20 Minutes of Rory Sutherland Making You Question Reality

0:00I don't think attention spans are actually dwindling. I think they're polarizing. The most valuable role of marketing is not actually discovering the things that consumers say they want. The really valuable role of marketing is discovering those things which consumers really, really want but don't know how to ask for. I think it's time we occasionally have the right to say, I think science is a bit shit. I'm going to start off with a big question. So as attention spans are dwindling and brands are trying to gain attention, what tools have they got that are actually working? I don't think attention spans are actually dwindling.

0:33I think they're polarizing. So one of the best bits of advice I ever had from a futurologist, and there isn't much because futurologists do talk an awful lot of nonsense sometimes, but one fantastic bit of advice is there aren't trends, there are vectors. In other words, there's always a counter trend. And if you look at, for example, I mean, one of the weirdest things about television was that all programs were roughly the same length. Okay, if you like, what's anomalous is not what's happening now in terms of our attention, but the slightly weird artificial form of attention we had, you know, perhaps between, you know, 1955 and, you know, 2005.

1:13In the scheme of things, that might seem to be more of an anomaly than what we're seeing now. And what we see is we see YouTube shorts and we see TikTok and info snacking. That's always existed in a form. And we also see actually people paying extraordinary attention for quite a long time to subjects that really interest them. And so it's a little bit like, I suppose, collective ADHD in that ADHD is often misunderstood in that people with ADHD tend to also have extraordinary powers of concentration for very long periods of time. if they can actually immerse themselves in something. So, you know, quite often these things are misunderstood.

1:54However, in terms of creating content, and I'm a very, very big fan of influencer marketing, of YouTube in general, by the way. I think of all the things that the tech world has given us that's an unalloyed good, YouTube is not far off. You know, the thing for which, by the way, YouTube premium is even better. but of all the things you can be really grateful for without having to worry too much about the possible downsides I find YouTube premium utterly astounding there's a wonderful episode which is called Why I Don't Own a Ferrari by Jay Leno so his whole collection contains no Ferraris and he won't buy them because he says I won't put up with all the bullshit you have to go through to buy one which is kind of they'll only sell you one of the rarer ones if you've already bought sort of six run of the mill Ferrari, not that there is a run-of-the-mill Ferrari, but you get what I mean.

2:47You know, in other words, it's a bit like those very high-end French handbags, where you have to go in and splurge a load of money on random, non-resellable stuff before they're prepared to actually let you into the inner sanctum where you can buy the Crocodile Kelly bag, which theoretically you could resell on eBay for whatever it is. And he said, I don't want to play those games. I just don't like it. I don't want to play those games. And he contrasts this with his experience of buying, I think it was the McLaren F1, but I might have got this wrong. It might have been another McLaren. And his experience was that he contacts McLaren and he says, I'm thinking of buying this thing.

3:26That's fine. They're obviously very helpful. And you would kind of expect that. Okay. Yeah, right. And he says, I was thinking, by the way, of getting the ceramic disc brakes. I think I've got this right. Brake discs. Sorry. I was thinking of getting the ceramic brake discs. And they said, the guy said to him, the thing is, Mr. Leno, are you planning to track race this car, to track this car, or are you mostly going to be driving it on the road? And he said, look, to be honest, I'd probably take it out on the track once, but most of the time I'll be driving around Los Angeles stuck in traffic.

4:02And the guy just said, well, Mr. Leno, let me save you$25 ,000 straight off the bat. Don't get the ceramic things because actually they take ages to warm up. They're actually a bit of a nightmare in everyday traffic. You know, you'll end up bumping into the car in front because they haven't warmed up adequately. Just go with the standard brakes. And what's interesting is from that moment on, basically the relationship was different because this person is not trying to maximize their commission in the short term. They're trying to maximize the value of the relationship over time by establishing trust.

4:37and talking to um dan arieli you probably know of him the author of predictably irrational very good book behavioral economist at duke and he came in and as an extraordinary thing a couple of weeks ago he offered effectively to work as an intern in our behavioral science department for a week genuinely probably the world's most over qualified intern okay there's a house near me in Sevenoaks where the owner, a man called Spotterswood, it was something like the third house in Britain to be wired for electricity. And he got Michael Faraday to supervise the wiring. So this was equivalent to that. You get the person who's practically invented everything to do with electricity, and he's actually supervising the wiring of the house.

5:28I always thought that was a fantastically overqualified case. I would have thought that music would predominate in the car. But for a lot of people, it does. But the explosion of the podcast is something that genuinely surprises me. It feels like what you talked about, you talked about a trend emerging and the counter trend. The trend might be deliberate, so it might be a brand trying to start a trend to sell something, but the counter trend is the piece that's kind of unpredictable. The counter trend is the thing that often emerges more organically because the trend often meets a thought spoken need of the consumer.

6:10I'd like lower prices and more choice. That's Tesco Extra, right? The counter trend is a farmer's market, right? Now, if you think about it, no one would really describe a farmer's market as something they wanted. So I'd like to buy direct from the manufacturer and pay higher prices. And I'd like it to be out of doors. And I have to go to seven different stalls to buy what I need, paying separately every time. OK, right. All of that stuff in the farmer's market is, to some extent, seemingly illogical. But it seems to meet some weird, unmet human need. Is it theatre? Is it authenticity? Is it that actually we as humans enjoy personalized transactions and that actually the growth of Tesco Extra has left us feeling slightly bereft?

7:05Because, you know, we wanted it. Nobody's going to buy 100 percent of their calories in the farmer's market. But somehow it meets it occupies a market space which has been vacated by the trend. So what tends to happen is there's a trend which is sort of logical, which would make sense in terms of consumer market research or stated preference. And the counter trend then satisfies unstated preference, as economists call it, which is the kind of preference which is generally unspoken but is revealed through behavior. I mean, you know, one of the most interesting things would be to say, you know, that's what marketing is for.

7:47ultimately marketing is there to the most valuable role of marketing is not actually discovering the things that consumers say they want. The really valuable role of marketing is discovering those things which consumers really, really want, but don't know how to ask for. You know, there are literally occasions where you can tweak something to a tiny degree, and just have a transformative effect in how people react to it emotionally. There's a nice example, which I can end on actually which is someone i'm not sure whether they thought it was a good idea or whether they thought it was just marketing bullshit but they were at changi airport in singapore and their flight was listed it was leaving 30 minutes after the uh scheduled time the flight was listed not as delayed but as retimed and there are two ways of looking at this which is what a load of marketing bullshit.

8:41You're trying to escape the blame for a delay by referring to it as retimed. OK, what a load of crap. And that's one interpretation. But I responded with a more benign interpretation, which is hold on a second. So you could look at that and say it's a very generous thing to do. Let me explain. Because 20 percent of the people waiting for that flight on average are shit scared of flying. A lot of people are. Either of you? No. But there's a percentage of the population who genuinely are shit scared of flying. Okay. If you put delayed, retimed looks like it's a logistical thing. It's to do with schedules, pushback dates, runway slots, whatever.

9:25We've made a conscious decision to actually reschedule this flight. Delayed is going to make that 20 % of scared people think, oh, they probably noticed one of the ailerons is missing or that the engine's going to catch fire. And then they'll go into a fear spiral of what else does this mean? Because I imagine, I'm not a nervous flyer. It's a terrible admission. I've confessed this once before. In the early days when you could actually download Sky programmes from Sky Go to your laptop, when I used to fly, I used to just take all the things I'd recorded on Sky and watch them in the air. on what was something like a 15, 17-inch Apple MacBook at the time.

10:07And I used to sit on the plane with this bloody great screen. I used to watch air crash investigations. And when I told my... I realised after I'd done this a couple of times that it was probably insensitive. When I told my wife and children, they'd go, Dad, I cannot fucking believe it. So there are a load of people behind you who are shit-scared of flying. And they're looking over my shoulder and seeing, like, footage of the wreckage strewn across a Japanese mountainside or burning debris or whatever or basically the recreation of a plane flying upside down anyway that was my terrible confession of total crass insensitivity for which if anybody was on one of those flights I really apologise and it was astoundingly insensitive of me but if you're frightened to fly I imagine that every time it's delayed you go into that mindset of imagine the worst what's the worst that can happen And you don't go, oh, they've probably rescheduled this because of a change in departure slots or whatever.

11:03Entrepreneurs want to play a game which is like real life, where it is how you respond to chance events that determine success. They don't want to play a reductionist game like chess, where the rules are all already written and where you know effectively what, you know, in other words, what's a legitimate move at the beginning of a chess game. also with chess. There's another reason why an entrepreneur is interested in chess. What happens if you play the most brilliant chess game of your life? You get one point. You get one point for a win. Jeff Bezos made this point. He said in baseball you can only score four.

11:41In business you can score 100, 1 ,000. If you're an entrepreneur, poker is interesting because when you play the best poker hand of your life, you get to retire, right? It's major. chess game you get one point nobody nobody who's interested in entrepreneurialism is going to play a game where it's going to play a game where you get one point for being a total genius right yeah what's the point so then is the that's an interesting one so is is the universal shared factor of being an entrepreneur just that decision making is viewed differently The thing I always notice is that entrepreneurs are effectively interested in, actually, they're very, very happy to get lucky.

12:26They don't necessarily want to be right. They're just happy to get lucky. I mean, you could write a whole book on effectively the essential role that entrepreneurs play in any business ecosystem because it is effectively R &D. and they're more you know they're more interested in outcome than they are an argument the quality of the outcome is what matters what i always notice about them uh is that if you go to someone in a large corporation and you point out an anomaly it annoys them or they try and ignore it if you go to an entrepreneur and you point out an anomaly they get excited by it because they see it as an you know arbitrage opportunity or an opportunity to game the system or you know whatever um probably you know property developers are like that they're always looking at you know what's everybody else missed they're not interested you see if you're in a corporate environment you want to know what everybody else knows so that you can demonstrate your rightness if you're an entrepreneur you want to know what nobody else knows so you can actually outplay the fuckers when richer people are paying for a car they're paying for status to a degree or or what i call l 'orealism which is because i'm worth it i'm not all status about showing off to other people a lot of status about showing off to yourself okay you know there's a certain thing we do which is not really because we're showing off to other people it's kind of reinforcement of our own identity and self-worth by spending a bit more on things even if nobody else notices you know you know that's the sort of versace underpants school yeah oh by the way do you want the funniest story.

13:58I absolutely love this. Talk about underpants. It just kills me. Which is one of the strangest problems of the rich. Okay. It's just Calvin Klein's daughter complained at one point about the disadvantages of being Calvin Klein's daughter with a complaint that I have to admit would never have occurred to me, which is that when you're Calvin Klein's daughter, just at a high point in sexual excitement when you're getting romantic with a man, you're confronted with your dad's own name in each high letters. No, the rest of us have never had to put up with that. I always thought that was a brilliant observation.

14:39Mark Hoopstead. Exactly. Whoa!

14:46But it's interesting that... What a weird experience that must be. Completely bizarre. But no, I mean, the whole thing is, you know, I mean, the whole thing about why we buy what we buy and also what prompts us to buy it. To be honest, I think it's always a bit messy and there are always multiple reasons going on, you know, from one consumer to another, because people are fundamentally different. But, you know, the violation of fairness is an interesting one. One thing that really annoys me personally, and I will say this to the rail industry repeatedly, okay, if you buy an advance ticket and you miss your train, okay, they make you buy a full fare ticket.

15:30I think they should allow you to put something from the advance ticket towards the full fare ticket. There's always the danger that the content gets politicized. And my argument is that you only put the content up there if it is universally agreed to be true by, you know, a panel of experts. In fact, I'll tell you a fact, okay, which everybody, this is why I always show the pace-o-meter when I give a talk. Because my argument is once people see a pace-o-meter, they understand speed differently, and therefore they're less likely to go at extreme speed. The speed awareness course, there's a story in the speed awareness course which everybody should know.

16:07As I get older, I think more and more want advertising to perform a useful social function. When you're 25, it's just a fun place to work, and you're happy to flog stuff. But the longer I spend in this game, the more I get interested in areas where bad decisions are made simply through lack of information. And when you're on the speed awareness course, they may have told you this story, which is that you have two cars that are parallel on a motorway. One of them is traveling at 70 miles an hour. The other one's traveling at 100 miles an hour. They come around a corner and simultaneously see that there's a tree right across the road.

16:43and they both break at the same moment when they see the tree. The car that was traveling at 70 miles an hour screeches to a halt half an inch from the tree, saving its occupant any energy. What speed is the car that was going at 100 miles an hour doing when it hits the tree? And nearly everybody goes, well, it'll be 30 miles an hour, because if the other car decelerated by 70 miles, no, the actual answer is 70 miles an hour. because don't forget your reaction time, you've covered a greater distance while you're reacting and then breaking distance is exponential. Now, when people know things like that, they tend to think of risk as being linear, okay, with speed.

17:25It's absolutely not. Now, that's not to say that speed is the only dangerous thing. Speed isn't always dangerous. You know, obviously it's rapid deceleration that's dangerous. But nonetheless, I think there are literally thousands of things which, if the populace knew. And, you know, one of the things I would love is to start again a government. Now, funnily enough, the very libertarian economist, Deirdre McCloskey, also argues that, look, government must have loads and loads of data from things it buys on, for example, what laptops are really reliable. You know, in other words, government procurement functions must have a load of data on, you know, how to buy things.

18:06Deirdre, libertarian though she is, thinks that information should be put in the public domain because it's a useful side effect of government. It enables informed decisions. And so that's one of the things that interests me. Now, one of the great things about our info diet changing is I'm not entirely sure that some of that content people wouldn't watch voluntarily. Now, trying to get that through ITV's entertainment division in 1975 you know we want a program on this would have been quite hard um right okay um and we obviously never mention that because we always got to accentuate the positive and pretend the absence of negatives is not really a factor and so i think a lot of the time people talk nonsense about why they do the things they do and i think you know as i said mcdonald's is i've often said mcdonald's is the most successful restaurant in the world not because it's really really good but because it's incredibly good at not being bad.

19:04And we had this discussion just at lunch just now, which is, and I love what I call kind of anthropological detective work, which is what explains the popularity of Nando's, you know, the extraordinary success of Nando's. And one part of it probably is, if you think about it, there's very little there to dislike. And if you're a party of six, basically everybody's happy, aren't they? Right? So the spicy people can have something spicy. The bland people can have something bland. There's a fabulous practice. If you've heard this practice at Nando's where people who take girls out for a date ask the person to make them a mild chicken but to put the flag in for the super spicy chicken.

19:49Wow. It's really funny because... Now, I may be getting this wrong. I'm the last person to put myself forward as an expert in dating psychology. But there is that very peculiar male belief that women will be really attracted to men by their ability. So that is, undoubtedly, men admire other men for their ability to eat spicy food, don't they? I mean, it is, you know. But the assumption this translates to the opposite sex, which is, I didn't really like you much, but when he ordered the chicken as far, oh, that was it, you know, you've pulled, you know. Marry me. Maybe that happens, I don't know.

20:26It seems particularly implausible. I don't know. It was his ability to handle a chicken vindaloo. That's what I knew he was the one. Oh, he's a keeper. But I found this sort of psychology of let's, because there's always a rational explanation, which is kind of half true, but it's good value for money. People like chicken, all of which is kind of true. But I always think getting to the bottom of it, what's the real, you know, if we could find out what that real magic formula is, And maybe part of it is that no group of people has a Nando's hater in it. Knew this.

21:05And all I'm saying is I think everybody was so frightened of putting their neck out and going, what if? Evidence-based is bollocks, right? This is Roger L. Martin, my personal guru in Svelingali in the business world. So don't listen to me. Fucking waste of time. Go and read the books written by Roger L. Martin. He was the dean of the Rotman Business School in Toronto, OK? Go and read his medium. posts. He's, I think, the best strategy thinker. He's the heir to Peter Drucker, basically. And he says this whole evidence-based thing is a ridiculous barrier because there's no evidence about the future.

21:38What was complicated about the bloody coronavirus was novel. It was novel. It wasn't the same as other coronaviruses. Therefore, the evidence you had about past coronaviruses may or may not have had any bearing on the behavior and transmission of this one. but i you know i think it's time i think it's time we occasionally have the right to say i think science is a bit shit okay because we fetishize science completely oh it's scientific oh it looks scientific there are fields in which that is entirely legitimate i'm sure in cosmology okay the science is pretty legit i'm absolutely sure that in elements of engineering okay it's totally legitimate to be scientific this is what roger martin said in his nudge talk aristotle specifically said you can only use the scientific method in fields where things cannot be different from the way they are.

22:31So tomorrow, gravity is going to be the same as it was yesterday, or else we've got far bigger problems to worry about again. There are certain aspects where the rules don't change. There are enormous parts of life, and Aristotle would say the greater part of life involves decision-making in fields where things are different. And therefore, demanding that everything you do in a fat-tailed, chaotic world necessarily meets the rules you have laid down for operating in a totally deterministic and predictable world is a complete misapplication of the scientific method. I think, okay, cops would have done a better job of solving the COVID problem than scientists would have done.

23:17Two things about, a few things about cops. One, they know that they don't have all the information they need. Secondly, they accept the fact that some of the information they get is misinformation because people are lying to them. Some of it will be luck. Some of it will be probably, you know, psychological branding. Some of it may be unbelievably trivial, by the way. And there's a guy I recommend here called Mark McCulloch, who's like a quick service restaurant hospitality marketing guru. And one of the things he points out is that a lot of cafes and restaurants fail to do the obvious because they know that they sell salads or they sell premium burgers.

23:55But the person walking by, unless they're an avid reader of Time Out, doesn't know that. So we had this interesting discussion in the office. We were talking about Oaxaca, and nobody knows what's a chimichanga, what's a burrito. People get muddled. And I suddenly said, actually, how many random punters in a London location, particularly if they're not even native, OK, will know that Oaxaca's a Mexican restaurant in the first place? And Mark McCullough told me the story of a woman who walked for nine years every day, walked 200 yards past a branch of chopped to buy salad for lunch. now she just assumed she saw chopped she assumed chopsticks she thought i don't like spicy food i'm going to ignore that right so literally nine years of her life that was like the person who worked at ogilvy when they were at lancaster bridge who asked somebody uh what's the closest tube to um the office and they said uh embankment and for the first two years at work she traveled down to Charing Cross, and literally, after two years of this, she was walking back to Embankment, and someone says, you go and live in, you know, you live in Finsbury Park or wherever it was.

25:10Why the hell, why didn't you just walk to Charing Cross? She goes, well, I change at Charing Cross every morning. And she was literally changing trains. She did that 400 times before she realized that, effectively, they're more or less, I think, you know, it's an extra two yards walk to get to Charing Cross versus the other one. Quite often, it might be something, it might be a bottleneck, A mental bottleneck where loads of people are walking past and they don't know what you do. Now, I'm talking to Mark McCulloch on a Zoom call with the guys who run Chaiwala. And they said, we realize this and we're going to put Indian Street Food Cafe on the outside of all the restaurants.

25:48And Mark McCulloch, this is where I go, OK, this is one of my I am not worthy moments. OK, because I don't think I would have thought of this in 100 years. Martin Carlton, without pausing, just says, put Indian street food and cafe. Because then people who don't like Indian street food can still use you as a cafe. Interesting. And you now are solving two jobs to be done rather than just one. Now, sometimes I suspect major businesses fall or succeed on the basis of things they've never even noticed.