitting at home. We must have spent something like 60 hours watching this guy review different American giant motorhomes. Goodness me. Anyway, but it's absolutely fascinating. I was talking about this, about the power of influencer marketing, which is those people are highly credible because they have reputational skin in the game.

1:34:23Yeah. OK. In other words, this isn't the influence of marketing where you pay someone irrelevant who happens to be famous to talk shit about something. This is where fundamentally two things, OK, which make it a reliable source of recommendation, one of which is they have skin in the game. Secondly, you know that in amongst their audience are people more expert than you. So this is a wonderful guy called Don Marty, who used to work for Firefox. and he has a model, it's actually, he came and presented it to us once, of advertising, which is, in other words, how you optimise for credibility. Now, if you read a magazine, Woodworkers Monthly, say, one of the things you know is that lots of people reading that magazine know a lot about woodworking.

1:35:10So the information in that, if it's bullshit, will get called out by people who know more than you. The problem with digital advertising is you don't know who else is seeing it. Not at all. You could be the sucker who's been singled out by the Nigerian prince. for all you know. In a mass medium you know that it's, this is why when we make our wedding vows, we make them in church in front of 200 people who know us simultaneously, we don't do it door to door. Because a promise made in public, for all kinds of reasons, is more compelling and carries more conviction than a promise made in private.

1:35:43Fundamentally. And actually that's what the digital marketing people haven't fully understood. Because they think it's all about who we reach, one at a time but there's a very fundamental extra bit that you need to do before you get involved in any of that and that is be good in the first place you have to have a really good experience for people coming in in order for that marketing to stick at all so you know when someone asks me for advice about running their pub is be there make sure your pints are nice make sure the place is clean watch out for those silent irritants make sure that when the guests do come in and they will that they have a wonderful time.

1:36:22And if you're not doing that, you might as well not bother. And I think some people aren't. A lot of publicans are not there. Because I think one they said, I think it was our first pod, mate, that you're like, when you walk into a great pub, you can sort of feel the omnipresence of the owner and the public. I think that's true. And that's one of the reasons why I don't want to do another one. Because I can't be in two places at the same time. Of course. And I think, show me a good pub or a good restaurant and I'll show you a figurehead who runs it and has been there and is that person. I'm looking over at that at the French house.

1:36:55By the way, scope for a mad pub is underexplored. Did you ever go to the Tickle Arms outside Cambridge? Mad, what do you mean by mad pub? I don't know about that. Kim de Kelle, flamboyant opera-loving homosex, you all. OK. Who basically ran this... It was an extraordinary pub, which his obituary must have been about, God, 15 years ago, 10 years ago now. But the Tickell Arms, it was... There's a famous thing called Innkeeper's Diary, isn't there, by a guy called Goldsworthy, who took over the spread eagle at Tame in the 1930s. And Tickell had these unbelievable eccentricities, OK? So... A friend of mine was there.

1:37:36For example, I always dick around with candle wax, OK? There were candles on the table. Lovely puns. And shouting right across the pub was, don't play with the candles, this isn't a nunnery. Came from Kim to Cal. A friend of mine was there, and he read out a list of car registration numbers and made the owners of those cars go out into the car park and re-park so that all the cars were facing the same way. And yet, what was bizarre, it was an extraordinary pub. There was always Wagner playing. I mean, completely bonkers. And actually, I think the potential for that, I think, is underexplored. Just be a really passive bastard.

1:38:13If you would trade the Rory Sutherland pub, What does that look like in your head? God, you'd go bankrupt very quickly. I'd be terrible. The administration would be catastrophic. But, no, I mean, there's a great Orwell thing, The Moon Underwater, isn't it? He writes his piece about what defines the perfect pub. There are a few things we can take issue with, but it's still not bad. It's lovely. It's lovely. Do you tell that a bit more? I have to remember it. It's only a short piece. I think it's just literally, it might have been a journalistic piece. Yeah, it was a piece for the Times. A piece for the Times, yeah.

1:38:45Yeah, he spoke about the landlady, he spoke about open heart. He spoke about, you know, the place feeling wonderful. But I think the thing I keep thinking about now, and when I say that thing about show me a really great pub and I'll show you a landlord who runs it. Sure. You go back and, you know... Kim Tickel was always there. Well, we touched on Kevin Moran as well earlier on, and Leslie from the French House as well. And I think it's absolutely key. And that's something that has been kind of partially erased from a lot of posts because of the fact that they're owned by big firms who just put managers in, who don't live there, and only do 40 hours a week.

1:39:25And most of that's paperwork. So, you know, that takes a bit of the soul out of it. What were your, because obviously it's kind of easy in retrospect, like now, I mean, the place is already beginning to swell outside and I can hear it, it's a wonderful sound, but what were your doubts going into this? Oh. Like what were the things, because it's a fucking huge site. Because both of you... Yes, it was. I mean, there was one rule, wasn't it? I'm not going to open a London pub. Was it you or was it Charlie? No, my rule is I'm not going to open another one. I've got it, got it. But we'd always plan to do it.

1:39:57But, I mean, this was a real jump into a dark chasm for me. Because it hadn't been a pub for 12 years. And obviously we were taking this big step into the dark. you know going very retro very old school lots of people in the industry who knew the old Devonshire which closed in the 2010s always said it was a dog of a sight and never worked and no one drank this end of Piccadilly and it would be a disaster, I literally spent four months every time I closed my eyes I had a vision of myself behind the bar there on my own and nobody coming in and it was a recurring dream it wouldn't go away until i got the bloody thing open and it got to the stage where when we were a month away from opening i was just like fucking get it open for christ's sake because i i can't sleep and i can't think straight and all i want to do is pour pints and serve customers even if there's only a few of them but for me it was um and what was the takeoff like in terms of a graph was it a kind of sigmoid with the slow at first it was a hurricane it was a hurricane yeah it was it really was like do you remember those old videos when Harrods used to do a sale in the 80s and they'd always have the TV camera inside and they'd open the door and the whole street would rush in it was like that it was like that yeah so quite the opposite of me standing alone behind the bar happened which brought another load of complications and problems but we dealt with it and it's doing alright thank goodness yeah yeah yeah what's the because I think when we had lunch I think Charlie was talking like i don't know if you purposely did this but didn't you write a list of like really hard things down yeah that almost would kind of no one else would be able to do yeah so there because i think that's a really good let the terms of getting people in yeah do things that are so that no one else would bother doing because then you're automatically different well there were our unique selling points you can see that picture there you can see that the beer tops are the czech ones they've run at twice the speed of the uk ones and for us to get them plumbed in was a huge thing You know, we've spoken about the Guinness, you know, about how we burn the wood for the Ember Grill, you know, about the butchery.

1:42:11We bake all the bread on site. We've had our own steak knives, steak knives, all of those. There was actually 38. 38 unique selling points. And I had a really, really fraught and anxious conversation with Charlie probably about two months before we opened, and he was going, we can't do all of these things, we need to cut this, at least by a third. And in his charismatic and measured and brilliant way, he just went, no, we're doing all with them. And we did. What was the hardest couple to get over the line? Um... The ovens must have been. The ovens is still quite a thing. I mean, we're burning half a ton of oak a week in the middle of Piccadilly, so getting all the filtration and the cleaning and blasting by the council, which we thankfully have has been a thing the butchery thing which is now a big thing because we own the whole sort of chain from when it leaves the abattoir to when it goes to on the place and that's five to six weeks now and so we have that much stock all the time the wine list the amount of wine the Guinness the logistics of getting the beer in and out and having it fresh and beautiful you know the staffing all the stuff but I love it yeah yeah yeah but I think it's, none of it's been, none of it's been.

1:43:34I think the idea of writing down a list of really hard things and running it hard is a great way to create like a massive gap between you and like competition. Is there, is what's the equivalent of that Rory in terms of a client where you've basically wrote a list of things that are like, I suppose it's, it's a offspring of reverse benchmarking, but like when you write lists, I don't know with any client, it could be Coca-Cola, it could be whoever where you've said, right, this competition is going to struggle to do this. Uh, differentiation always requires you to do something that's a little bit bonkers, doesn't it?

1:44:08Yeah. In other words, it's the thing you do that you don't have to do that carries the weight of the... This is where finance people are a catastrophe in marketing, you see. Because they go, well, you know, the classic example is the Doubletree Hotel cookies, okay? There is no, you know, nobody ever goes to a hotel and goes, I found that hotel experience very disappointing. They didn't give me free warm cookies on check-in, okay? So those are the things that the finance people will always cut. But in the process, what they do is they make everything more and more alike to its competitors. And therefore, the things that you do that aren't actually necessary, the discretionary things, are the things that carry by far the greater part of the weight of communicating what makes you valuable.

1:44:49It's a bit like my two cup holders, right? It's not very relevant when you buy a car. I'm going to say, as we've been talking about silent irritants, I think the cup holders and the cookies might be silent pleasantries. Yes, yes, they are. Because there are things that are added in that you don't necessarily tell everyone about, but they elevate your experience. I mean, famously, I suppose the people who understand that, actually Skoda copied it amusingly, but Rolls-Royce putting umbrellas in the door handle of the car is the kind of bollocks which is kind of, you know, it's gratuitous, but it's precisely for that reason that it's really, really interesting.

1:45:24But again, it goes back to that thing of sexuality and feeling it when it's right and knowing that it's right and being pleasantly... Nice idea. I hope they don't mind me telling you. I'm not going to name the hotel chain, but a very, very upmarket hotel chain, extremely upmarket hotel chain. We just got into a conversation. I was kind of talking about this reverse benchmarking thing. They suddenly realised that every hotel chain, you get this shitty pair of slippers next to the bed. Yeah. And they said, why don't we do it the other way around? which was we say, if you would like slippers, please request them.

1:45:56And then when someone does request slippers, which is probably, unless they're Japanese, probably one time in 10, OK, or one time in 15, we'll actually get some embroidered proper slippers with their initials on for them to keep. I won't name that hotel because now everybody who goes there will, can I have three pairs of slippers? But the point about that is... It'd be on my Instagram. Rather than doing something that everybody expects and they go, meh, there's some slippers. Yeah. By the way, one story I tell, which someone somewhere has had a genius idea, which I think has made half a billion dollars for the hotel industry, which never occurred to me before.

1:46:36So I'm booking a hotel, I think it was the Intercontinental Hotel in Houston. And normally when you get to choose a room in a hotel, it's, you know, it's like, you know, standard king, double queen, da-da-da-da. It's all about size of room, number of beds. That's it. and this person whoever the genius was because it it works for every hotel had just branded some rooms as pool access did i tell you this before so such and such a room pool access and such and such a room gym access and what they mean is it's just the same as any other room that size but in one case it's close to the pool another case it's close to the gym and i paid 20 bucks a night more for a room that was close to the pool, which normally would have been given out at random to someone who didn't care about whether they're close to the pool or not.

1:47:22Now, the genius of that is that doesn't require you to put up a single picture. It doesn't require you to put anything in the minibar. It costs absolutely nothing. Simply by describing something differently, you've created value. It's brilliant. I've got a great example of that. One of the original Italian restaurants in London was called Tarazzo. Oh, is that up in Regional Park? No, it's on the corner of Romilly Street and Dean Street. This isn't the Capri Lounge, is it? Not that. Yes, it is. Go on, tell the story. Sorry, I don't know. This is brilliant. So they have this... Everybody listen to this.

1:47:56I'm going to break the fourth wall. You might be sharing a little bit. Sorry, sorry. It's this good a story, so listen in, folks. So they used to have this kind of dead space downstairs, which was an old function room. Sorry, just for context. Years. No, it must be the 50s. It was up near Regional Park. This is the 50s, yeah. No, I know exactly where it was. It's the corner of Dean Street and Romilly Street. It's currently Mr. Foggs. And if you pass by, it's still got the... Oh, it's there, is it? Well, it's long gone. It's currently Mr. Foggs. But if you look, it's got this beautiful mosaic tile with tirato outside.

1:48:28So you know which one it was. But obviously, Soho, you know what these downstairs rooms are like. It was an old function room. Nobody ever wanted to go down there. So they refurbished it a bit and they did the tables and chairs and they put some nice art downstairs. And they lit it nicely and it still didn't work. So what they did was, every time a reservation came through, they'd go, so when do you want it for? Oh, it'll be one o 'clock on Friday. I'm so sorry, but the Capri lounge is full. You're going to have to sit on the ground floor, I'm afraid. Oh, OK, well, if a table comes up down there, will you be able to?

1:49:01Maybe we'll see what we can do. And they would do this to every guest and say, I'm really sorry, but there's no access to the Capri lounge at the moment. So everybody wanted to know what the Capri Lounge was. And what they did was they funneled all the guests downstairs and they made sure they had a really nice time. So the Capri Lounge just became a thing and it became the premium place to eat. Now, a boring person would say, I'm terribly sorry you'll have to sit in the basement. Yes. What they did was they actually rebranded the less desirable space as the more desirable space. Exactly. And by implication...

1:49:33And then it became the most desirable place. I actually heard people would ring from Los Angeles say, I'm arriving in London on Friday. Is there space in the Cat Free Lounge? That's genius. Genius, isn't it? Absolutely. The words, I think, like, I listened to a podcast where a guy was saying, we, in terms of, like, getting people recycle more, the words, change the word rubbish bin to landfill bin. It's like one... I don't know who it was. I was in a wormhole on YouTube, essentially. But it's like those two little words can change everything. Amazing. It's mad. What are some cities that you really love in terms of going for food adventures.

1:50:10I know we've talked about San Sebastian before. I've been three times since. I saw you. Oh, really? Presently direct flights? Well, OK, actually, maybe a better question. Do you want to want to do one of my direct flights from London City to San Sebastian? Correct. Yes. That is a sensational place. They are also, my fellow... Apparently, the Basques share their Y chromosome with the Welsh, so I feel particular for them. I swear everyone shares their Y chromosome with the Welsh. Well, that's because we're so incredibly fertile. No, but actually, in every respect, that place is gorgeous, isn't it?

1:50:39I adore it. And all the surrounding villages as well. Yeah, absolutely. What about anywhere underrated then, would you say? Like people that are probably not on people's radar. Do you know what? I've not done a lot of travel since I saw you last. But you know me, I love Northern Italy. Love Tuscany. I love the Veneto. And I love going up into the mountains, you know, around Lake Garda, going up into Alto Adige. a totally underrated place for food because you have that sort of border between Germanic and Italian happening there. So they've got unbelievable pasta and fantastic meat, gorgeous wine, really, really lovely place.

1:51:24Generalisation, every number two place is underrated and every number one place is overrated. Go on, tell me more. Well, what tends to happen is that fame tends to confer itself in a kind of winner-takes-all effect. which is what you might call Salkum okay right in Devon which is actually too popular for its own good and I'm worried about San Sebastian well that's an interesting point fortunately the airport isn't big enough that's why London City flies to San Sebastian because it can take internal flights from Madrid and Barcelona and it can take the little planes from London City but you can't basically Ryanair won't be able to fly there you can land an Embraer 190 Sorry, this is not an aviation podcast.

1:52:08We were talking about roads last time. By the way, the Embraer 190 is the most underrated, gorgeous plane, lovely plane. Sorry, anyway. Anyway, it's like a private jet, but for ordinary flights. But, no, I mean, San Sebastian has, luckily, has a bit of a moat to prevent it becoming ruined. Yeah, because it's hard to get to. Because it's hard to get to. You find a Bilbao and drive would be the only other way, I guess. but generally the number one place is too popular is is unjustly popular and therefore the number two the number three the number four and and it's a rule of market such as it's god it's a distribution if you want to get really nerdy it happens in brands in other words the brand leader always enjoys both an unfair advantage for two reasons when i say unfair what's unfair and the reason is, let's make it get it right, which is it's a part of more people's repertoire and the people who have it in their repertoire buy it more frequently within their repertoire so you get a combinatorial effect where, for example this is why people go to Umbria rather than Tuscany or they go to the lot rather than the Dordogne, which is that the place that's most famous is probably you know, maybe it's 5 % better than the second best place, although you might argue when it gets really, really crowded, it's now 15 % worse.

1:53:26Okay? And if you want to buy a house in Sulcombe, forget it. So the trick is often to go and find a number three, number four. I'd often say, actually, for example, if you want to go to an American city, you've got to choose the time of year, right? Go to Chicago. Yeah, go to Chicago. You'd agree with that, okay? Why Chicago? Everybody would go, Orlando, New York, LA, right, standard places, Florida, everywhere, everybody goes there. And actually, Chicago is the best city, the best big city in America. Yeah, because... Well, first of all, it's an American city. Yeah. OK, it's a really, really American Midwest.

1:54:03By the way, the food scene is fantastic. Absolutely brilliant. It's really great. You've got this barbecue. You've got all of the Midwest coming in. You've got posh restaurants. You've got Michelin star. You've got unbelievable burgers. You've got, like, really great bars. It's a great day. It's a fantastic day. I suppose people go pick New York. And also there aren't that many tourists. So I always say there's a kind of... You're staying in the right place if you're at the hotel breakfast and at least half of the people having breakfast aren't tourists, OK? They're there for some other reason.

1:54:35When a place becomes entirely about tourism, you kind of lose something. You lose all the authenticity. Yeah, all the authenticity is gone. And this is why Airbnb, which is... I mean, this is one of the things I'm really conflicted about, OK? Airbnb, if you're a Welsh farmer and you convert a stable which no one would live in and you convert it into a holiday net, Airbnb is an absolute joy. If you're trying to live in Barcelona, it's a living nightmare because it's more profitable to Airbnb, a two-bedroom apartment for 14 weekends of the year, than it is to have a local living in it for 365 days.

1:55:09Which is wrong. And, you know, fundamentally, you get these effects. And the winner takes all effects. And absolutely beset tourism. I mean, actually, tourism's kind of stupid because an awful lot of tourism is people going somewhere far away for bragging rights. That's actually less interesting than something nearby. I'll give you an example of this. OK, I used to do this with an audience of 500 people. I go, OK, how many people have been to Machu Picchu? And you get about 10, 15. Oh, if it's Gen Z, it's everybody puts out their hands because it's their gap year. Then you go, how many of you have been to Lincoln Cathedral?

1:55:48And you get half, and two of them will be people who either went to university in Lincoln or grew up there. And I go, look, objectively speaking, Lincoln Cathedral is every bit as interesting as Machu Picchu, and there's a fucking castle next door with an original copy of Magna Carta or something, right? And you can get there in a day on the train for, like, 23 quid. You don't get altitude sickness, but it doesn't have many bragging rights. and so an awful lot of tourism is kind of bollocks because people go there to say they've been there we talk about this a lot but when you when you say your favorite restaurant if you ask them your favorite restaurant you'll always say the one that gives you the most status no we've talked about that as in like you'll always say like a three star that you've been to once versus your actual because your favorite restaurant is really the one you go to most frequently yeah what was a guilthead it's the one at the end of your street where the way to know as you know yeah yeah a few more things then we'll wrap this up i'm loving this one thing um i think we've talked about when we had lunch was um i think it's just it's just interesting to talk about um is the difference between real stories and true stories i absolutely love that and i think we talked about like the way especially the irish and sort of the welsh it's it's you're not you're conversing to show how good you are at conversing is there such thing as a really good story that doesn't have an element of some kind of exaggeration or an untruth?

1:57:12Yes. Or an embellishment or a change in the timing or the tone or the characters? Is there any such thing? I actually think no. I think stories by their nature are things that are more important to be entertaining than to be true. And they need to be real and they need to have a hook. They need to have an element of truth. They need to think something. Well, even still. Yeah, yeah. Would you say the Marxian equivalent of that is, Roar? Oh, well, David Ogilvie famously, he wrote a story in one of his books, Autobiographies, and someone went along and basically had a little bit of a quibble with the veracity.

1:57:52And David Ogilvie said, I know, but it's a good story, so shut up. Yeah, exactly. And effectively, the way I was describing it Stories are the PDF files for the human mind. They're the format in which we retain and share information. That's Will Stores' thing. And therefore, just as you have to get something into PDF format for purposes of sharing a document that you need to sign, you've got to get something into story format in order for it to become both memorable and storable. In a way, statistics are not memorable, stories are, very simply. If you went to the pub and someone started reeling out data or showing you graphs, you know, you wouldn't stare around very long.

1:58:34Whereas stories are entertaining, rewarding, shareable, memorable, all those qualities. And it's a format. It's like a cognitive format. I think that's the way to look at it. Well, Will Storr says we're the homo... You know what it's... Homo Narans, is it? Homo Nagans or Homo Narans. Like, we're the storytelling being. Yeah. We only, as you say... Isn't he a great guy, by the way? He's been on the podcast. Fucking best... Brilliant. Best episodes I've ever done. Brilliant, yeah. He's super smart. What in terms of... The status game, by the way, is fantastic, if you haven't read that. I haven't.

1:59:05Will Storr's book, The Status Game. I love it. That's very good. How do you deal with, like... We talk about trends and fads. Like, this place is, like, rockety. What keeps you up at night about keeping, like, not relevant, but, like, keeping this thing moving for... How do you think about that? Because I think the other... Because you know what you were saying about, Rory, about number one and number two. Like, there's that... Almost there's a pressure of being... the busiest, the best? I don't know. I mean, there's a couple of things I want to say. One is that we're not trendy. I don't follow trends.

1:59:37I do things that people say I should do. I do things that I think are timeless, you know, like selling pints and doing scotch eggs. By the way, that's a virtue of London over New York. I find the New York eating scene ridiculously faddish. Yeah. I remember saying, someone said, where are you going this evening? And they said, that's so last year. And I kind of went, as a London... I kind of go, is it any good or not? I find that implicitly so annoying. Yes. And, you know, we just... What the fuck are you talking about? It's so last year. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that we need to continue to be good.

2:00:12And in order to continue to be good, we look at our why, which is we're here to make sure people feel comfortable and safe, happy, welcome, well looked after. And if we look at that top line all the time in everything, then we know that we are doing okay. and where we can find marginal gains, little places where we can do things slightly better all the time, always looking at those, then I think we'll be OK. Touch wood. Interesting. Rory, what would you say in terms of, like, that Y piece with the Simon Sinek? Because have you met Simon Sinek? No, weirdly not. No, I shouldn't have been, but no.

2:00:48He was at Ogilvy, New York, probably at the same time as I was in London, but I never met him then. But by the way, some of what he did got then taken on by people with this whole idea of purpose, which got a bit excessive. But the fundamental point of Start With Why is actually, it's a very, very good kind of North Star. I think it's very powerful. I think it's a powerful idea and very, very useful. And actually, by the way, consumers can tell. That's why it really matters. Which means? Fundamentally, there's a lovely story by John Kay, you know, the FT writer, where he goes out to a restaurant with a friend and they've loved this restaurant for quite a few years.

2:01:25And he goes, you know, something's changed here. It feels like it's been taken over by private equity, you see. And they go and Google it and sure enough it has. Isn't that amazing? And, you know, there's something about the portions. They actually felt it. There you go. You see. And suddenly the motivation has gone from being... And by the way, the shareholder value movement has been a catastrophe in business. The only healthy thing in business is a customer value movement, which is why family-owned businesses disproportionately better, live longer, have better brands than PLCs. In Germany, it's way more common to have a family business than it is.

2:02:03Actually, the car industry, I mean, although they are public companies, you'll even find, I mean, you know, Adidas, Aldi, okay, Puma. Quite a lot of German businesses are driven by, do you know this, basically sibling rivalry. So you have Grower and Hans Grower, are two separate tap companies where the brothers fell out. Puma and Adidas are in the same town, but the brothers fell out. And the car industry, I can't remember, there's all these people called Pinshit Reader who sort of own BMW, and then one of them is the stepfather of ferry Porsche. But the family thing, and I was in Texas, HEB, all these places, Buc-ee's, they're family-owned businesses.

2:02:43And if you're a family-owned business, you have a huge advantage over a PLC because, one, you work to multiple time horizons. Yeah. OK. And so in other words, rather than being obsessed with the next quarter or the next year's figures, you're actually thinking both six months ahead and six years ahead. Yeah. You have, you're on the premises, OK, in a sense. You have long-term reputational skin in the game because it's your name above the door and you're thinking of the futurity and posterity. And also your customers are coming before the shareholders. Before the shareholders, you see. So you haven't got any shareholders.

2:03:18So what happens when you haven't got any shareholders? You focus on your customers. The great thing about your customers, your customers live in the real world with all the messiness that entails, all right? Whereas the shareholders are basically judging you by a load of artificial numerical metrics, which don't really capture the value of the business at all. They're just there to justify their own investment decisions to someone else. And consequently, therefore, I think, a very interesting fact, Out of the five IPA gold winners for advertising effectiveness last year, four of them were family-owned businesses.

2:03:55Specsavers, Yorkshire Tea, Lathwaites. Timpsons. Well, Timpsons is sort of family-owned. I think you're right, actually. It is, isn't it? Yeah. What was the fourth one? Their customer service. Oh, McCain. The oven chip people. They're a Canadian family, right? Really? Well, the only one I wanted to mention was Richard Sounds, of course. Oh, Julie Richard. Yeah, fantastic. What's that? Richer Sounds? There's a book, The Richer Way. He's such a legend. Wait, but as Matt... Oh, oh, oh, God. OK, so there's a book called The Richer Sounds, The Richer Way, by Julian Richer, who founded Richer Sounds.

2:04:29By the way... Highest retail pounds per square foot in the works. Oh, is that they start TVs? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, by the way, one of the things I absolutely love, which everybody can learn from, is he went and bought... It was nothing amazingly expensive. It was like a Rolls-Royce Phantom... Sorry, Shadow 2. This is about 15, 20 years ago. And the best performing store in any given couple of weeks, the people who worked at the store got the Rolls-Royce for a couple of weeks. Unbelievably inexpensive incentive programme. I mean, back in the day, you could buy a Rolls-Royce Shadow Tube for like 20 grand or something.

2:05:05Yeah. But you're some kids working... OK. You're some kids in Barnsley working in a hi-fi store, and for two weeks you're cruising around in a Rolls Royce, then basically you're the most successful person in your school. Yeah, right? Because you got the roller. It's the game stages. Really, really clever stuff. That's what he would do. But he also had a system which is, by the way, any person working at Richer Sands got paid a fiver if you sent in a suggestion. Now, he said, obviously there's the risk that people who are just short of money will just send in bollocks. And he said there was about 3 % of it was bollocks suggestions just to make a fiver.

2:05:41but he paid a fiver regardless that was so he had a biver back then that was like but the richer way it's called and it's it's a it's a really super now i'll tell you why because really yeah back in the god back in about 1998 or something i went to a wpp event where he came as a guest speaker complete epiphany but his he gave a talk there and it was one of those sort of three or four moments in my life where i go hold on i'd never thought about it like this before this is the The other one was a guy... What was, like, the... Seymour from Seymour Powell, the design company. Have you ever come across him?

2:06:16Just quickly go back to Richard. So what was the epiphany from that talk? Well, it was just his approach to business was... Basically, it was customer-focused and employee-focused. Entirely. Entirely, right? But it was very healthily employee-focused. Now, he had, you know, let's be fair, one advantage he had is it's not difficult to find, and particularly then, to find young guys who are obsessed with hi-fi. But you would get a level of knowledge in the staff there, which was way above that, which you'd find in a standard electrical retailer. So it was basically, it was medium to high-end hi-fi TVs, equipment, very, very competitively priced in tiny stores.

2:06:59Tiny, tiny stores. Genuinely tiny stores. What was the value of that, being in a small store? Was that just... Low rent. Low rent, yeah, yeah, yeah. so he used to have warehouse and just bring it in you'd bring it in as yeah yeah it's Argos and he always had stock yeah yeah because the other one is that zap business you know those speedy deliveries yeah so they basically put it was so competitive and they put all their warehouses basically like in Knightsbridge Chelsea and then the minimum basket spent has to be over 50 quid they basically have bottles of Dom Perignon you'll be able to get like really expensive things but you'll get one or two rich people who are basically on a sesh will get two or three bottles of champagne and it covers the rest of the the rest of the average spend brings up by that like it's almost like that diehard fans yeah and they've positioned it as like really premium that's by the way a shrewd approach to pricing which is EasyJet very quickly discovered it's almost like barbell pricing EasyJet has quite premium coffee, quite premium sandwiches, quite premium food and the reason is there are people who are really price sensitive on EasyJet who aren't going to order anything.

2:08:06And then there are people who think, wow, I've saved 100 quid by going on EasyJet. Let's go large. So they realise there's no point in trying to go for the middle. OK? So McDonald's actually in KFC practice barbell pricing, they call it, don't they? Which is basically there are people who are focused on price and there are people who aren't. Don't worry about the middle because something's either a bargain or it's a treat. There's no word for something that's in between a bargain or a treat. is also something slightly disappointing about that as well. Yeah, because it's neither one thing nor the other.

2:08:36Exactly. You see? I suppose that's what you guys have done with, like, the sausage on the stick, the Bex beer. Then you can equally go upstairs and spend an absolute fortune. Absolutely. And it happens all the time. Yeah. I'm under pressure for time. I'll be able to just wrap it up. This has been absolutely fun. Yeah, I could go on for ages. And thank you for giving me the chapter and verse about the Capri lounge, because I've been trying to track that down for ages. I'll send you the address. Oh, fantastic. I'll go there. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah. Lads, thank you so much. As always, absolutely.

2:09:05Pleasure. What a joy. It's just three of us that we've got. Absolutely fantastic. Absolutely, really, really enjoyed that. Yeah, that went. Sorry about the voice, by the way. I know. Thank you so, so much for listening to the podcast. I really, really do appreciate it. If you liked that episode, only if you liked it, please do give it five stars. Subscribe. Tell all your friends, families, foes, next door but one, cat, dog, whatever. Please tell everyone about this podcast. It means the world to me. And I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of Challenger food and drink brands.

2:09:37Please do hit me up on LinkedIn, search Dan Pope, and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of Challenger food and drink brands. Thank you so much.