S06.EP10 - Problem Framing: Rewire How You Think, Create, and Lead with Rory Sutherland

0:00Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode. People inherently trust you more. People are happier basically making an impulse purchase from a brand than they are from someone they've never heard of. So a brand has an effect in lots and lots of ways, which I think grow, by the way, exponentially with brand fame. And we shouldn't be afraid of simply saying a large part of branding is being famous.

0:28Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:46All right, before we jump in, if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the waitlist. That's joinbba.com. Now let's get into the show. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Just Branding. And today we are very, very excited because we have the one and only Rory Sutherland on the show.

1:30Rory, if you've never heard of him before, where have you been? He is the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, where he spent, I mean, it says down here the last three decades, but he doesn't look that old, so I'm sure that's not the case. The last three decades applying behavioural science to some of the world's biggest brands. You will know Rory from his bestselling book, Alchemy, which I've got here. and if you haven't read that you definitely need to his TEDx talks which have racked up over 15 million views and his uncanny knack for turning irrational ideas into astonishing commercial results in our conversation today we're going to be focusing in on problem framing and this idea around reframing problems so that constraints become creative springboards that spark different questions and help brands come up with more valuable answers for their consumers.

2:23More on that later. Before then, Rory, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. It's a pleasure. What a joy. Really happy to be here. Firstly, just to give us a snapshot of, for those people that maybe have been living under a rock and have never heard of you before, give us a bit of a snapshot of your journey and how you became sort of focused on behavioural science? Very simply, my first job was, other than driving a forklift truck at the Ribena factory when I was a student, and working for my dad, who was self-employed, my first sort of full-time job was in what was then called Ogilvy and Mather Direct, now called Ogilvy One, which was the direct marketing wing of Ogilvy and Mather at the time, That was in 1988.

3:07And it was an incredibly lucky and fortunate place in which to start work, because, of course, it was that part of advertising which was measurable. By the way, you know, there was a downside to that. And I'll come to that later, which is the good thing about measurement is you can compare what's working and what's not working and what's working better. The bad thing about measurement is you're never allowed to do anything you can't actually measure, which is, if you like, it's a double edged sword. However, what we were doing was effectively behavioural economics avant la lettre. We were performing enormous randomised control trials of both creative and media and targeting and measuring the comparative effect of different changes, which very, very quickly caused you to realise that what motivated people to do things, what was important in terms of a marketing communication wasn't necessarily either what research would tell you was important, or what rational economic models would tell you was important.

4:09So you would repeatedly find utterly bizarre effects. One of the earliest ones was a simple test for what was then called British Telecom, where if you sold a product and you allowed people to respond by phone, you got a 2 % response rate. if you allowed them only to respond by post all other things being equal you got a four percent response rate and if you gave them the choice of both you got a six percent response rate i'm i think i'm point one percent off on a few of those figures but and i haven't got the data anymore because this was 1989 but that's the kind of thing that you'd find that was now an economist would accept the fact that there are there's something called transaction costs you know people are happier engaging in one responding in one medium rather than another and therefore that's not going to be negligible but that finding that two plus four equals six that effectively every additional channel of response you offer creates more response is something which has i always argued then look these things i said there's a science here for which we have no name in other words really understanding what it is that drives people to change their behavior as opposed to falling back on rational seeming theories about what matters.

5:26And it was only years later when I discovered accidentally the existence of behavioral economics, nudge theory, Kahneman, Tversky, Ariely, Thaler, etc., Sunstein. OK, it was only then that I realized that there were a tiny group of people engaged in this thing. and it did, in fact, have a name. And I always thought it had a vastly greater importance. David Ogilvie would have been the same. David Ogilvie always said people should start by working in direct response advertising because it gives you effectively an instinctive feeling for what works. And so that was the thing that really... And, of course, I was in the right place at the right time.

6:11You know, I already knew quite a bit. In fact, when I eventually met Thaler and Kahneman and people like that, what was quite surprising to me is I had interesting things to say to them. And they were interested in what I had to say because I was party to all kinds of experiments which weren't in the academic literature because they were in the commercial field. Amazing. Amazing. Well, you've sort of touched on it there, this idea of problem framing, because this is something I know that you speak a lot about in your book, Alchemy. And it's kind of a key thing that we want to tuck into with you today.

6:42So perhaps before we get into some details, let's sort of start high level for folks perhaps who are just kind of grappling with this for the first time. How would you sort of describe problem framing? And specifically, I mean, our audience are all trying to build brands or involved in brand building strategically somehow. How is problem framing helpful for, say, somebody who's trying to build a brand to think through? Okay, I'll reframe this, which is only appropriate. Go for it. Which is to say that how is not problem framing an issue in business and indeed governmental and institutional decision making?

7:18In other words, if you don't spend time, famously, I think Einstein said, you know, if I had, you know, if I had something like an hour left to save the world, I'd spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute solving it. It's understood in mathematics, obviously. Mathematicians would understand this instinctively. that if you can redefine the question, you've given yourself a second chance at solving it. And not doing that by effectively saying we have to solve every problem through brute force methods. And if you rewrite the brief or redefine the problem, you're cheating. That is hugely problematic, because I think that's an instinctive thing which has come to us through our educational system, which is I've been given a problem.

8:06The problem contains all the information that I need to solve the problem and there's a single right answer that's your typical high school multiple choice maths question all right I mean interestingly by the way a few people I know have had an issue with IQ tests because they say an IQ test to make it easy to mark is multiple choice and when you have multiple choice answers by definition the questions can only had one right answer. And so there is this fundamental tendency where I think we take the problem as it is currently defined, we work on it using the approved sequential logical methods proceeding from that definition of the problem.

8:47And whatever is our best shot at it following that process, we there deem to be not only right or interesting or worth testing or worth exploring, we deem it to be the only right answer. And the point I'm making there is that actually, in many cases, the problem isn't as currently defined, or by describing the problem in a different way, you arrive at a completely different avenue for exploration. Okay? So two things that are problematic there. One, people have this instinctive feeling that if I redefine the problem or rewrite the question I've been given, I'm cheating. okay that's true in a maths exam or whatever you're not allowed to do this in you know history 101 i don't really like that question about the norman conquest so i'm going to answer a question about the roman invasion okay that's obviously a con but actually in real life problem solving that's exactly what you often need to do that's the first part the second point is and this is a really important one, particularly in any institutional setting, okay, is that if you want to signal that you care about a problem, you naturally want to tackle the problem head on in the most obvious way possible.

10:02Okay, we have a problem with not enough luggage going through x-ray machines in airports. Therefore, we must hire more security staff. And it's a very, very fashionable belief, which you know and generally it involves the trade-off or there's a cost attached and it's a very very logical way to solve that problem okay because you're doing what effectively is a direct head-to-head conflict with the problem as currently defined with with all the parameters that are already in place so i'm going to give you this example when you go through airport x-ray machines one of the most common problems that happens and it's interesting who notices this and who doesn't is that people start taking their jackets and belts out of the trays as soon as they emerge from the x-ray machine okay the problem that creates is that they're effectively holding up their tray so that no future trays can be scanned now what you'll occasionally notice is that there's a shrewd person who understands the sort of systems thinking who stands close to the x-ray machine and whizzes the trays along the conveyor belt to the far end so that there's the maximum buffer available for trays to come through and be scanned and then five people can be removing their belts and jackets and bags in parallel rather than one person doing it in series okay now the way you know before you hire more x-ray staff or spend another two million pounds on an amazing scanning machine maybe you ought to be just instructing the staff who are currently there to actually whiz the trays along to the end so that the retrieval process can happen in parallel rather than series so the throughput of the x-ray machine without any expenditure on money or staff can be trebled okay and so that would be the typical example i'd give where it's very very easy one people think they're cheating if they change the question but actually the only thing that matters is the objective not really the question and even the objective is open to debate okay when you have a proxy objective generally it's quite arbitrary okay you know we need to make this brand appeal more to young people you know would be absolutely you know almost stereotypical form of client paranoia and therefore the natural thing to do is to do ads which very explicitly say hey young people you love this brand quite frequently because of the foibles of human psychology what that creates is a kind of reactance okay which is you're trying to hard disco vicar you know what i mean you know it it's the whole thing of you know you you don't look now but your strategy is showing yeah now there may there may be lots of ways you can appeal more to young people i i want to sad this thing where we notice you know we don't you know we're not selling that much to the young and i said young people have yet less money than old people why don't you just try offering clana right so you know what i'm saying is that and i think it's really important because one of the things that really bothers me about this whole business is ever since the advertising business was paid by the hour it lost something which was first of all clients didn't engage you very early on because they didn't want the meter to start running whereas when you were paid on commission they got in touch with you day one because after all you were free until they actually bought some media all right the second thing is that consequently because of that general impatience and the idea that efficiency is you know on time and in budget that's that's the kind of goal we've lost what i call the exploratory phase and we're more and more inclined to rush into dumb execution so what i you know what now one of the daft things i think we've also done is create a planning department which instead of working in parallel with the creative department works in advance of it howl henry spotted that this was a fault and they created a kind of five-person team that worked on the whole problem from soup to nuts which always struck me as a fundamentally useful idea which produced by the way very very interesting advertising you know it was empirically quite a successful approach but for whatever reason nobody's actually you know nobody's really replicated this yeah it's it's funny isn't it because because one of the um the things that i like as a sort of a solo consultant is that i get to do that you know i kind of people will approach with the as you you know you you get you get this idea that we have this problem and I always say to to my clients look you know it may well be that we have that is the problem that you've discussed but before I just take that and start trying to solve for that can I interrogate it a bit I want to go talk to some customers talk to your staff talk to your leadership team and then we'll settle on that you know and then and then we'll explore a solution further once we verify that that is a problem to attack.

15:10So Roger L. Martin talks about this sort a very narrow island of factual data surrounded by a sea of uncertainty. And for some reason, we feel we have to start the journey from that island, even though it's a very restrictive and narrow place from which to start. The analogy I use, which is where I think people get it right, and where I think people sometimes highly intelligent people get it wrong, is if you look at police work, they accept if you've got a criminal you're trying to catch, they accept that there are two phases to the investigation. There's the investigative phase, and then there's the evidential phase.

15:47Eventually, you've got to prove the guy's guilty, right, in a court of law. And to prove the guy's guilty, you're not allowed to use anecdotes, you're not allowed to use entirely circumstantial, you know, information. But you are allowed to use that information in the investigative phase. So the standard police question would be if someone's weirdly found dead in a downstairs basement flat would be to go next door and to ask the neighbours, did you notice anything unusual between the hours of, you know, 9pm and 1am on, you know, on the third of whatever. Now, that's a totally open ended question.

16:23Okay, the answer could be literally anything. And it's almost certainly not going to have any any evidential value. I heard a scream at 1130. well that narrows down your time of day possibly if you believe they're telling the truth i saw a strange man in a white van drive up repeatedly and he kept driving back dust and again you can't imprison someone for life for driving a white van in a funny way although probabilistically it wouldn't be a bad approach actually given the serial killer's love of the white van but you can't reasonably you know imprison someone for that that's that's that has no evidential value well it has a minor evidential value but but it really tells you let's look at the cctv and see if we can see any white vans that reappear more than once and find out if the person driving said van is somehow a bit iffy now again we're not yet in the evidential phase we're just in the exploratory investigative phase but we're allowed to use information there, which isn't entirely robust.

17:27And that's only correct. And similarly, you know, what you will probably do in the course of investigation is you will redefine what you're trying to do several times in the course of that investigation. You know, first of all, it's find something unusual. Secondly, there's a line of inquiry around white vans. Okay. Thirdly, you would probably if budget allows, you'd also say, let's also proceed on the basis of the white vans irrelevant because we could be missing something here okay that could be coincidence and it could be meaningful and so the whole thing is an iterative process and what we've tried to do is turn it into a linear process because and i've got a theory about this which is one of the reasons why ad agencies don't experiment very much with their process is because we've got to justify our activities to some procurement department who want to know what we're doing for every second the meters ticking.

18:20And we have to maintain the pretense that every single step of this journey is a sequential stepping stone towards this somehow singular and miraculously perfect solution. Consequently, if you come up with an interesting approach like Howell Henry, with five people working in parallel, procurement probably won't accept that, because they'll say, we need to be able to compare your costs on a like-for-like basis with every other agency that's pitching for this count. So innovation is not allowed because it destroys our ability to compare on very narrow cost metrics. It strikes me that a lot of these supposedly well-intentioned parts of business actually have extraordinarily dangerous unintended consequences because when you take a business and you optimise for only part of it, and you do so basically with the aim of self-justification, it's highly likely that you're over-optimizing what you need to lay claim to and under-optimizing other important facets in any decision there's a great book now by margaret heffernan which is it's called uncertainty i think and it's basically a a plea for people and organizations to accept existing in a state of uncertainty because what we do is a large number of people find that being in a state of indecision or uncertainty deeply painful yeah it's like a psychological you know it is yeah yeah i need to i need desperately need to pretend i know what's going on here or i desperately need to pretend i can make a plausible story up to explain what on earth happened here and therefore we rush to kind of what you might call pre-rationalization yeah i once said it it's like you know in the ancient maps there where you know they sort of hadn't explored areas they would like just draw a little dragon in the corner here be dragons yeah that's it's that sort of idea isn't it it's like we don't like being in the dragon pit like we want to be land where we know for sure where we are so yeah jacob do you have a question to lead lead lead lead the conversation forward yeah rory so hi jacob here i'd want to jump into some like practical tools and examples that we could use so like if we're if a team's feeling boxed in by a brief like what's an exercise or something you would do to shift their mindset is like a question or a template or how do you like start that shift well it doesn't have to shift their mindset at all you could shift their behavior and then their mindset will follow so actually we know this from quite a lot of evidence in brain science that quite often attitudinal change actually lags behavioural change.

21:04You know, in other words, I like this because I do it as opposed to I do this because I liked it in advance. And by the way, there are rational reasons for this, which is once we have experience of something, we often like it more than we expected. OK, I'm the classic case of behavioural change versus attitudinal change, which I think is relevant to the electric car industry as well, is I don't know how this applies in Australia, probably exactly the same way. British people for years were hugely resistant to automatic transmission in cars oh no no no I like I like that the sense of control that's something Americans have no no I can't stand the idea of an automatic car okay no no I like the feeling that I can change you know and they all came up with these after and you couldn't change their minds really okay until they drove an automatic car at which point nobody ever went back okay don't get me wrong okay if I move to the north of scotland and i lived sort of half a mile from the a9 and i had rolling highland roads with no traffic on and i had the joy of double d clutching okay i might might go back to a manual car but for all practical day-to-day purposes and once you've had an automatic you never go back and once you've had one pebble driving in an electric car you never go back driving a car is just mildly irritating so it isn't necessarily the job of assuming you have to change someone's attitude to something in order to get them to do it.

22:29Sometimes you get them to do it in order to change their attitude to it. Now that strikes me as hugely important. And I'll give you another example of this. So one of the things that does is it does actually change our attitude to sales promotion. Not necessarily to boring money off sales promotion, which I think can be good and can be bad. It's not inherently bad, but it should be the last resort should be bribing your people to buy your product. OK, but it does, for example, when we talk to Great British Railways, one of the things we'd say is, look, there are something like 70 percent of the population are what's called rail rejecters.

23:09Some of them have good reasons. They live in a part of the country which is totally ill served by rail, for example. OK, fine. But there's this huge percentage of people who don't like railways because they never use it. OK, there's a famous joke line about Guinness. I've never tried it because I don't like it. okay right and in a sense those people are caught in a kind of mental loop of they don't use the railway so therefore they've never had any incentive why why would i have an incentive to have an opinion that conflicts with my existing behavior so in denmark what they do is they give everybody free rail travel on their birthday now i would argue there's a whole chunk of people one of my ideas was increased car tax by 100 pounds a year but give every person who taxes their car 150 pounds worth of off-peak rail vouchers to use whenever they like on any off-peak train i.e train that isn't already crowded i mean those journeys are more or less free anyway because you're moving trains around the country full of fresh air and so the you know the incremental the marginal cost of an extra passenger is zero and my argument for doing this is that if you make four train journeys a year next time you have to make a journey at least rail is in your repertoire it's in your consideration set not saying you'll go i'm not suggesting people will go oh this is a total epiphany i've seen the light i'm selling my car and i'm going to go everywhere my train it's simply the fact that they will now consider the train as an option because they've had experience of using it under reasonably benign circumstances and they can see the benefits of the train and they can see the downsides of the train whereas people who only use a car just have imagined downsides of the railway and they and also the first time you use a train is a painful experience because everything's unfamiliar and you need to work out where to park and where you buy a ticket and how much it costs and where you stand and all that stuff which when you've used a train five or six times then becomes system one rather than system two you know it becomes then relatively instinctive and a bit painless so i wouldn't even i wouldn't even start from the assumption that you're trying to change someone's attitude i'd just say there is somewhere there is a behavioral bottleneck in the system, which we need to use whatever tools are available to address.

25:24And then you have to ask a secondary question, which is, is that the real bottleneck? Which is, there's no point in getting people to think differently about something if it doesn't translate into behavior. So if the real bottleneck is, you know, so this is really important, by the way, because you can identify what appears to be a pinch point in your business. But if there's an even worse pinch point upstream or downstream, I'm a big fan of that book by Eli Goldratt called The Goal, which is all about bottleneck theory, effectively, which says that in any system, the performance of the system is usually constrained by its narrowest point.

26:05now that that originated in what you might call manufacturing processes or chemical processes he's a gold rat was a hard-hitting physicist you know a serious guy right and then people realize that actually also applies upstream to demand it's not just a question of manufacturing and production there is probably one thing which is the single point at which it pays you most to intervene now at which point if you free up that bottleneck a bottleneck may appear somewhere else so so you have this you have a very weird thing which happens in i think the electric car market which is the first bottleneck was there was huge demand for electric cars in the very early days from earlier doctors techno geeks etc the bottleneck was you couldn't produce enough cars and so there were waiting lists then about 10 electric car companies came on stream with massive production of electric cars simultaneously and the problem was there was a glut okay so you know you literally have those issues where at any one time where the bottleneck lies may actually change right and therefore framing the problem because it's important to consistently kind of evolve as you are sort of solving one bit or reframing one bit it might pop open another bottleneck somewhere else i guess is what we're saying absolutely yeah so what i'm saying is there's no point in widening a road if there's a badly phased set of traffic lights 200 yards further on all you do is you move the traffic jam somewhere else on the road and you don't actually increase the throughput of cars at all so let's let's bring this down into kind of your world you know in ogre v or you know in terms of what you're doing can you give us an example or just sort of maybe it would help if if you could kind of show us say maybe where you got um a brief through or something through where there seemed to be problem a but by reframing it re-exploring it you know it uh it changed the outlook and and changed the outcome of the of the project so same mate to a mate which is a campaign for the mayor of london which created a lot of controversy And actually, the controversy was interesting because a lot of people said that by proposing a relatively small intervention, we were making light of a problem.

28:32OK, but let me explain the logic here. We did huge numbers of interviews with people in the kind of target audience. and what we found is that it was designed to effectively diminish or provide a reasonable solution to what you might call male-on-female misogynistic bullying okay now what emerged from that is that that kind of behavior where people are casually misogynistic either in the presence of women or or or their absence in some cases okay most men don't like it but they didn't have a mechanism for criticizing it in their friends without coming across as holier than that without coming across as patronizing because you know what you can't do if your friend engages in casual sexism some shape or form most men don't support it don't agree and regard it as bad behavior, but you can't suddenly read out a Guardian editorial, okay, to your friend, because your friendship has an inherent value.

29:36And quite often, we tolerate quite a lot from our friends, because that's what friendship means. And so the whole idea which embraced, for example, comedians talking about it, it embraced a whole lot of a poster campaign, it embraced, you know, so every form of medium suitable was actually involved in this. Okay. Now, I think it's particularly important because you could argue it's a version of broken windows theory look it's not going to stop this campaign is not going to stop fred west okay it's not you know it's not going to stop peter sutcliffe in his tracks okay but you could argue that those behaviors start somewhere and they start small before becoming bigger and bigger and so the whole point about mate is it's a form of censure or criticism which doesn't actually make the person you're criticizing it doesn't actually effectively it's a corrective it's an internal corrective from a group of friends who would prevent that because some of that misogyny is probably performed for bravado okay they think they're impressing their friends and their friends aren't actually impressed and so it's interesting because some people you know some people said no no no we need to spend the money on street lighting well you know arguably and you know everything starts somewhere but secondly the whole point was it's very interesting that two people who supported it i think were interestingly piers morgan and um caitlin moran were two people who said i get it that works to me that makes sense and actually you know two you know two people who whether you like them or not, I think are astute.

31:13You can say whatever you like about those two people. But they're highly astute and they're not formulaic thinkers. They will actually take a completely kind of a bleak opinion on things. They were two people who actually supported the campaign. The people who disliked the campaign were people who effectively felt that the only solution to any problem had to be head on. And actually, human psychology, in many cases, is keep off the grass is not a very effective communication. You know my story about, please turn off your mobile phone on entering the restaurant. We immediately think of reasons why it shouldn't apply to us.

31:52Whereas the brilliant restaurant in Saint-Emilion, which had a sign ostensibly aimed at people leaving the restaurant, but actually visible to everybody walking in, which said, please remember to turn your mobile phone back on when leaving the restaurant. By effectively suggesting a social norm, rather than by imposing a rule, okay, the emotional response to that message, although both of them are in service of the same aim, the emotional response to the message is completely different. Now, you know, if you're a hardcore person who says the only way to stop people turning their mobile phones on, okay, is by a direct instruction, or an economist would say you have to fine people, okay, for using mobile phones.

32:37but actually there's a perfectly perfectly gentle way of doing this which is just to say that if your mobile phone goes off during the the meal you know in this fancy restaurant you know it might be considered a bit of a faux pas by the rest of the diners and therefore it's a question that you're actually the the notice is saving you from embarrassment rather than issuing an edict and consequently our emotional response is very very different even if the ultimate intent of the message is exactly the same. So going back to that brief for the Mayor of London then, how did that go then? You know, I know it was controversially received, but like, do you know of the data of the outcome of that campaign?

33:17I will seek to find out, it will take time because that's one of my criticisms I will make about one of the problems of working in direct marketing and one of the problems about this false claim of quantification we've made about marketing is a lot of the value of marketing takes time to emerge. Definitely. It's exponential. The value of fame, for example, is really a compounding effect. It's more like a pension. You know, as you become more famous, it becomes easier to become more famous. OK, so these things are not linear and they're not immediate, but we will measure it. And as far as we possibly can.

33:52By the way, I mean, you know, we ought to remember that there are some things which are very difficult to measure. If you obsess about the speed of measurement, and it's worth remembering there's a double problem there, things you can measure very fast. tend to be acquisition focused, bottom of the funnel. And because you can measure them fast, you get results very fast, and the level of attribution is very precise. Any investment in customer service is likely to be slow and less attributable. Consequently, one consequence of this is that almost all companies, I would argue, that are obsessed with justifying their own existence in the marketing department are over-invested in acquisition and under-invested in customer experience.

34:33Right. loyalty and retention and repeat purchase right because it goes back to that point you were making earlier that if you've experienced a train ride right and you've know that that's going to take some time so you know yeah yeah absolutely right it's going to take some time for then me to get on the train and then have a couple of turns on that have a good experience then i you know tell someone else about it and then start actually planning that into my behavior going forwards it does take behavior change takes time yeah absolutely right yeah yeah and so it's slow you And so if you think about it, any significant behavioral change involves someone, A, in the early days, it involves people breaking with a habit and doing something altogether unfamiliar.

35:13And B, doing something which other people aren't doing. Now, there is an interesting issue, which is sometimes called crossing the chasm, which is there is a group of people in any particular field who love doing things that other people aren't doing. but they're a minority of people and they aren't necessarily where the market value lies. And so you could argue that this very early group of people who are obsessed with buying electric cars, who are both novelty seekers and very high on openness, and to some extent, perhaps slightly more individualistic, they want to stand out rather than fit in.

35:48Those people create an early groundswell of uptake for electric cars, which then doesn't cross the chasm into the mainstream in part sometimes because the user imagery of early adopters might be quite strange okay so a classic case of that was you had early people who bought apple vision pro okay who then started walking around the streets of manhattan wearing an enormous pair of goggles it happened apparently with famously with google glass They only gave Google Glass out to developers. So the earlier doctors became known as glass holes. And what you need to do is you need to mainstream something.

36:31And sometimes the enthusiasts who are your first customers are actually, in some ways, almost negative ambassadors. Interesting. So how do we do that then, Rory? How do you mainstream something in that regard? I suppose you've got to normalise it somehow, haven't you? Yeah, I mean, OK, with electric cars, one of the things I made this point repeatedly in the hope that the industry picks it up, it's a lot easier to reduce anxiety than it is to increase range. You know, increasing range, you're dealing with the laws of physics, which are quite difficult to. I mean, there are wonderful ideas in chemistry and battery chemistry, which I'm sure can further increase the energy density of batteries.

37:09I've got no doubt about that. And indeed, it's worth spending billions and billions of dollars looking for exactly those ideas. but at the same time it's a lot cheaper and quicker just to make people with a car with a range of 170 miles say or even 120 miles stop feeling so goddamn anxious so how do you do that well what to two obvious ones there are more okay one of them is you reduce the any legal restrictions within reason on signage directing people to electric car chargers so you know if If you need planning permission to put up a sign that says car charging. OK, that's a problem because electric car chargers are literally only five percent as visible as petrol stations are.

37:55There are actually more rapid chargers. By the way, Jacob, a slight apologies for this, because I accept the fact that in Australia or in certain parts of Australia, this situation is different. OK, because Australia is what geographers technically call very, very big. In fact, I think you have I think I think you're in the 30 countries in the world with the lowest population density in Australia. So you have massive cities separated by enormous distances. You know, that's like the US similarly, Canada similarly. OK, I accept the fact that what I'm saying, so I'm just going to. But in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, OK, high density population countries that are relatively small in size.

38:35range anxiety is i think a virus we've caught from the united states where it's a rational fear out there it's not really a very rational fear in the uk at all because i mean apart from anything else in the us they need a hundred and i think the statistics i went and found is in the uk we've got eight and a half thousand gas stations to serve a population of 60 million and in the us they've got about 350 million people which is five times as many they actually have 116 000 gas stations and the reason is they need gas stations to serve a geography not just a population with the possible exception of the far north of scotland there's nowhere really in britain where you're you're 50 miles from a place of major habitation okay i mean literally there's you know there are still black spots by the way i mean they those need to be ironed out but one of the things would be you can just go to android auto or apple carplay and just say can you just add for anybody driving an electric car, a little panel that says nearest for high speed charging five miles ahead.

39:38Next, three available out of five, you know. OK, just continue to reassure people. The other thing is you don't need the bloody battery to say your battery charges at 87 percent. OK, I do need when I get down to 11 percent charge, I need individual digits. 80 percent plus would be fine. I don't need to be made conscious of the fact that I've lost a bit of juice when i'm at 80 already and i've just taken the kids to school i don't need that to factor into my thinking any more than i did when i had a petrol gauge yeah because petrol gauges don't give you the percentage do they it's no no no it's just three quarters full full half full eight full the light's gone on you know that was it okay that was the level of granularity we needed so there are lots of ways in which you can stop the other one by the way is very simply I hate to say it, but if you have extended test drives for electric cars, people can basically, A, get addicted, because once you've driven one, going back to petrol feels stupid in a weird way.

40:38Nothing to do with environmentalism, by the way. In fact, I think the environmental message might have actually set back electric cars by five to ten years, because a lot of people interpreted them as an unfortunate compromise that was being forced on them by tree huggers, rather than the first major step forward in automotive traction in, you know, 90 years. If you're building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses, and a crew of brand builders who've got your back. Get on the waitlist now at joinbba.com. Now back to the show.