Rory Sutherland: Why Following Logic is Dangerous For Challenger Brands, Act Foolish To Unlock Opportunities Your Competition Don’t See

59:42And it was a kind of place where we'd go for, you know, brainstorming sessions and so on. Right. And so his wife, Herta, is obviously a fantastic repository of David's stories as well, as well as being absolutely remarkable in her own right. I mean, fabulous. Where was it when you met him? I only met him once, and I can time it more or less exactly, because David was terrified of flying. and as a consequence rarely came to the UK. And the one visit he made during my time at Ogilvy in London, well, I'm still there, but I mean, 88, he died in 99, I think. So in the 11 years when he was alive and I worked at Ogilvy, his one visit to London was just after the Eurostar open.

1:00:32and he came by train and he uh pinned up his work uh and you know gave a presentation of of his work and he was at the time i suppose he would have been born in 1911 if i'm right so he would have been in his mid 80s i would think i think i cancelled the holiday i heard he was coming over i think i'd cancel a holiday to me because i thought this may well as it was this may well be or any chance and uh he was genuinely quite extraordinary genuinely quite extraordinary how so i always one of the questions i ask the guests right is there's you can read all the books in the world but there's something you pick up from osmosis and nuance from people do you know what i mean like what what was what was why was he quite remarkable one of the things is he clearly maintained right into you know acquisitions uh into his 80s a kind which which he always had i think a kind of grumpiness with the wider advertising industry you know which you might call divine discontent that was what that was what he usually called it um and um uh you know i remember my colleague arrived we were both in the direct marketing part of ogilvy at the time uh what was then called ogilvy made the direct and when we introduced ourselves as being from direct he kind of embraced us and said thank god a proper salesman so his uh his love of uh direct marketing was perfectly sincere by the way i mean his head His office, as well as being in the Chateau de Tufu, which is about four hours back from Paris, not far from Poitiers, his office in the French agency was in the direct marketing agency, not in the advertising agency.

1:02:12And they've actually preserved it rather magnificently. So if you ever go to Ogilvy, Paris, there's a kind of recreation of David's office. Because his whole thing, which I find fascinating, and I was speaking to a guy yesterday who's Gordon Ramsay's new business partner called Hexglad. They're doing Reinventing Cookware. Genius. Yeah. Huge business. But what we were talking about is how David Ogilvie's whole thing was, like, it's got to sell. Like, that's one of his big things is it's got to be able to sell. Yeah. If it doesn't sell, it's not creative. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Seth Godin, who's the marketing guru, you should say, his favorite book is is a guy he talks about all the time is zig ziglar who wrote a book called this uh his book that he basically read a hundred times is called um the secrets of closing the sale and what i find fascinating is these two in uh formidable marketing guys are actually super obsessed with sales do you mean because i think it can get quite wishy-washy do you mean and maybe that's a bright phrasing way of saying it there's a great book actually which i really recommend called 100 million dollar offers by alex hormosey who's an american who made a fortune selling uh effectively software for small gyms and that's kind of wonderful business you can have in the us because the overall market is so vast you have this vast you know monolingual market um he made the brilliant point that you know uh you know if you're selling you know just business management software you know you can charge sort of 10 or 20 you know 50 pounds for it if you're selling gym management software you can charge 5 000 pounds for it and if you're selling small gym management software you can charge even more because people pay according to specificity but that's another book which i'd really recommend everybody read because it's really really interesting on what you might call the proposition now this is an area of marketing which i think is always neglected I'm always interested.

1:04:16I'm a huge fan of both Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson. Yeah. We find, I think, between us, we come at the same thing from different approaches. But between us, there are things we disagree on, but not that much. And they're probably right. I fundamentally accept the fact, by the way, that some of the things I say are wrong. My point is that being wrong occasionally is the price you pay for being interesting. And it's a trade-off we just have to accept. And one of the things that's grossly underexplored in business, I'll include in this the restaurant business, is what Procter – I didn't know the name for it.

1:04:57And you could call it the offer, okay? You could call it the – I mean, it was occasionally called the offer in marketing, occasionally the proposition. Procter & Gamble called it commercial innovation. and commercial innovation is what happens where you don't innovate the product itself you innovate different ways of selling it pricing it packaging it and actually the scope for um gains in commercial innovation so i'll give you an example of what might be considered a commercial innovation i met some wonderful people at lunch stock actually at madfest who came from great british railways which is to be the new kind of unitary body um uh providing for rail travel in the across the uk above and beyond the train operating companies the song and back in the day now there'll be 50 year olds in britain becoming nostalgic about this there was a brilliant brilliant promotion with purcell which is that if you bought a certain amount of personal, you got cheap, cheap family off-peak rail tickets.

1:06:10Because they had a high perceived value. In fact, the cost to a rail company of giving away off-peak travel is actually quite small. I would argue that actually it's wrong to think of it as a cost. It's a sampling exercise. A lot of people never travel by train. They don't travel by train because they don't travel by train. Therefore, they find train travel unfamiliar and baffling and slightly intimidating are the trick is to get them to travel by train three times at which point next time they have a journey to make they're at least making a kind of reasonably balanced decision between car and train but you know one of the things they were rather wonderfully discussing was do you think there's scope for kind of almost amazon prime of train travel so that for example could retired people pay 500 pounds a year in order to have unlimited train travel on any train that wasn't fully booked 24 hours beforehand for example in other words there are loads and loads of ways you can sell a train seat other than peak off peak you know first class second class amazon prime is a really interesting case it's a really fantastic case of commercial innovation in other words rather than charging for delivery every time we charge for it kind of once and we give you some films you know yeah yeah but but but i mean actually i think in the restaurant business i have no doubt that there's scope for i mean okay i suppose you could argue that the subsidized happy meal i'm assuming happy meals are subsidized i may be wrong maybe maybe happy meals are quite profitable but those kind of things where you actually um i mean i'll give you I'll give you a very good example in the restaurant business.

1:07:51It's even more acute in the hotel business, okay? If you have a childless double-earning couple staying in a hotel room, okay? Yeah. That's typically two salaries paying for one room. If you have a couple with kids staying in a hotel, that's typically one salary paying for two rooms. So a… Yeah, we… Okay, you can't have a bit. Okay. you know let's say you know the person's taking a bit of time off to look after the kids that means that a hotel stay is four times as expensive for a family as it is for a dual earning couple so effectively premier inn is to the family what the you know not quite the intercontinental but you get my point okay what the hyatt is okay to a dual earning couple now given that anybody with kids patently isn't it isn't traveling on business therefore you're not actually cannibalizing sort of high revenue business traffic it would seem bloody obvious for hotels to do second room half price or even cleverer still if the hotel isn't fully booked you know we'll refund you on the cost of the second room now let's imagine you did that okay you go and stay on your holiday end right and you got kids and you book the two rooms they go well the hotel wasn't full last night so um uh we've put a 150 quid credit on your bloody bill right now well where are you going to stay next time instead of the effing holiday inn aren't you right because you've got 150 quid credit credit sitting there okay now in restaurants i suppose kfc does it with the bucket okay but feeding a family with one salary is inordinately more expensive than feeding your you know yourself a couple with two salaries not quite as extreme as the hotel case but it's not far off it seems weird that fast food restaurants mostly price i mean as we said you know the kfc buckets they're an exception but most fast food restaurants priced by the item not by the now as a result undoubtedly there's an economic inefficiency there in the if you are prepared to make a concession to families and you could make sure there wasn't any um uh what you might call gaming of the system or um uh what you might call revenue dilution in other words you didn't get four strangers outside all pretending to be a family which you know might happen okay not gonna happen in a hotel i'm not gonna sleep with a bloody stranger to save it you know draw the line of that um but um uh you know if you can create you know interesting different ways in which you can price things according to people's ability to pay price discrimination if you can find uh a small niche group of people who can basically take dud um inventory off your hands so there's quite a clever app called hotel tonight and the whole thing is you've got to book a hotel that day now tourist isn't going to do it a business person isn't going to do it right yeah but if you're pissed and you missed the last train okay hotel tonight is perfect because they sell a room they wouldn't otherwise have sold and you see i i asked what i asked hotels how much do you need from a hotel room to more than break even including the cost of just turning over the room and it's kind of 15 20 quid roughly probably less than that they're probably exaggerating um but you know those kind of things those kind of what you might call exploring the value exchange things in commercial innovation strike me and i think the reason they don't happen to know why they don't is because marketing no longer has responsibility properly for pricing it doesn't really control the five p's it's become devolved into a kind of you know marcom's ghetto of hey it's just like reprogram if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got an ocado listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies.

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1:13:32They're in the same building as us, and they're called Mando Connect. And they specialize in brand partnerships. And they're one of very few entities who do this. But as indeed Mark Ritson says, brand partnerships are a completely underexplored source of value creation. And again, I suspect the reason is exactly the same. Either ad agencies don't know how to make any money out of them, so they don't propose them, which is quite popular. On the client side, it probably falls between two stools. It's no one's responsibility in many cases. But actually, the potential there for symbiotic relationships between different brands is absolutely immense.

1:14:13And brands that doesn't have to be two brands in the same space. In fact, what it can quite often be is a big established brand and a small cool brand. You're going to have Trip CBD drink. Yes. In fact, I've consumed it occasionally with mildly pleasant results. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. It's good. Not so keen on the THC. I've consumed a few of those THC sweets.

1:14:37You'll get very creative after a few of those down here. Yeah, yeah. I've never ventured into that arena. I've tried Trip. I've quite enjoyed it. So I interviewed Liv on this podcast. I mean, they're the fastest growing drinks band in the UK. They're really taking off. and she she met the founder of calm the meditation app at like a sour house event whatever it was and yeah the sort of place of serendipity there right but they but they did they did a partnership where calm are the big brand yep and they did put it all over uh i think that was like a discount if you're a calm user you've got a discount on the dtc website or something like that bingo but people listening to this especially challenger brands is brand partnerships are brilliant and also it's like it doesn't have to be like the right it doesn't as i was saying it doesn't have to be like a cross category um sorry it doesn't even have to be in the same industry do you mean it can be something completely different no no i mean in fact there was a partnership we did between a small app and you know um uh she did a partnership with market suspensors for example yeah uh small gifting app and market suspensors that's exactly the kind of thing which you can do which is kind of a win-win because the the big brand earns cool points and the small brand gets exposure scale and degree of credibility and so it's kind of symbiotic relationship between you know cool and rich you know um and um yeah actually funnily enough that is quite often a symbiotic relationship in humanity isn't it because rich people tend not to be cool so you know one of the things you notice is that cool people get co-opted by the rich example um um but those kind of things i mean actually what used to happen is people used to talk total nonsense about brand partnerships so they'd say things like oh no it dilutes your brand okay it sounds very plausible but don't i say well that's a bit like saying that my having friends dilutes my personality you know it's it's not a sensible it's one of those things that sounds a reason but it's not yeah bullshit yeah yeah yeah well i want to go back to david ogilvie so So you talked about, you know, you'd met him and he was an extraordinary guy.

1:16:48What are some of the specific... A lot of other, by the way, I mean, just to give full credit, I mean, Ogilvy was pretty remarkable, pretty replete for a period with quite a few. I mean, Steve Harrison and Drayton Bird, for example. I don't know how well you know Drayton Bird, but he was kind of the direct marketing guru of the UK. Still is, in many ways. He's still practicing at about 80-something and is an absolutely brilliant person who has an enormous influence on me along with a bunch of other people who came through who've come through Ogilvy and continue to come through Ogilvy yeah what so what are some of those lessons from that that these are people you record to like the dead spiders is that was is there's a I remember do you know about the dead spiders because it was in I remember I remember thinking it was like some sort of either like David Bowie sort of weird tribute act or like i remember i think it was in your book and it was like dave trot and um there was like it was like a there's a bunch of um oldsters including me i'm probably one of the younger ones relatively uh from the advertising industry and we actually need to reconvene it's been a long time it all arose from a mishearing that someone had started an agency called red spider and someone thought it was called dead spider and they thought it was pretty strange it does sound like it's the sort of place you'd um go to some sort of uh underground bar and but we would occasionally have a dead spiders uh finally i thought it was a strange accusation of that guy nick do you remember that guy who was making completely spurious accusations against politicians and um uh he was convinced there was this sort of weird pedophile conspiracy going deep into the establishment and that you know that you know the head of the army and three conservative cabinet ministers were murdering a boy and throwing dead spiders over him um so maybe we need to rename in the light of that but um pretty odd i would say that's pretty odd paraphilia throwing dead spiders on people i have to say um but um it's um i think it's one of the interesting things is that marketing is actually more interesting more powerful and has more potential than even marketers realize in many cases.

1:18:58How? That simply that so much of value is perceptually determined. Okay. Now, if you take Trip, for example, we don't know the counterfactual, but let's say they'd sold it in a big can, not a small can. Okay. Probably wouldn't have worked. Yeah. There are all these weird things that, you know, something medicinal, something that's perceived to be potent. and the most extreme case of that those ginger shots you now buy for about two pounds 15 they're expensive because they're small yeah yeah yeah okay yeah and so so if you proceed as though the world is a rational space and that consumers have an objective perception on reality and our utility maximizes and blah blah blah blah blah you'll get a lot really really badly wrong because most really interesting ideas have an element of the nonsensical.

1:19:52This is exactly why I get back to my point about if I open, which I don't want to open, I'd love someone else to open it. If you open up bacon sandwich, you'd refuse to serve ketchup. Now, I don't know why you do that, but I just have a hunch that if you want to establish yourself as a food lover's food place, those weird eccentric rules kind of convey something about you. The order of Le Swine, you'll need to get this. Go on. Le Swine. So go have, I was at the, um, a trade show or an event they did, the Old Truman Brewery. This was like five years ago. And they've basically done that. They were, they've just focused on perfecting the bacon sandwich.

1:20:32They've got a bloody good business that, um, I'm trying to pull it, pull this up actually. Because the bacon sandwich is, assuming you can eat bacon, which isn't everybody, is an extraordinary item of food. But that's the definition of less is more with bacon sandwich because, I mean, I've had it before where I've tried to put chilli oil in it. It just ruins it. It just needs to be shit bread, butter. The bread's going to have, I think, the roll with a bit of dust on it. I think it's all going to have dust. I don't know what the contribution is of the dust. I'm trying to find this. But in a dusty roll, or perhaps a stoi, if you're from the Northeast.

1:21:09So you get old-fashioned middle bacon, right? Bacon butter, milk and onion buns, which are just gorgeous. Fresh sage. Yeah. You don't get a tomato ketchup. You get a chipotle and mushroom ketchup. And you get a bacon guide, which is that value add at the end. I'll show you. Can you have brown sauce? I mean, you can't have brown sauce. That's not right.

1:21:36I think so. I prefer brown sauce with sausages. I think that's... Oh, no, no, no. You see, I don't know. I think... But that's really interesting because that business of taking one thing... And doing your work. And the apotheosis of it... Yeah. I mean, Five Guys is really interesting from that standpoint. It's a very, really interesting business. The other thing you could almost do on that is, you know, your psychophysics thing where it's like things... I don't know. I may have not got it down, but I've been thinking about it so much. But when you eat a pizza with a knife and fork, which I will sometimes do, right?

1:22:11Yes. So if I'm in a pizza, there's a place in Wandsworth Common called Pizza de Volta, which does an insane pizza. Really, really good. I think it's actually better with a knife and fork. It's ten times better. It's ten times better. If you're getting a Domino's, but it changes the taste of it. Completely. completely if you were to get a restaurant open restaurant which does it's like almost you can only eat your pizza with a knife and fork but there's that you could which i suppose is pizza express to some extent yeah it is yeah and pizza expresses thing is is which i think is beautiful which is your marble table awaits you that's their strap line on instagram at least oh interesting your marble table awaits you so clever that's very that's really really nice so spotting those details and actually the marble table is clever because it it isn't a tablecloth which signifies fine dining but nor is it something rudimentary and i'm always interested in the things we know without knowing them it's technically called tacit knowledge and there's most of what we do is based on tacit knowledge actually uh think in other words things we know at an unconscious so the classic is on let it if you watch clarkson's farm i actually haven't watched that but what's the guy called um but reversing a trailer into a narrow gate okay with a tractor as caleb says i can't tell you how to do it you just have to know how and it's almost certainly right you know so you could get the professor of bloody engineering at imperial college and ask him to reverse a trailer into a gate and he'd cock it up but someone who just unconsciously learned how to do it would do it in one i used to when i went to cambridge i was at a college which was opposite mark suspenses and they had they'd actually paid the college a large amount of money for the right to reverse articulated lorries into the into a small entrance because that was the only way the lorries could turn and watching those guys do it or watching people reverse up to a loading bay is just art because you couldn't you can't explain how to do it you've just got to know so i used to deliver cheese was my job random job yeah random job so i left uni and was like what am i going to do with my life but uh it was actually quite good delivering cheese because i'd have i'd have you know i was getting paid bugger all eight nine hours a day just listening to podcasts this is 2016 and now i've got a podcast so back to the back to that what what was the first draft of everything is shit what at the time well i mean actually quite a lot of that may be that it's by doing things that we acquire this tacit knowledge and the tacit knowledge that interests me in the restaurant trade is what's differently a cafe in a restaurant which is really interesting because i think it's that you know you can go into a cafe and just order a drink and it's not weird okay yeah right and actually you can upgrade your order from drink to food which is something starbucks is obviously very eager for people to do but fundamentally going in there ordering a drink and leaving is totally okay in fact completely normal okay and indeed in the modern age going into a cafe and opening up a laptop and then ordering a drink is totally normal in a restaurant isn't and you know so that i mean that very interesting thing that cavi did at which is how do we create an indian restaurant which is full at lunchtime and they crack the problem by doing breakfast that was brilliant because the fact that actually as you walk past at 11 o 'clock 11 30 12 o 'clock there are some people already in there okay we in we instinctively go we instinctively go it's okay going in there because there are already people in there i don't want to go in there because funnily enough for years i worked in soho square i absolutely love korean food and right around the corner was a korean restaurant but i never saw anybody in there and so i never went in and i only learned and this may be some aspect of korean culture i have no idea they never seated people by the window so the place was actually full to half full all the time but they seated everybody in the back and then they had the small part of the restaurant which was the window there's nobody ever there and no one in yeah we do these things we make these kind of inferences all the time without being aware of doing so back back to your your great analogy of the champagne and the and the topless ladies right is if you're at Padella the pasta restaurant so they did something genius I'll show you this is they just started making their pasta rolling pasta in the morning in the window right oh bliss so before they open before they open so every commuter That's brilliant.

1:26:50Every commuter is coming out London Bridge Station, and then there's people making fresh pasta at the front of the window. The queue is, I mean, I've only managed to get in there twice, right? Other signals are put chairs and tables outside on the pavement if you can. Yeah. Because from 500 yards away, it says… I'm a bit closer to that one. 500 yards away, it says there's a place to eat here, and it's open. Yeah. Because if it wasn't open, they would have put the chairs away. There are ways in which you can communicate through, as I said, kind of unconscious inference which are really really potent that that's a beautiful idea um there's another one i was thinking of which did something similarly clever um but that business of actually you're walking past so it's just storytelling and then it is and then it's rammed and by default of just being busy because it's a small restaurant your queings you automatically think the scarcity is going to taste better yeah what i want to talk about now is i know you you known um nasa's lab i think you wrote the forward for your book i've explored this so challenger brands and you know that the triad is almost like fragile robust anti-fragile is he i generally think challenger brands are inherently fragile whereby often you know you're at the the mercy of the retailer um having the the kind of controlling the distribution um inflation quality control in food is very very hard so brands can be quite inherently fragile they can be robust in terms of i think like branding is is robust or packaging is is robust i think distribution can be robust if you're an established brand but i'd love to try to explore like then there's a miracle which is coca-cola okay and i genuinely mean it's a miracle because um it's the only cold non-alcoholic drink apart from water where anywhere from a beach shack in zambia okay or indeed an inland zambia a drink shack okay to a michelin-starred restaurant if you ask for it they don't have it it's their fault not yours yeah okay in other words there is an obligation to actually offer it which is kind of and also there is absolutely nothing unusual in either of those two extreme circumstances and asking for it to drink okay now you wouldn't you know you wouldn't go to the manuel can't say he's and go you've got his dr pepper zero right my my friend went into the uh into saint john although i am quite a fan of fanta lemon actually i think that deserves its place especially especially in uh on like on holiday that my mate went into the uh into he walked up to saint john we were in saint john and He rocked up in, yeah, we went actually, sat with Sarah actually the other week, but he rocked up and asked for a vodka Diet Coke and, sorry, vodka lemonade, and the waitress sort of looked at him like, you're fucking crazy.

1:29:40Because it's obviously, it's a wine bar, right? It's almost worse in the reverse. Do they not sell spirits? I'm never trying to order. I usually drank Guinness there, actually. There you were, they did, yeah. They did, yeah. So, yeah, so what I'd love to talk about is like, so what's, again, kind of, he's another big inspiration for mine, Taleb, like the anti-fragile book what are some of the things really important stuff but what sort of stuff has he taught you for that i couldn't i don't know what's well i mean everything from full by randomness obviously there's a bed of procrustes there's um uh anti-fragile and uh some of the later work being skin in the game yeah but what you could almost describe it as is social physics which is i mean there is actually an academic discipline when you won't believe called cleodynamics which is named after cleo the muse of history and dynamics and this guy called peter turchin sorry cleodynamics is is basically history as viewed almost as a a physical complex system and so turchin believes that certain civilizations reach a point of kind of turmoil and near collapse at certain points partly driven by a thing called elite overproduction which is that you have more people with an expectation of a great job than there are powerful jobs available and the people who then fail to make the cut tend to become revolutionary because they want to disrupt the status quo because anything that disrupts the status quo and diminishes the status of the people who have got elite jobs is basically in their interests and so that's why you he would argue that's why you tend to get revolutionary movements actually weirdly come from the kind of upper middle class in many cases not often from the the most poor in other words they're led by middle class people now okay i won't go into that because you know if you wanted to have a discussion about that as a whole separate podcast i don't know enough to talk about it more than 10 minutes i suspect but there is a kind of you know nasim's point about minority rule for example which is if you have one group of people who will only do a and another group of people who end up who are happy doing a and b they may prefer b but they're content to do a okay example you end up with it well um an example would be uh that all the soft drinks in the united states are kosher most of the lamb in the uk is halal which is that obviously Muslims won't eat non-halal lamb but people who aren't Muslims with the technical exception of Sikhs interestingly I think technically Sikhs are supposed not to eat halal food for reasons I don't fully understand but there is a technical exception to that but most Christians atheists whatever don't really care whether the lamb's halal or not so to save of yourself having to have two completely separate supply chains for everything keeping it all separate you just make everything halal you make all the soft drinks kosher um and you keep it simple that way and so people who exercise a right of veto have power disproportionate to their numbers so an example of that would be um i would never open a fish restaurant unless i was by the sea and the reason is unless you're by the seaside there's always going to be one person at a party of six who goes i don't feel like eating fish either they don't like fish or they're vegetarian or they had fish yesterday or they're just not in the mood now pizza by contrast one of the reasons for the success of pizza isn't necessarily that everybody loves it it's that very few people hate it there's a strange argument about this by the way with beer which is the reason bud visor is the most successful beer this is dave trott writing the reason bud visor is the most successful beer in america is because it's everybody's second beer second favorite beer and so if you're basically let's say there's a boxing match you're having a load of people around and you want to provide beer what you do is you buy a case of you know negra modello or whatever for yourself because that's your favorite beer yeah okay yeah and then everybody else has bud because you know that nobody hates it okay in other words it has and so what you actually have in the dynamics of any kind of social decision a decision where one person's behavior has a bearing on what hat what's offered to other people is something which is not necessarily um a case of majority rule as you might expect but actually the opposite i mean one of the interesting things i think is that veganism is i think in some ways i think veganism is a bit unfair to vegetarians because it used to me you probably get two vegetarian options now you get one bloody vegan option and one vegetarian option and the vegetarians then often end up with no choice at all if you're unlucky but in a better world what you end up with is one vegan option and two vegetarian options which then means that simply through the law of averages okay some meat eaters are also going to favor the vegetarian option and so it has a bigger impetus once vegetarianism reaches kind of all veganism reach critical mass okay they have a bigger effect on overall food consumption than their numbers might actually suggest because once you've got to offer it some people are going to choose it but you know you know os lenghi's restaurant uh rovi he's i don't know where i've never been i don't know why that's clever but he's that so he's got no p which is like a standard restaurant but then he's got rovi which is predominantly vegetarian with a few meat dishes yeah which i don't know where like how you distill that down but it's so clever whereby it's like it's almost doing the opposite it's because you'll hold the opposite of a good idea is a good idea right so it's like default is vegetarian but there's a meat option yeah so what you're absolutely doing is reversing the plan now that's interesting also because i met someone who did a lot of research into this so i asked bring that whenever you talk to people in the meat industry they always start fulminating against bloody vegans and bloody vegetarians.

1:35:54But a friend of mine who did the research said that the biggest reason for the decline in meat consumption isn't actually veganism or vegetarianism. By far the bigger reason is a preference for people for foodstuffs which contain some meat but not very much. So a pepperoni pizza is not vegetarian, okay, but by comparison with a stew or a steak it contains relatively small amounts of meat and so people preferring food that actually has in other words the preponderance of foods that where meat is a kind of garnish rather than the uh the the main feature well actually that's on the trend because the trend is the trend and i should be fair like i can make them pulling shitting bollocks out of my mouth right but like there's a there's a trend for flexitarianism right so everyone says i'm not i'm not i'm not like it's not binary i'm not vegan or i'm not money no i'm not this but i am cutting down so one coffee a week i'll have with oat milk i will go and have a vegetarian at um at a restaurant but actually the restaurants that are coming out it's either die-hard vegan restaurants which are like we're just vegan yeah die-hard vegetarian restaurants or just standard restaurants, but there needs, I don't know.

1:37:12I don't think you can go to a vegan restaurant and then sprinkle porky scratchy. Yeah, you never know what I'm saying. I'm not sure how they respond to that. But I don't know why there's not like a full-blown flexitarian restaurant. The only restaurant I can think of that's like naming themselves as a flexitarian restaurant and they're not even doing this would be that Rovi where it's like, you know, sometimes I don't always want to have meat with every meal. No. And actually, I actually think vegetarian curries sometimes even better than normal meat curry, right? Same like with aubergines. Not just aubergines.

1:37:42I have a thing the other day. Lebanese food's better when it's not meat. What's that for you straight? It's not a plantain. The Indian name for it is something like mogu or something. But it's a particular vegetable which is not a potato, but it's actually quite hard. But I had a kind of chilli version of that, which um i can't remember what the damn bloody vegetable was called but it was sensational absolutely amazing and you're probably right actually that um uh you know they probably made the mistake with vegetarian carries were a bit run a bit bean heavy weren't they sometimes historically but actually with really really imaginative use of um uh you know interesting vegetables uh you could probably do something astonishing what asked me your um in terms of Because I think why I love restaurants and brands, actually, is there's just so much opportunity for alchemy.

1:38:38What are some of your favourite restaurants in London? I have to admire on both scores, both the branding score and the food score, which is de Shum, but I've been a lot of company there, I suspect, admiring that. Funnily enough, I was very impressed by Slim Chickens when I went there, which is a sort of southern chicken thing. and I shouldn't say that because I sort of work a bit with KFC. One of the things that I liked about it was that I think if you want British people to read more healthily, there is one actually somewhere in Cambridge Circus, I think, there's one, quite a big one. By the way, did you read the book Hospitality Beyond Reason by Will?

1:39:23No, I need to read that. That's an astounding book. If you want me to put you in touch with him for an interview. Oh, that would be amazing. One of the most interesting things he did, which is the kind of thing i absolutely love so he had this restaurant 11 madison park which at one point actually became i think the highest rated restaurant in the world i'm always a bit skeptical about that because i mean damn the difference between number 75 and number one is going to be pretty kind of trivial but um one of the things he did which i really admire him for which is effectively a kind of game theory approach, a gamesmanship approach.

1:39:58Now, he went as a sort of competitive review to probably Chez Panisse or something like that with the French Laundry. I can't remember. One of the best restaurants in New York. And surprisingly, he was doing this as a kind of competitive assessment. The experience was fantastic. And then he notices the killer thing, okay? At the end of the meal, what you got was a cup of filter coffee, okay? that's it and so he immediately goes back to his restaurant he goes don't try and beat them on what they're good at find their little weak spot and um uh he um uh did something absolutely brilliant which is he had already a waiter i think or possibly a chef who was absolutely obsessed with coffee and said from now on you're the coffee sommelier okay your job is to offer people completely different blends of coffee espresso you know whatever whatever coffee you want uh you know we'll buy the machinery and this will be you know one of the best cups of coffee you've had now from the peak end rule of daniel kahneman you know what's that the idea being that how an experience ends has a disproportionate effect on the memory of your experience so if you listen to a wonderful symphony but at the end there's a scratch on the record and it gets stuck your memory will be disproportionately compromised yep and similarly if you have a great meal but it ends with shit coffee and then he went one step further which is he appointed a beer sommelier now i've noticed this if you happen not to want to drink wine at a fancy restaurant you're treated like shit because they come and top up all your friends fucking glasses and who do you want another bottle of this if you're ordering wine you're treated like a god if you want a beer you're basically neglecting you can have another beer please right and he actually appointed the guy as the kind of beer sommelier then you know now what was fantastic about this was that it must have coincided with that period of extraordinary kind of effusion of brilliant american craft beers and the beer makers were so bloody chuffed that a really serious restaurant was taking beer seriously they were basically kind of always delivering bottles of their finest craft double ipas you know not quite for free but i mean they were absolutely overrun now probably if there is an indian restaurant somewhere in smithfield which i think it closed down because probably because of crossrail but they had a really serious approach to beer and it's often totally neglected and i think you know i thought that book what's his name will can you remember his name uh i can't remember his surname it's definitely called hospitality beyond reason um a fantastic book by the way anybody anybody in the customer service business should read it and um uh that point of actually saying okay where are we falling short and beer is a fantastic example uh where most great restaurants i think fall really really short he's like looking at the proper battle we're talking about with james dyson looking the problem from the wrong way around and and i interviewed charlie mcveigh do you know charlie mcveigh yeah and you'll have to remind me i know the name so he did he he he basically took well exactly what you're saying right so he built built a business called i interviewed him funnily enough above a pub the ring in um southwark great pub um and he had he created a business called the draft house which he sold to brew dog but basically your brew dog was 2009 camden town was 2012 charlie set this up in 2006 when craft beer wasn't the sort of you know a profulsion he's got now right so but he was like okay does it deserve it i mean yeah but he looked he looked at it and they're like right we're gonna put the beer first yeah and then the foods the food second right so they had this whole smorgasbord of different craft beers which back you know this almost coming up 20 years ago 15 20 years ago it was like what are you doing he tried to sell italian food nah and it just didn't work and their first pub was in absolute disarray because it's, they got the bit right about the beers, almost, he wanted beer, everyone behind the bar to be more of a beer sommelier versus, versus, you know, back in the day, it was like, you know, pour a fucking pint and then here's your packet of scratchings or whatever, right?

1:44:18A little blah, blah, blah. Supping ale, session ale. He almost created like the Apple Genius Bar for beer. For booze. Yeah, for booze, which is amazing. But anyway, then he, then he realized, like, what actually people want with beer is if you're getting on the sesh, right, you actually just want burgers, salt, fat. And he did that, and then it began to scale. But he'd looked at that problem from the other way around. Here's an interesting one, isn't it, which is that there's a huge explosion in posh Turkish restaurants. And the first rule of being a posh Turkish restaurant is you cannot sell a doner kebab.

1:44:56I don't know why that is. I mean, because I presume that the doner kebab is authentically Turkish, is it? I mean, that's why I get one on piss. But it is. I mean, I made a very perverse argument once that said that the doner kebab may be the world's finest food because when your brain is drunk and shorn of all pretension, it's what you really want to eat. So if we're being intellectually honest, okay, we have to acknowledge that the kebab has some magical property. True sort of Indian food and spicy. you heard the thing about nashville hot chicken did you i might have told that story so there's a place called prince's uh hot chicken it was originally called barbecue and hot chicken and the guy who ran the original restaurant was basically a womanizer and a drunk and his girlfriend was massively pissed off that he'd been staying out so late so left him a meal of insanely overspiced chicken for when he got back as revenge and of course he got back drunk and thought it was absolutely delicious.

1:45:57And they built the whole restaurant. It still exists, I think. Although, bizarrely, the original restaurant, an Audi 4x4 crashed into it. And I don't think it's reopened since in Nashville. But there are other branches. But the entire premise of the restaurant was built around this thing, which was created as a revenge dish. But, of course, when you're drunk, that's exactly what you want. what i find weird is how some some cuisines kick take on more than others so so when i went over to see the irish guys right yeah dublin i was speaking to lawkney so he'd made there's no there's no curry houses over here there's like no curry houses in uh in in dublin there is one cool but it's like but there's one out by the bay which i went to which was pretty good but it's unbelievably my Irish friends complain that if you go to an Irish curry house it basically says every single dish says very mild made with potatoes yeah and um uh I don't know what's going on there but then also then I was in New York about um about two months ago now actually and the they've got curry house right they've got just I don't know what the stats are with the population wise but they've got they've got an indian population in new york but then the provoke the it's actually compared to the the indian population in the us is comparatively recent so they you know in actually they tend to start off as software codus and silicon yeah yeah yeah but so the indian scene is actually is actually okay in the us or certainly in new york and larger cities but it was disappointing slightly even in the 1990s in big city.

1:47:40A place called Tabla, New York. I don't know if it still exists. That was very good I went to. But then Korean food over there is huge, and it hasn't really caught on over here. It will because it's fabulous. Really? Because have you been to New Maldon? I have. I've been on a pilgrimage to New Maldon. I've done that twice, actually. Every time I'm on the M3 or whatever it is. It's sacrilege, because I think the best Nando's is in New Maldon, right? So what restaurants have you been to in New Maldon? I can't remember. I never remember. There's a very good one called uh tobang uh which my ultimate favorite is a thing called dulcet bibimbap which is the hot stone bowl bit of beef bit of rice bit of egg uh you know and you effectively mash it all up it continues to cook within the bowl and you blast on a load of chili sauce uh weirdly there's quite a nice one which has also got a slightly strange name and um which is alongside charing cross station in villiers street it's only a little thing but you can go and have a really really good hot noodle soup there and they also do those corn dogs which seem to be you know a bit of a feature um but um uh to be honest i've i've never really had a bad korean meal i'm sure what would you how is it different from i actually feel bad two cheeky ones what i'd say now i'm going to really really get people riled here i think indian food's better than chinese i think italian food's better than french i think korean food's better than japanese okay and i think malaysian food's better than thai okay so now i've only offended about you know what 1.9 billion people with that assertion but um you know it's not always the you know the better food the way start i'm totally happy italian food's better because it's scalable the french are fine if you're doing a banquet but they've never really got the snack food thing in fact there isn't really a french word for snack um they got croque monsieur and a very limited repertoire but but italian food is is scalable you can you know you go and chop up some tomatoes and banging on top of it i'd actually put spanish food spanish food above french for me personally i i think the old also this is um by the way i mean there's some countries where i mean i have to say i went to greece in the early 90s the food was shit literally fucking awful i came from england okay and i do now you go back it's fantastic there seem to be countries which have utterly transformed their game i'm in the uk being one of them let's be honest i think the way to eat it's almost you can apply it across different cuisines right so um so for example tapas right that way of eating is very different but it's very very enjoyable you've been to san sebastian have you i haven't no that's that's worth a pilgrimage but so so then i think a restaurant which is a genius idea is just to copy that so if you had been to san carlo they've got one in manchester the cichetti cichettini is italian tapas and it's fucking amazing so you go you get a slice of pizza you'll get a little spag bowl my daughter wanted me to go there i didn't get i don't know we went to dishoom but um oh there's another one another one in terms of favorite restaurants i don't get to go there very often it is probably the most expensive indian restaurant in london but weirdly the most expensive indian restaurant in london is still pretty reasonable compared to the most expensive french restaurant and it's better because it's indian yeah okay and there's a thing there i have which is called um oh crikey it's called um saloo it's on kinnerton street uh just off kind of the knightsbridge underpass opposite the barclay i think we talked about this last time actually yeah there's a thing there which is it's actually unusual it's a pakistani restaurant i think there are other branches they got a branch like new york and karachi or something and it's uh there's a thing now i've just briefly forgotten what it's called uh which is a kind of shredded lamb in a kind of lentil base over which you sprinkle bits of jock chili and ginger and things uh and i'll remember what it's called in a second but it's utterly so that that'd be you know i would condemn to death somewhere um uh probably pakistan since they have that's that's to me that would be where i'd order my uh my last meal from that's me my mate went to a curry house in ballon on sunday called the bad the ballon social and it was actually a really interesting way of eating a curry right so we just thought they had a really long starters menu so we went in there and we were like i don't want to eat i don't want to get us i was pretty hung over i didn't really didn't want because they need to work out how to scale i mean in street so hot scaling it down i don't mind the hot no no as in as in the weather was so hot i didn't want to eat loads of yeah it was only hot yeah yeah no no i know i know that's it as in i was so hung over my wife used to say when she was pregnant oh no you're not supposed to eat spicy food when you're pregnant i say they're 1.6 billion indians okay we had twins anyway so it can't have exactly been that much of a problem but the the the the way of eating it again back to the the way you eat your pizza with knife and fork tastes different they experience even though it's the same restaurant right the same restaurant where i've gone in the winter um and it's really hot the other weird one which is totally weird is what i call the indian picnic which is you go and get an indian takeaway and you actually eat it as a picnic and eating indian food out of doors is weird really i can't really i mean there are a lot there are a lot of weird things where if you do them out of doors i'm getting just sex sort of thing but there are a lot of weird things that if you do them out of doors it's completely different in that um if you rig up your router in the window and you go and work in the garden in the summer it doesn't really feel like work it's completely weird so certain things you can just create a complete sort of contextual shift by just moving moving outside um and i used to do this i got one of those sort of you know what are they called not a range extender it's like a mesh network and if you ring up if you've got bt broadband by the way and you ring up you say uh oh i've got weak coverage in part of the house or i've got a very big garden or whatever it is okay and they'll send you a free little round thing and you can pop it in the window which basically means you've got wi-fi in the garden what i love is those little and that's why i love restaurants as well i interviewed a chef called tommy banks he's got a restaurant up in um oldstead which is above you'll wrap this up shortly um about just above leeds and this is a genius piece of alchemy you walk in right and say these are the these are the the chairs right on every single one he's just done that and so you walk into the restaurant when every chair is not like this it's like this and i talked about this so they're parallel but at an angle yeah and he basically he basically i don't know where he got the idea from but he basically had had the whole thing of being um open body language yeah and i can't describe you all go into a restaurant like that and every chair is facing that way you just suddenly feels and you kind of it's like going outside with the router you can't it's a that's a really really clever thing to do yeah very clever because it somehow feels welcoming perhaps or as if you know that's a very really And also, by the way, I was just talking to the man who'd organized, who's created this thing or co-created this thing called Arcade.

1:55:06There's one at Tottenham Court Road. Yeah, I've been there. Now, the food court, you know, and you can include Box Park in this, is actually a pretty useful concept, isn't it? Because A, it's a kind of evolutionary. uh if you you can think of the individual retailers as like jeans or you know they're units of selection okay and eventually you'll probably end up with a really interesting mix complementary mix and you get the flexibility where anybody can eat any food they like and the coffee is really good because you get it from a speciality coffee place and the cocktail is really good because you get it from a speciality cocktail place and everything's really good uh so you get gains to specialisation but also gains to scale so he's also opened a second arcade in um bassey what was bassey power stage which is so clever because the food in there is shit oh is it oh guys i'm walking through there because i'm the chocolate company i did a bit of work for this opposite i was thinking how the fuck have you built this and it's basically like the bento center in kingston with a few poles on it that's maybe that's been a bit disparaging that place in canary wharf because you know uh roti king yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah this is my point about malaysian food being better than thai okay then that nasty goreng um no and also they've opened a new thing which is called is it something gopal something i've been to it in canary wharf where you get the where you get the roti and dip it in the curry yeah yeah no i haven't been there yet but there's some sort of food court thing that's opening canary wharf which is the same kind of concept that was my mate lives in cary wulf what's wonderful about it is it's really really good for what you might call brandogenesis because places rather like the one in box park which effectively did lots of versions of uh you know a loaded fries i don't remember what that's called but it's a great place to try out concepts and you know in terms of what you might call creating a gateway for food experimentation and the creation of new brands and the and actually the expansion of existing brands along with this whole dark kitchens thing which is i mean the food thing is the dark you have the dark kitchens then you have the sort of central kitchens which supply physical restaurants um i mean the extent to which there's now innovation in the food sector and of course food trucks which which really interests me because we we've got it's rather annoying in my village at kent which is on mondays the wood-fired pizza van turns up and so does a very good place uh which does greek souvlaki and they're both on mondays and then you know tuesday and a bloody sunday with a bugger all which is a bit silly but never mind but what's so interesting about that is i'm absolutely convinced that my kids ate wood-fired pizza from that van one day a week but they actually ate it much more frequently than they would have done if there'd been a pizzeria at the end of our drive because it's the scarcity thing well it's monday so if If we don't buy it now, we'll have to wait another seven days.

1:58:08The guy parked somewhere else on Tuesday to Sunday, so you could drive and go and find it. But I'm never going to clue where the hell he is. But those kind of things strike me as just really, really interesting in terms of, of course, if you think about it, I mean, you won't realize this. I'm 57. Eating out, unless you are pretty rich and or a kind of Londoner, Mancunian, Bristolian in a big city, eating out was pretty rare in my childhood i mean most people did eat some i mean i'm not including cafes okay but eating out in restaurants getting takeaway food was more common but it was pretty rare um in the 60s and 70s except in certain sort of you know fairly rarefied um excuse now what you see in the united states is they actually spend more money on eating out than they do and eating at home so at some point there was this the singularity which is where the u.s started spending more on eating food cooked outside the home than on food cooked inside the home and so we've got to remember that that is going to continue forever by the way and there's probably going to be a hard rain's gonna fall in some of it's rather like the food delivery thing which i always think you know ultimately that's a bit like highlander there can only be one you know that actually it's going to be a you know a kind of fight to the death probably actually i suppose just eat have an advantage because they're not responsible for the delivery are they so just eat probably has an advantage there but if you take all those sort of delivery services um it's uh it's it's a natural monopoly i would argue and it's you know unless you have the network effect it doesn't really work and so you know i suspect that's a case of you know whoever's best capitalized in last man standing um so they're probably you know let's be honest there probably will be tough times ahead for quite a lot of uh you know quite a lot of restaurants which rode this wave of uh you know all kinds of factors of course you know typically two salary households both provided the money and the lack of time um it was just socially normalized to an extent because people at university ate out a lot and took their habits with them um but um it is interesting i mean what's going to happen because it is it's you know there's nasim talit points out you mentioned him earlier uh the graveyard of failed restaurants is a very silent place so it's very easy to look at restaurants and go hey look this restaurant business is a complete doddle look at all these restaurants they're all doing well so the grape say that again the graveyard so the way he puts it is the graveyard of so there's a huge survivorship bias in our perception of restaurants because by definition we look at the ones that survive and forget or don't see the ones that failed and quite often in the location of a successful restaurant six restaurants failed previously so it's very very easy to look at the restaurant world and become hugely over optimistic because you only see the successes because it's rather like that wonderful thing where everybody goes didn't they build brilliant homes in 18th century america because look look how good these old houses are well there were a lot of old houses which weren't that good the reason you don't see them is they basically fell down or rotted or were knocked down it's only the good ones that survive and so and actually finding that formula i suspect is bloody difficult now i'll give you an example from my own uh local town um just to the right so there was a restaurant on a hill with bloody awful parking and it's the worst thing you can make to a barge you know you end up parking down the hill having to walk up uphill now to londoners this isn't that weird you're what you're gonna move is outside london you used to be able to park where you eat basically which is why i mean by the way actually the food scene outside london is uh i mean one of the most extraordinary thing i often talk about things that nobody notices because they happen slowly okay we all talk about things like brexit because they notionally happen quickly yeah but actually the really important changes happen slowly but back to ernest hemingway he's got a quote which is gradually then suddenly which i love someone said that about how you go bankrupt you go bankrupt in two ways first slowly yeah yeah yeah um and then uh gradually and then yeah and then suddenly uh but that's actually a very very important concept because i think for example okay i'll give you an example of this no if you're only 25 you won't realize this the extraordinary preponderable extraordinary dominance of english as a language okay wasn't there uh in my childhood you learned french because the french were next door and in the age before most people took long-haul flights okay you learned the language of your next-door neighbor okay now that basically you know has totally diminished to a point where you now you know if you get a i met someone the other day who lived in amsterdam for 11 years doesn't know a word of dutch it takes a bit of a bit of a special effort but i mean that you know you couldn't have done that yeah in the 70s i mean you would have got around you would have got around okay but i mean um these things that happen really really slowly i think are really important to understand because weirdly they tend not to make the news one of the things that's happened really slowly but is really really significant you have to be 45 to notice it is that when you went to provincial cities or even provincial and especially provincial towns okay from london in 1989 with the possible exception of like an edinburgh or of bristol okay or bath or something they were shit and when i said that i went to manchester in 1989 okay now my daughter's at manchester university i go there i can see no particular disadvantages living in manchester versus living in london now okay in fact you know i get she living in fallowfield uh funny that she was she started off living in fallowfield which she still does yeah you're right yeah yeah that's quite an interesting place and the weirdest thing about newcastle where my other daughter is is that jesmond which is the night is so posh yeah is the student yeah water it's like oh he can't afford to live in night i used it's just students there they've got the jesmans because i used to go there all the time so those are two unis that i went to manchester in regards newcastle all the time it's a fantastic city both of them are yeah and uh and newcastle i walk so you know you're not falloffers like in i don't i mean this in the in a polite way it's a bit of a shithole but it's that's where it's all this character is but it's like um that is it's not a good korean there by the way really good korean oh interesting yeah but what i found weird is we're doing the jesmond road mile which is that mile of where you supposed to get three triples for a fucking fiver and then i was signed but i'm just going to get my pre-drinks and it's a fucking little waitress and i was going to oh it's mental and then it was like every everyone who's rich lives in jesmond but then so do all the students who are getting off their tits it's like it's completely bizarre no no and so i mean but what is it what i mean unless you're 40 you know you know i went i went i always tell this story so sorry if anyone's heard it before i remember we were about to miss our last train in a business meeting in sheffield and we said to our host who was from sheffield okay where's the best place if we miss our train where's the best place to stay in sheffield he said leeds now the that by the way wasn't entirely a joke in that there probably wasn't you know a nice hotel in sheffield in 1989 okay i'm probably being unfair there probably was one okay but the extent to which there was a kind of what you might call a provincial city deficit then compared to now has you know it's almost disappeared in that what london really has is to be honest an awful lot of redundancy at the price of it being really difficult to move around um now you know literally if you know when i was in manchester in 1989 you kind of couldn't wait to get onto the train back to uh euston and now i actually experience you know provincial city envy in a way because they have all of the good all of the goodies of london and the variety at a much lower price in an accessible format you know so one of the things i'd hope to see is actually a diminution of this kind of you know absurd over concentration of people moving to london and you know more interesting businesses ideas you know i i'd definitely like to see a sort of centripetal movement but also so i co-op are based up in manchester fugal sorry so co-op are based so i toast supper clubs food and drink founders it's another there's basically yeah which is it's epic yeah it's the co-op the whole co-op thing was actually created in where was it in manchester they're manchester yeah so when one of the things we were talking about and we're trying to link up so hungary would partner with the co-op because a lot of london basically gets all the razzle dazzle right but there are some amazing brands based up in manchester and actually not just manchester north of england but there there still is this whole thing of like you've got to be in london to access the whole foods access the planet organic whereas it's it's beginning so i left union in 2016 so we're what seven years on it's now marketers will be astute to notice the fact that where property prices are lower disposable income is higher there's first of all everybody under the age of about 30 in London who doesn't work in banking is practically bankrupt.

2:08:05Okay, right. The increase you get in your income when the costs of London are factored in by moving to London amounts to like a few quid a year. And actually, the fact that there are low property price options existing in those places would probably make an astute person. This is one of the reasons I keep arguing about this question of flexible working, because people go, I don't want my colleagues to work flexibly. I go, well, that's not the really important part. The really important part is, do you want your customers to be able to work flexibly? Because if they do, they'll have a lot more money to spend on your products.

2:08:46So actually, flexible working, let's say it makes as 4 % less productive, but it increases disposable income by 8%, well, as far as I'm concerned, that's a win. You know, free-range work as opposed to battery farm work has quite a lot to commend it, not least the fact that… That's such a good way of thinking, free-range. I know, I know. I think there's an inherent bias to that naming, but you know what I mean. Yeah. You know, it's kind of interesting. But I mean, I love that point about slowly and then suddenly, because that's so often how change trends happen. If you look at something like drink driving behaviour or attitudes to same-sex marriage, okay, what basically happens is slowly, then suddenly.

2:09:37And I actually, I hate suddenly. so i've got this i've got this thing which is um i hate i wrote about this for food drink brand specific specifically right is i did this talk um i do this talk basically about how to sort of be a challenger brand right for a challenger drink brand and i've there's this whole obsession in america which has come over from people masturbating over fucking silicon valley which is this whole unicorn like it basically suddenly suddenly suddenly suddenly suddenly suddenly suddenly So every food and drink brand founder is seeing brands like Airbnb or Uber or these other unicorns have this huge exponential growth.

2:10:18So suddenly, whereas actually food and drink is very different. For my mum to become a user of PayPal, she can just go online and become a user of PayPal in two minutes. So actually go and buy… The dispersion of what you might call physical and mental distribution of new food stuff. So your point about Korean food, for example, is that I've always had my father all credit him, actually. When he was at university, there was one Indian restaurant in the town, about 150 ,000 people. And he immediately became a complete convert. He thought it was fantastic. Sorry, sorry. What did you say? You said that there was a more.

2:10:57Well, if you look at the diffusion of food, it looks a bit as though every country has a kind of spicy food. You know, the Indonesian in France doesn't really have one. I suppose they have North African. They have North African, you know, stuff. Okay. So, and it tends to be the spicy food you ate as a student. And you take that habit with you. In the US, it's Mexican. And you take that habit with you into later life, perhaps. I don't know. um but it's it's off it's often odd that there's one kind of characteristically kind of it's like outlier food in any country's kind of food options in the uk it's really been indian i had a wonderful friend who said to me uh he he was he's gotten older than me and he said in the 1960s he said there were two questions of any importance he said uh the two questions were indian or chinese and beetles and stones and the correct answers were indian and stones yeah yeah yeah i think he's quite interesting but the the really interesting thing i think is that you're right because the you're expecting this instantaneous adoption of something where you have monumental network effects okay now obviously you're going to see very very rapid uptake of things like chat gpt partly out of curiosity because all you have to do is type something okay now the as you're quite right to say the hurdles you have to clear to make that japanese you know or just buy a brand new retail so it's like you know my mom's going to discover that brand and then also there's a jar take the risk take the risk and and it's seven quid in that case right that's quite all that chili oil for example yeah that you don't just you don't unless you're like a freak, which I could potentially do if I'm drunk, you're not going to neck that whole fucking thing, right?

2:12:47It's going to be in your larder for a fiend two weeks. We talk about fast-moving consumer goods, but there are a lot of things. I mean, Angostura bitters are not a fast-moving good, are they? I also say you should always say it's actually quite slow-moving consumer goods. And my point is, what I say is, in a world that's obsessed with unicorns and suddenly actually be a donkey, and gradually gradually gradually and then suddenly and it was jolly it's like the same with this podcast there was no one listened to it for the first three years whereas now it's beginning to just go like that right but i mean interestingly i mean that point about complete non-linearity of progress in that way and the fact that there's a kind of malcolm gladwell's book the tipping point i guess yeah yeah yeah yeah um but i'll give you an example through madfest is this advertising festival, which is free to attend by invitation.

2:13:43Did you set that up? Did you set that up? No, no, no, no. I worked with them, but we worked with them on Nudge Stock and we partnered with them on Nudge Stock, but they set it up a few years ago. And Nudge Stock is, just sorry, because I've... And Nudge Stock is our behavioural science festival, which we bolt onto the tail end of Madfest, which is at the Women Brewery. Right, okay, with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every year they send out invitations and 15 % of people come, okay? And they've got absolutely hard data showing basically you know that uptake rate is about 15 and of course it operates over three days mostly people don't go for all three days and suddenly this year okay basically there's total mayhem because their queues all around the block because the take-up rate is 40 or something crazy right and what's just happened is that it's it's crossed that threshold of being a thing okay where previously it was i wonder if i'll go to mad fest and suddenly it becomes are you going to mad fest this year kind of change you know so it goes from a default no to a default yes as it were because it's just become a thing the other side of that is when so what always interests me is when a restaurant becomes almost a bit passe of that's what i was saying or a bit well pizza express is the really interesting one because there was a michelin-starred chef who said he thought that Pizza Express...

2:15:02Marcus Waring. Marcus Waring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I generally, I think so... I have to say, I don't go to Pizza Express very often, but I still agree with him, kind of. It's, um... So there's that, and have you... He was widely attacked. Now, there are alternatives. There's a place called the Detroit Pizza Company, somewhere in Shoreditch, which makes... Have you been to Crisp? No. I've been to Pizza... Pizza of... What are they called? Pizza Pilgrims. Yeah. Have you heard of Crisp? No. Go on, hit me with it. It's somewhere in the East End, isn't it? so this i wrote a piece about this in my newsletter actually and called a bit called escape the middle right and basically the middle is every every like every man's dog has set up a pizza restaurant with hipsters doing neapolitan pizza yeah in east london um and they've probably got tattoos and they're quite like obtuse on instagram as that's basically the middle right this guy sets up a pizza restaurant and he's been obsessed with new york style pizza opens a restaurant in in a shitty pub in hammersmith which serendipitously happened to be near the river cafe oh which meant that the river cafe chefs went there so they're those are the near fields the earlier doctors are you worried fact about fine dining is the chefs will go home via kfc don't they yeah yeah right i mean you do you have to ask some questions but this but this pizza so when everyone's seen neapolitan which is that sort of fluffy dough crust this guy's common and it's roman style so it's just the crisp and like and and anyway so and it's in a pub so you go in and it's like a full and football club uh pub so it's lots of old geezers yeah like drinking guinness shouting and swearing at the tv you have to order through things so everything about this doesn't make sense there's no cool hipster there's no cool instagram or there is now an instagram following but when it initially started it was like what is this place and but yeah back to back to the what i was going to say is when does something become not because he marcus wearing said the american hot was basically his favorite pizza with extra chilies yeah which is something of what i have yeah yeah uh i did occasionally do you get riquito or crikey um it's so um it's a while since i've been about a year since i've been um uh he has the romana doesn't he i think the romana base american hearts extra the other bases you get that and you just feel like you've been short even though it's the same amount of dough yeah you get it and it's about to like the psychophysics thing you're getting the same amount of dough but everyone was convinced pizza express pizzas had gotten smaller which wasn't true they claimed because they've got the original kind of dyes from the um that may just be because other pizza people's pizzas were getting bigger and therefore by comparison you see because dominoes and other people started doing these kind of ginormous things by comparison pizza express pizzas looked smaller than they did when they were surprisingly big when they first came out i suspect but that's an interesting case where um there's genuinely nothing to dislike about it it's really rather a wonderful place and um i hope we're not becoming like america where what matters about a restaurant isn't how good the food is but how happening it is now i remember i was in new york and i was going to some restaurant which was bloody good someone said oh that's a bit last year i can go kind of as a brit my question about a restaurant is what's the food like what's the ambience like not how hard it is to get in but it's so but how but one of the things that baffles me is is how brand stays uh relevant so like you know gales for example i think gales is amazing that bakery was cool was way there's a guy taught me something which is scale can sometimes kill magic right so when a place i worry about with five guys because if five guys goes from being a treat to a staple okay is that a problem in other words can five guys become uh in other words the victim of its ubiquity and i'd worry about that genuinely scale kills magic is a very good oh yes but then there's a quote which i'm trying to um by or actually by ray crock from mcdonald's which is when you're what does he say are you green and growing or are you ripe and rotting got it which is basically when you get to that point where with madfest you cross that chaston where you're a thing if you don't reinvent yourself there's no longer the thing so i'm trying to think of an example i won't give names but there's like there's there's uh chicken joint places there is gbk which which i know adam the co-founder of that and so he'll be finally saying this that was a super hipster cool place back in 2010s 11s suddenly it gets to 80 sites and it's no longer cool do you see what i mean as in it's too obvious it's not the thing and it's i always think how do brands get big but stay the thing do you know what i mean it's like how do you stay occasionally get that regional thing like whataburger um don't you in texas and there's a thing called i think it's blake burger in new mexico and of course and of course so you've got the regional restriction which is in and out as well won't it is that's rude yeah in and out won't they'll open in arizona new mexico and california but if they can't get the beef there in a day or something they won't buy it so they've limited their expansion they opened a shake shack in clapham and i drove past it and my heart sort of melted a bit i was i was like why does that happen i should be happier like when it was in covent garden there's only one shake shack do you know the funnier story which is that brand which really appealed to people who wanted to be old Etonians but weren't uh what was it what was it called you know you know the brand uh clothing brand old Etonians uh it was Jack Wills yeah yeah yeah apparently right this is a wonderful thing it's a bit like Henry James's thing short story the real thing okay which is that they opened a jack wills on eaton high street and were so convinced that the demand would be insane that they actually employed a bouncer for the opening day or security god and nobody should because it's you know it's a little like i suppose it's a little like the weirdness of british people buying ralph loren okay which is you're having your own you're having your own culture sold back it's a big kind of there's a little bit of that which i kind of go So, hmm, I'm okay with this, but it's a bit kind of...

2:21:27But, I mean, it's... I think that the Ubiquity Kills Magic thing is a really interesting question because, you know, I mean, Dishoom agonise before they open a new, you know... So Dishoom do it well because they create a story for each. Yeah, and each one has a backstory, which is wonderful, you know. Would you be able... I'd love to get them on. Would you be able to ask... I'll talk to him. Of course, he'd be delighted. he's a lovely yeah yeah so they they because i think they're they're the prime example of do it well whereby i went to the one in manchester and yeah i'll be there story was they they're the master of it how you scale and keep magic because they're actually everything right that manchester one was supposedly founded by a bit of a rogue wasn't there a guy who got like it could be the smuggler yeah well each one has a story doesn't it yeah but what that does is they're actually we're back to Greg Rock's quote which is are you green and growing or ripe and rotting because if they were to carbon copy each one they'd be ripe and rotting but by having the story they're reinventing to create an extraordinary thing which is kind of like there's a constant leitmotif to the thing but with enough it's variations on theme so the the basic authentic theme remains constant but each restaurant is distinctive enough uh no not it's not so I understand that apparently every single um weather spoons has a different carpet i didn't know that okay but um they take that obviously they take that much much further so that everyone is distinctive it's also true to the architecture in which it finds itself to some extent and by creating this backstory there's a kind of authenticity to it but also a difference um now interestingly with five guys i don't know the answer to that question in other words is this a food that has to be uh consumed occasionally in order to be meaningful you know um well so you know you know that you know that top jaw thing which did the interview with marcus wearing yeah i'm trying to get them on this podcast actually but they go around and they've if you want a good series they go around to every top chef and ask them what's your best pizza what's your best burger what's your best um uh whatever right what's what's london's worst tourist trap and everyone says fucking m &m world and they the resounding um thing from all chefs is that five guys is their like hidden gem and it's like mission star chef saying yeah no no i mean funnily enough the guys at kfc are huge admirers of five guys and what they've done is very very interesting so as i said they went to this place thrashers i think it's called in ocean city maryland um to you know perfect the fries and they started off with a food first price later and then i think they came up with this really cunning thing which is they have two signature items the burger and the shake which are really expensive everything else is comparatively the extra scoop of fries the free peanuts the unlimited drinks everything else is comparatively generous and so you feel you're paying for where it makes a difference and not paying for the things where it doesn't and And consequently, they managed to actually obtain, you know, when you think about it, you're in an environment which isn't much fancier than a McDonald's.

2:24:39They had piles of potatoes, which send an interesting signal. I would totally agree with that assessment. So pretty much every chef goes, it will admit to a secret five guys. Yeah. And I must admit that now what I have, oh, by the way, the toppings are free. So that's a really interesting detail. Everybody else charges toppings. You pay for the bacon and the cheese, but all the other things, which I have a mixture of jalapenos, onions, and HP sauce, by the way. I think I have something else as well. There should be a Challenger brand, HP sauce. Actually, there's a brand called Sauce Shop who have been on this podcast.

2:25:17They do fucking good. They do a Scotch Borne Chili Jam with a Michelin-star chef. You're going to have to run this. I'm going to have to run about five minutes. Yeah, but they also did a thing called FU sauce, which was fry-up sauce, which was a mix of brown sauce and ketchup and vodka. What? And it was, honestly, it was fucking incredible. I think it was a limited run, but it was called sauce shop. What else? Yeah, I mean, interesting expansion in Turkish food. That's undoubtedly a big thing. Yeah. Another weird thing is I want to know what's happened to men's hairdressing, which is all the turks turkish men must be looking pretty damn scruffy because as far as i can see every barber in turkey seems to move to the uk that seems to have happened again in sort of five years um but the turkish barber thing is fascinating particularly if you get the methylated spirit flicked in your ears i particularly now that's something you never would have asked for isn't it right it's one of those gratuitous things a bit you know that no customer in market research would ever say i'm quite happy with my existing hairdresser i just wish he'd flick burning methylated spirits into my eardrums okay that that would never happen but when it happens it's kind of brilliant and um so you know i i mean i i effectively all this i mean this is a good way to end i mean uh i think kumal galhotra who's the head of ford north america says that car making is a hundred thousand rational decisions in search of one emotional decision that you can get everything right about the power trade and the this and that the other but if people fundamentally don't want to buy the car it's all a total waste of time there's something about the restaurant business where in a way i suspect you've got to add actually a completely bullshit free restaurant you know if you don't have the push for champagne button you don't have the if if you don't have one singular kind of little standout little mental burr you know maybe you're missing something rory delight as always i think we could go on always happy to come back an absolute joy yeah it's my favorite thing to talk about and you're one of my favorite people to talk about it with um so thank you so much thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like 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 please do hit me up on linkedin search damn 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