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What most people miss about marketing | Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, author)
00:00:00.160 Steve Jobs was not a technologist. He was a pitch man. He was a brilliant  
00:00:03.880 salesman. He was a fantastic marketer. When products succeed, we forget the  
00:00:08.360 extent to which marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in their success.
00:00:12.760 You once said, "If you could imagine a stand-up comedian doing a routine  
00:00:15.720 about your product, then you're onto something."
00:00:17.760 You eed to preserve slightly odd things. Rolls-Royce's were  
00:00:21.080 the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor. Famously,  
00:00:24.800 Veuve Clicquot it's the one with a yellow name. Idiosyncrasies count double.
00:00:29.360 Do you have any advice for early stage founders to help build their brand?
00:00:32.400 Be consistent, be distinctive, and be famous. When you are not famous, you have to find all your  
00:00:37.000 customers. Suddenly you reach this magical escape velocity of fame where people start coming to you.
00:00:46.880 Today my guest is Rory Sutherland. Rory is vice chairman of Ogilvy UK. Author of the book,  
00:00:52.800 Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business and Life,  
00:00:57.560 and the founder of Nudge Stock, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and  
00:01:01.800 creativity. Rory is both an example and a huge proponent of thinking from first principles. 
00:01:07.960 Through his speaking and his books, he encourages people to not think logically when solving  
00:01:12.440 problems, but to think psychologically using human psychology to inform how you design and build and  
00:01:18.720 market your products. Rory is full of amazing stories and ideas and examples and inspiration,  
00:01:24.480 which you'll get a sense of as soon as we start talking. I don't even ask him a question and  
00:01:28.120 he's already off to the races. This episode is for anyone who wants to think more creatively,  
00:01:32.760 help their team be more innovative and learn how to create more magic in your world. Rory has been  
00:01:37.600 one of the most requested guests on this podcast, and I can now see why. If you enjoy this podcast,  
00:01:42.720 don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's  
00:01:46.200 the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that,  
00:01:51.040 I bring you Rory Sutherland. Rory, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
00:02:00.480 It's a pleasure. It's an audience I don't normally speak to and it's an audience which  
00:02:06.400 I think is particularly valuable, particularly important, but also actually probably could  
00:02:13.760 benefit quite a bit from just a little bit of extra psychology. Not least by the way,  
00:02:20.280 a very simple observation, which is that do not think that good products automatically  
00:02:25.720 succeed or that bad ones necessarily fail. The other thing I'd say is that timing is so  
00:02:32.200 important that don't necessarily reject things simply because they failed in the past. One of  
00:02:37.800 the best products I've ever worked on in a professional capacity was Facebook Meta TV,  
00:02:44.200 the TV portal, sorry, Facebook, the Meta [inaudible 00:02:46] TV.
00:02:48.142 Oh, I love the portal, yeah. Big fan.
00:02:48.179 [inaudible 00:02:49] by Facebook and I bought it for about $120. It plugs into your TV. It allows  
00:02:53.920 you to do obviously WhatsApp or Facebook or indeed Zoom on your television with a fantastic face  
00:03:02.200 tracking camera. It really is sort of $500 worth of equipment, which they were selling  
00:03:07.320 for about $120. One of the best things I've ever owned, I owned about four of them. When  
00:03:12.120 I heard it was being discontinued, I bought another one because I think they're so good. 
00:03:16.760 And yet for reasons I fully I don't really understand, apart from the fact that every single  
00:03:23.120 review said, "This is brilliant," effectively as a product, but the first seven paragraphs of the  
00:03:29.520 article weren't saying, "This is brilliant." They were saying, "Who would allow Facebook to put a  
00:03:34.960 camera in their home?" And so basically, it was nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia because you  
00:03:43.000 can turn the thing off after all, you don't have to leave it switched on, okay? But there were nine  
00:03:49.120 paragraphs of privacy paranoia basically followed by one paragraph saying, "As these products go,  
00:03:56.520 it's brilliant." And yet we still don't have video calling on TV unless you're willing to  
00:04:02.360 plug your laptop in or do something pretty fancy and complex. That seems really weird to me.
00:04:08.520 Let me actually read a quote from you around what good marketing often looks like. So you  
00:04:12.960 once said, "If you could imagine a stand-up comedian doing a routine about your product,  
00:04:16.560 then you're onto something. The urge to appear serious is in many ways a disaster in marketing."  
00:04:22.280 I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the  
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00:05:42.920 Pendo.
00:05:48.320 Today's episode is brought to you by Cycle, the AI-powered feedback platform for product teams  
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00:06:37.720 feedback loops in each release. Feedback is not used just as a way to prioritize what to build,  
00:06:43.200 but also as a tool that creates trust with all stakeholders. Sign up forof the device. You want the device  
01:07:19.680 to have one function, which it performs very well," what Don Norman will call an affordance. 
01:07:26.480 You don't want any ambiguity about what this thing's for. What this thing's for is  
01:07:30.160 for listening to high quality music while you're on a flight or on a train journey,  
01:07:36.200 and it's for that. It's a personal entertainment device and nothing else. Once people start going,  
01:07:41.000 "Is it Dictaphone? Does it have a corporate function? Should I use it to record concerts,  
01:07:46.480 et cetera?" Once it's got more than one function, people don't know where to  
01:07:50.080 start. And so I thought that was an absolutely inspired thing, which is actually in many cases,  
01:07:55.640 less is more. In other words, focus attention on one thing, the one thing that it does,  
01:08:01.240 it's really good at that thing. You don't have to worry about anything else. If you  
01:08:04.520 want to do that thing, then this is the thing for you. And if you don't want to do that thing,  
01:08:09.040 then don't buy it. Very simple binary decision.The second you introduce complexity into the  
01:08:14.080 thing, logically greater functionality should mean greater utility, which should mean greater  
01:08:19.479 value. But sometimes as with the McDonald's menu, that was an absolutely beautiful case  
01:08:25.560 where they realized that, "Okay, it's partly about speed, it's partly about simplicity.  
01:08:29.439 It's partly about supply chain, but it's also about choice reduction. Do you want a  
01:08:34.960 big Mac? Don't you want a Big Mac?" Whereas the American Diner, which was the proceeding thing  
01:08:40.439 before the McDonald's brothers came and shook it all up with I suppose this Detroit model  
01:08:46.920 of production. The American Diner was, "How do you want your eggs?" Substitutions, over easy,  
01:08:56.840 sunny side up, poach, scramble, et cetera. The whole thing was about customization. And so this  
01:09:02.520 is what I mean. Sometimes customization is a great idea. Sometimes it's the opposite. 
01:09:07.200 I think Tesla's quite clever in the choice architecture of Tesla's is just the right amount  
01:09:13.479 of choice. You don't want one color and you don't want one battery size, but equally they haven't  
01:09:19.920 gone silly. There are two interiors you can choose from two size of wheels, five colors, five basic  
01:09:27.680 colors and two premium ones. It's about right. That's about manageable. Whereas I had a look  
01:09:35.279 at customizing the new electric Range Rover today and it just, well, it drives you insane because  
01:09:44.399 you suddenly realize you're going to be spending basically the price of a house by the time you've  
01:09:48.479 added all the stuff you really, really want. You can't actually justify buying the vehicle.
01:09:54.279 Okay, so maybe a last question. We've covered a lot of stuff at this point,  
01:09:57.920 which makes me very happy. I asked people on Twitter what I should ask you when you were  
01:10:02.600 coming on the podcast and the most common question came around branding for startups.  
01:10:07.040 So say you're a startup, you're trying to figure out how do we build a brand for what  
01:10:10.840 we're doing? Do you have any advice for early stage founders to help build their brands,  
01:10:15.520 trying to get their brand over time? Something they could do early on?
01:10:17.760 Very simple. Be consistent, be distinctive and be famous. Now, often, we forget this,  
01:10:25.320 advertising often talks about brand in this incredibly nuanced way about differentiation  
01:10:30.520 and this and that and the other. You've got to be distinctive undoubtedly. You've got to be  
01:10:37.360 consistent for obvious reasons and you've got to stick at it visually without dicking around too  
01:10:43.800 much. But actually the reason advertising agencies never say, "We're going to make you famous is  
01:10:50.080 because it sounds too obvious." Okay, well yeah, obviously. Yeah, but let's not talk about fame. It  
01:10:55.840 is. It's about fame in that fame fundamentally changes the rules in completely non-linear ways.  
01:11:06.880 So first of all, when you are not famous, you have to find all your customers. Suddenly you  
01:11:12.240 reach this magical escape velocity of fame where people start coming to you and they start saying,  
01:11:18.440 "Have you thought of using this for this?" Of, "Actually, you didn't think of this  
01:11:22.480 as an application for your product, but I've actually got this, I actually use it for this." 
01:11:28.240 And then you reach, these are levels of fame and they compound over time. It's not linear, it's not  
01:11:35.800 attributable. You can't really say... I joke about this, there are people who can attribute their  
01:11:42.800 fame to one single event, Monica Lewinsky perhaps being good example or serial killers. All right,  
01:11:50.080 okay. "If I hadn't killed all those people, no one would've heard of me." There are people for whom  
01:11:55.840 fame is attributable, but for most people it's a whole what you might call amalgam of different  
01:12:03.400 activities going back years. And actually in many cases we ask consumers, "How did you hear  
01:12:10.800 about this?" They don't actually know. They'll always put TV or something online, but actually  
01:12:17.360 they don't know how they heard about it. They just heard about it. And we know that people's  
01:12:21.280 brains react completely differently in terms of their level of comfort with things they've heard  
01:12:26.720 of before versus things that are completely new. It's almost similar to the heuristic of,  
01:12:33.440 is everybody else eating this? Have I eaten it before and have I heard of people eating this? 
01:12:41.000 It's part of that same package of right in the motherboard at human psychology.  
01:12:46.240 So fame is completely, it basically changes the rules for everything. When your chief executive  
01:12:52.880 rings somebody up, they probably call back. If you're a famous company, if he's heard of you  
01:12:57.920 or she's heard of you, she'll call back. If they haven't heard of you, they probably won't call  
01:13:03.240 back. What's that worth? What's it possible? It's impossible to quantify the value of fame. People  
01:13:08.840 come and work for you for less money. People actually apply to you without you having to  
01:13:13.000 find them. People stay longer, customers come to you and give you the benefit of the doubt. You're  
01:13:18.000 allowed to cock up once if you're famous. People will give you, if you've got a great brand, the  
01:13:25.160 best definition of a brand is from the guy who's called Eric Johnson, I think, who wrote the book,  
01:13:31.120 Blind Sight and he's also written a book called Brands That Mean Business. It's a great book.  
01:13:40.200 It deserves to be much more famous actually.And there's a sentence in that book which says,  
01:13:47.000 "Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode." And I genuinely  
01:13:55.440 can't think of a better definition than that. Now, the point about playing on easy  
01:13:58.920 mode is can you quantify the value of that? Well, no. Because you don't know what your  
01:14:03.800 score would've been if you were playing on hard mode or psycho mode. I'm not a gamer,  
01:14:09.280 but you know what I mean. Okay. Can you also say which of your various activities contributed to  
01:14:18.440 the building of that great brand? Well, no, you can't because it's actually not even an amalgam  
01:14:24.040 of things. It's actually a concatenation.There are a host of elements here which are  
01:14:30.400 catalytic. They're not linear. And that's the other thing, which is that because it's not  
01:14:35.840 linear, attempts to evaluate advertising on short-term transactional metrics will always  
01:14:45.360grotesquely undervalue the contribution of that activity to your ultimate business success. It's a  
01:14:52.960 bit like when I first got a pension for the first few years, brand building is a bit like a pension.  
01:14:58.800 For the first few years I had a pension. Oh God, I'm paying this guy a few hundred quid a month and  
01:15:03.440 look, half it's gone in commission and there was a lot of work and I'd rather have the money to have  
01:15:08.800 an Indian meal. I don't know why I'm doing this. Oh look, it's hardly gone up at all. What a bore,  
01:15:14.320 what a waste of time. I thought that for about three years. I'm 58 now and I've got  
01:15:19.280 a pension and I go, "Where did all this money come from? I don't remember paying this." 
01:15:25.640 It really is like that. It's a compounding effect. And everybody effectively, because we have finance  
01:15:32.200 and ROI and all those things, everybody's using addition, multiplication, subtraction,  
01:15:37.200 and division to try and quantify the value of an activity, which actually is about power laws. It's  
01:15:46.360 not about that linear bullshit. It's really about power laws and non-linearities and all  
01:15:54.440 this kind of stuff. And so we are being judged by the wrong maths. We're being evaluated by the  
01:16:01.000 wrong maths and also we're being evaluated over the wrong timeframe. And consequently,  
01:16:07.600 my argument would be that at a very rough estimate, an awful lot of marketing activity  
01:16:14.040 is in reality four times as valuable. Four is, okay, I'm plucking that number out of the air,  
01:16:20.800 but four seems about [inaudible 01:16:25] is probably four times as valuable as people think  
01:16:26.760 it is when they measure its short-term contribution. Could be more of course
01:16:32.240 I love that because over time it will build and it compounds. It's like a drip. I love  
01:16:37.200 the three points you made about how to build a great brand consistency,  
01:16:40.680 distinctiveness. What was the third? It was be famous?
01:16:44.280 Yeah, consistency, distinctiveness, probably clarity.
01:16:50.960 Clarity.
01:16:51.640 Just be famous.
01:16:53.040 Great.
01:16:53.360 Yeah. Some sort of clarity of promise, I think.
01:16:57.520 Amazing. Consistency-
01:16:58.640 I think a good brand is a promise, but also the extent to which it contributes to trust,  
01:17:06.520 which is that if you met a celebrity on the street, I don't mean a serial killer celebrity,  
01:17:16.160 I mean a famous actor. One thing you wouldn't think about is are they going  
01:17:19.840 to steal my wallet? Are they going to mug me? Are they going to do anything weird? They may  
01:17:24.600 have lots and lots of vices, but generally people who have a lot of reputational skin in the game,  
01:17:30.080 who've invested a lot in building up a reputation over time are going to be much more cautious about  
01:17:35.720 disappointing their customers or risking negative feedback than someone nobody's ever heard of. 
01:17:45.120 And let's be honest, I think it's even more extreme in the United States than it is in  
01:17:49.240 the UK. The relationship people have with celebrities is kind of pervy and weird.  
01:17:56.160 They imbue these people with superpowers. They're actors. They didn't actually fly through the air,  
01:18:02.520 but somehow people treat them with this reverence because they're just famous. And the point is,  
01:18:09.640 it's easy mode. If you are actually pretty famous, you are playing that game on easy  
01:18:15.760 mode because so many things which require massive reassurance, due diligence, checking,  
01:18:22.240 you take it to the board and three people on the board have never heard of the company so they want  
01:18:26.200 you to go back and check with so-and-so. And then you walk in and you're famous,  
01:18:32.560 the rules are different. When I say there are also these inflection points like escape velocity,  
01:18:38.680 I always say about Coke that Coke has reached a magical level of fame where  
01:18:44.760 it is your expectation that any shop or bar or cafe or bistro style restaurant will stock it. 
01:18:54.120 I can ask for this anywhere, and if they haven't got it's their fault,  
01:18:58.600 not mine. Now that that's really mega fame. But equally in B2B, there's an inflection point in  
01:19:06.440 B2B marketing, which is that if no one ever got fired for buying IBM, we know the famous phrase,  
01:19:14.560 if you appoint Pricewaterhouse or EY or whatever to your audit and something goes wrong,  
01:19:21.360 everybody blames them. If you appoint someone nobody's ever heard of to be your auditor and  
01:19:27.120 something goes wrong, everybody blames you for not appointing Pricewaterhouse or EY. It's rather like  
01:19:32.680 one of the reasons I fly with... I wouldn't go on a business trip with Ryanair, even though they're  
01:19:38.880 actually pretty good and they're very punctual, is if the flight gets canceled or delayed and I  
01:19:44.880 ring the client and say, "I'm terribly sorry, the BA flight's been delayed." They go, "Oh, well,  
01:19:50.840 never mind you did your best." And if I ring up and say, "The Ryanair flight's been delayed," it's  
01:19:59.080 not quite the same, is it? I haven't necessarily tried. I've skipped on that. You see what I mean?
01:20:05.440 Yeah.
01:20:05.880 And so various things, it's not just what things are, it's what they mean. And we use brands as  
01:20:14.920 extended phenotypes to express ourselves in all kinds of ways. So this is the other  
01:20:21.400 thing with brands, it's not just a simple consumer. It's not just a simple business  
01:20:27.840 consumer relationship. There are all kinds of things as what does the brand I use say  
01:20:31.880 about me? It's do the people who know me know what this brand means? It's no good  
01:20:38.600 being a luxury car that only rich people have heard of. Because in order to convey prestige,  
01:20:45.040 it's necessary for you to know that other people know that BMW is a prestigious car  
01:20:50.280 brand and so on and so forth. So there are lots of things here which are second order,  
01:20:54.240 third order, non-linear compounding factors. We just have to acknowledge this is a different  
01:21:00.200 kind of maths and yet we're being judged on an X minus Y equals Z maths. Doesn't make any sense.
01:21:12.200 Maybe as a final question, is there anything you want to leave listeners with,  
01:21:15.160 folks that are building product? Any lasting piece of nugget or advice?
01:21:19.360 Try and do the psychological and the technological and the economic for that matter. In other words,  
01:21:28.440 the sweet spot is it works psychologically. It works technologically and it works economically.  
01:21:35.480 In other words, you can make money out of it. People want it and it allows them to  
01:21:41.160 do something significantly new by using some clever application of tech. Try and use those  
01:21:48.080 three things in parallel because I think what most businesses do is they try and do things in  
01:21:53.120 series and businesses borrow an awful lot from the Fordist Taylorist production line mentality  
01:21:59.520 of the process. And the process, we have to pretend that the process is linear, but the  
01:22:06.840 process of any kind of innovation or development is not linear. They're loads of products, which by  
01:22:11.840 the way have completely failed at first iteration, and then someone sold them in a different way and  
01:22:16.760 they then turn out to be completely successful.The Pivot is an example of that. Famously Wrigley  
01:22:26.360 started off selling soap powder in Chicago. Then he started giving away baking powder free to  
01:22:32.000 sell the soap powder, and then realized he'd start making baking powder and selling that, and he gave  
01:22:37.120 away chewing gum that went on the baking powder as a gift. And thenpeople liked the chewing gum  
01:22:43.200 a lot more than they liked the baking powder. So as a result, Wrigley became a chewing gum company. 
01:22:49.440 But we're always trying to make this thing linear because when we tell stories backwards,  
01:22:53.880 we post-rationalize and we reverse engineer and we reverse engineer our actions to make it all seem  
01:22:59.240 perfectly linear and logical as a self-check. The real process is never like that. And I think you  
01:23:05.400 should have marketing. Marketing and innovation are two sides of the same coin. As I often say,  
01:23:13.400 you can either work out what people want to find out a clever way to make it,  
01:23:16.760 or you can work out what you can make and find a clever way to make people want it.  
01:23:22.120 And actually the greatest things manage to do both. Simple as that. Don't do it one than the  
01:23:29.120 other. Don't leave marketing to the last minute, but equally work in parallel as far as you can.
01:23:35.200 Where can people find your book and Nudgestock? Point them real quick.
01:23:38.640 Nudgestock.com. The book's called Alchemy and it's got a variety of subtitles depending on  
01:23:43.920 which country you're in. But if you look for Alchemy by Rory Sutherland,  
01:23:47.680 the audiobook is probably the best thing to buy because I actually read it myself and I  
01:23:51.240 rift a bit from that. But also available on Kindle and from all good bookshops and quite  
01:23:59.240 a few rotten ones. And there's also a book I've co-written called Transport for Humans  
01:24:03.960 co-written with Pete Dyson. If you're in the transportation industry, I'd recommend that one.
01:24:08.160 Amazing. Rory, thank you so much for being here.
01:24:09.680 Thank you for that. Always a joy.
01:24:12.640 Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on  
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01:24:27.480 past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.a free Cycle trial  
00:06:48.680 today at cycle.app/lenny and put your feedback on autopilot. That's C-Y-C-L-E dot app slash Lenny.
00:06:58.400 I've had a conversation earlier today with someone who's in the hotel industry and is in a  
00:07:04.600 particular, without giving away where he works, he's looking to reinvent the hotel. Arguing,  
00:07:11.960 I think with some reason, that it's one of those areas which is actually ripe for a good degree  
00:07:18.320 of disruption. There's a complicated thing, don't be too weird, okay? Don't be too strange because  
00:07:27.040 if the consumer... There's a wonderful concept from Raymond Levy course, the French designer  
00:07:31.840 called maximally advanced yet acceptable. In other words, there is a pace of change which  
00:07:38.320 consumers will accept, and generally they're more comfortable with evolution than they are with  
00:07:43.680 complete reinvention. There are exceptions to that. Well, actually even the iPhone,  
00:07:49.680 let's face it was preceded by the iPod. It wasn't a complete WTF moment. And consumers effectively  
00:07:59.800 like to migrate their behavior rather than reinventing their behavior. But nonetheless,  
00:08:06.720 one of the things I always point out is that idiosyncrasies count double. 
00:08:12.800 The wonderful thing actually, years ago, back in the 1990s, Ogilvy won the Jaguar account and  
00:08:20.640 one of the things the creative director in New York said is that one of the things you  
00:08:25.400 need to preserve is slightly odd things. So in a Jaguar of the 1990s, you turned on the  
00:08:33.240 light above your head, the reading light or the central light with a switch that was actually on  
00:08:38.200 the central console. Every other car you reached up and you flipped the switch. In the Jaguar,  
00:08:44.680 you pressed the button at the bottom and the light came on the top and the creative director said,  
00:08:50.320 "Keep those things. Actually distinctiveness really matters." And they were actually really  
00:08:56.880 interested. They said, "Oh, that's interesting you say that because we're actually planning  
00:08:59.560 to get rid of it. We thought it was inconsistent.For years, I don't know if this is still true  
00:09:05.880 because I don't drive many Rolls-Royces, but for years, Rolls-Royce was the last car,  
00:09:10.600 now obviously now cars dip their headlamps automatically, or you have an automatic setting,  
00:09:16.040 but for years, Rolls-Royces were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor,  
00:09:21.120 perfect for an automatic, not so good for a manual, but they had a pedal on  
00:09:24.640 the floor where you dipped and undipped your headlamps rather than having a stop.  
00:09:30.960 And those things, which I always cite things like the Double Tree cookie when you check in for  
00:09:37.080 example, a brilliant example of this, which when you think about it was extraordinary in terms of  
00:09:43.320 the attention it garnered. You probably remember MCI the American phone... No, you're too young.
00:09:48.880 Yeah, I do. Of course I remember MCI.
00:09:50.800 You do? Okay. They have the concept of friends and family where you nominated a  
00:09:56.000 certain number of calls, a certain number of numbers that you called particularly  
00:09:59.600 frequently, and you got 20% off calls to those numbers. I think it started off with 10%, and  
00:10:06.520 I think they eventually ramped it up to 25%, but actually most people, 90, it's a Pareto principle,  
00:10:13.320 most people make 80% of their calls to probably five or six numbers. Now, what was interesting  
00:10:19.040 about that was it garnered [inaudible 00:10:21]. It was in a sense irrational,  
00:10:23.560 but it garnered much more interest than if you'd simply reduced the cost of calls by 15,  
00:10:28.600 20% across the board because you have to stipulate your numbers. And actually things that are  
00:10:37.080 slightly weird things that have a little bit of extra things that are slightly counterintuitive,  
00:10:44.080 sometimes the right thing to do is to get rid of them, sometimes you celebrate them. 
00:10:48.360 And that's what I mean about the comedian. The comedian notices things that are slightly weird,  
00:10:52.880 notices things, and actually there was a great comedy routine When Friends and Family Came to  
00:10:57.760 the UK. It was introduced from MCI by a marketer called Ed Carter to BT in the UK. There wrote  
00:11:04.720 whole comedy routines about it, people going, "I suddenly realized I couldn't think of the ninth  
00:11:11.440 number," or, "It's basically my mum and nine adult lines." This was the kind of thing. But those  
00:11:18.760 kind of things, which actually they're a slight little splinter on the attention. In other words,  
00:11:26.640 it's something that slightly raises up from the normal shape or it's the step that isn't quite  
00:11:32.520 the riser. If you go down a flight of steps and one step is slightly... The sender is slightly out  
00:11:39.040 of whack. Those things have a place actually. Famously Veuve Cliquot, the French Champagne  
00:11:46.720 house, their labels ended up yellow by mistake.I think there was some printing error and they  
00:11:54.440 thought, "Okay, we have these stupid yellow limos and we will send them to [inaudible 00:12:00] in  
00:11:59.840 England. We didn't want [inaudible 00:12:04] by selling them in France." And then the Brits said,  
00:12:06.560 "Okay, by the way, that champagne, can you send us more of the champagne with the yellow label?  
00:12:10.480 It's going down really well." And they said, "Okay, we're going to make it really yellow  
00:12:14.360 now," just almost as a kind of wind-up, I think. But of course, if you think about it, the entire  
00:12:21.600 identity of that champagne, you can't remember the name, it's the one with the yellow label.  
00:12:28.960 And so visual distinctiveness and other forms of what you might call UX distinctiveness, as I said,  
00:12:36.680 don't go crazy weird, but there's this concept of MAYA, which is maximally advanced yet acceptable. 
00:12:42.680 There's a wonderful phrase which I'll share with you, which was there's an English guy who went  
00:12:48.240 over from the BBC for BBC 4, which is like the PBS of PBS, okay? It's the really niche, niche,  
00:12:59.280 educational hardcore factual British TV channel. And he went to see if there are any programs to  
00:13:09.640 buy from the Danish state broadcaster, and he ended up buying a series called The Killing. He  
00:13:15.760 bought the first season of The Killing went for 24,000 pounds, so about $30,000 he paid  
00:13:21.760 to run The Killing, which had aired on Danish television about a year and a half earlier and  
00:13:27.040 been quite successful in Denmark, but nowhere else. And he paid 24,000 pounds, $30,000 and  
00:13:32.280 aired it on BBC 4, and then it became hugely popular, and then it migrated to BBC 2,  
00:13:37.280 and then Netflix came along and bought the rights to the series. You'll probably remember this. 
00:13:41.600 So actually the Danish state broadcaster ended up, he said, "There should be a statue of me outside  
00:13:47.000 this Danish broadcaster because I ended up making them tens of millions of pounds by both selling  
00:13:52.320 the rights to the original series and also by Netflix buying the rights to the basic storyline."  
00:13:59.640 I said, "Well, why did you do that?" I said, "What made you buy it?" And he said, great phrase. He  
00:14:03.760 said, "Well, if you're British," true also if you're American, by the way, he said, "If you're  
00:14:07.720 British, the great thing about Scandinavians is they're just the right amount of weird." So if you  
00:14:14.920 think about it, if you have to watch something set in Denmark and you live in San Francisco, it's not  
00:14:19.600 like watching something set in Korea or Somalia. You're not sitting there going,"What the hell  
00:14:24.840 is going on here? Why is this man doing this?"Basically, they're a bit like us, they're enough  
00:14:31.520 like us that we basically figure out what's going on, but they're weird enough to make it just that  
00:14:37.880 little bit more interesting. And I think that's part of the reason for the popularity of Scandi  
00:14:43.280 Noir and Scandi Crime is they're the right amount of weird, and I think that's true of product  
00:14:48.800 design. I think with Raymond Loewe, I think the thing was he made a fan, if I got the story right,  
00:14:53.520 he made a fad that was insanely quiet and people didn't believe it worked because it was just too  
00:15:00.120 quiet. And years later, I remember that story because there was a guy who had this extraordinary  
00:15:05.560 machine learning and AI device that was being used by engineers, and he was producing I think  
00:15:11.760 it was an electric toothbrush or it might've been a razor, it was either a men's razor, with  
00:15:18.000 an electric motor, which was they could somehow make it insanely quiet by using some weird machine  
00:15:23.560 learning algorithm about what caused the noise.I said to him, "Look, be a bit careful because  
00:15:29.600 it's probably a good idea to make a razor a bit quieter, but if you make it too quiet,  
00:15:33.960 we genuinely won't believe it's working. Actually, it's the crackly noise whether you rub it over  
00:15:39.400 your face and it's the buzz of the thing and the vibration of the thing that actually convinces  
00:15:45.400 us it's doing a job. And you can overdo this. You can over optimize for things."
00:15:52.040 I love all these examples you're sharing of ways products stand out sometimes by accident,  
00:15:57.280 sometimes intentionally. If I were to zoom out and try to describe what you encourage  
00:16:01.840 people to do, you basically are intent on convincing people to think less logically,  
00:16:06.680 to think less rationally, which I think is pretty counterintuitive to a lot of people,  
00:16:10.760 especially in business where they're told, "Be more rational, be more logical."
00:16:14.160 I think what it is psychology is a branch of complexity theory, and there are lots of things  
00:16:20.440 in it which are nonlinear butterfly effects, small things that have a huge effect, and there  
00:16:25.800 are also lots of things which are, if you like yin and yang. In other words, what I say is the  
00:16:32.000 opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. I always say there are two great ways to check  
00:16:38.680 into a hotel. One of them is insanely high touch and the other way is no touch. It'd be pretty cool  
00:16:44.360 to check into a hotel where basically you just walked in with your mobile phone and unlocked your  
00:16:48.880 room. That'd be pretty cool. It's also pretty cool if you go to the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong  
00:16:53.640 that they take you up to your room, show you how to use the television, the shower, I hope, because  
00:16:58.920 that's always a baffling thing and that actually make you a cup of tea in the room while you're  
00:17:04.400 filling out the paperwork at your vast desk.They're both pretty great ways to check into  
00:17:08.920 a hotel. They're complete opposites, but they are distinctive. I think understanding the fact that  
00:17:15.680 what we're trying to do is we're trying to run the world of business entirely to a reductionist kind  
00:17:22.200 of maths and physics and finance model where everything's linear and everything works in  
00:17:30.120 straight lines and everything's proportionate, and the opposite of a good idea is wrong,  
00:17:36.200 and the past is a fantastic guide to the future. We're basing our decision making on high school  
00:17:42.840 maths questions. It always bothers me by the way that intelligence tests are multiple choice. The  
00:17:49.440 SAT is a multiple choice in the US I think, aren't they? Very weirdly, a great aunt of mine actually,  
00:17:55.560 who spent some time in the US I think at Princeton, was actually involved with the  
00:18:00.600 guy who designed those early intelligence tests.By the way, she had her doubts. One of the things  
00:18:08.440 she commented on was that basically if they did an intelligence test in which  
00:18:13.800 white academics didn't come top, they rejected it as a measure of intelligence. So they found,  
00:18:19.200 for example, I think that Native Americans and African-Americans were, for instance, better at  
00:18:24.440 memorizing poetry than white people were, and all credit to my great aunt. They rejected this then  
00:18:32.920 as a measure of intelligence because it didn't fit their narrative. But the other thing that  
00:18:37.640 bothers me, I'm slightly proud of my great aunt for spotting this, calling this out as a bit  
00:18:42.920 of bullshit to be honest, but the other thing that always bothers me is that by definition,  
00:18:49.400 multiple choice questions have a single right answer. Theoretically, you could have multiple  
00:18:55.600 right answers and you simply have to choose one that is acceptable, but basically they've  
00:19:00.480 got a right answer and three wrong answers. That's how you do multiple choice questions. 
00:19:04.640 But real life decisions aren't like that. You can have multiple right answers, and also you  
00:19:10.440 don't have all the information you need to answer the question contained within the question. And  
00:19:17.800 some of the information you have, which you think is important, is actually irrelevant to  
00:19:22.200 answering the question. So we have this when you look at those intelligence tests, SAT measures,  
00:19:28.800 IQ tests, they're all two buses leave a bus station, one travels due north. They all have  
00:19:35.480 an assumption of complete proportionality and linearity. The buses are all traveling in a  
00:19:39.800 straight line. You have to calculate what time it is when the buses are a hundred kilometers  
00:19:45.820 apart and there's a single right answer. And all the information in the question is germane  
00:19:50.640 to the answer that generally there isn't any extraneous information which you have to ignore. 
00:19:56.120 And there was a famous experiment actually, which I think originated in France where they said,  
00:20:01.720 "This ship stops, 27 goats get on, three sheep get off, then they add 25 cows. How old is the  
00:20:10.640 captain of the ship?" And what they found is actually pretty intelligent kids would not give  
00:20:18.720 the answer, "It is impossible to tell." They'd assume that the information in the question,  
00:20:24.760 because it's in the question, had to be of use in formulating the answer. 
00:20:30.760 And you can Google it because it then appeared in a Chinese school exam and  
00:20:36.520 it was a very interesting experiment done I think by a French philosopher or psychologist,  
00:20:40.440 which is what happens if you actually just give people a load of data and then you give them a  
00:20:45.320 question? Are they so habituated by high school questions to assume that what's in the question  
00:20:52.280 must therefore give you a single right answer? And this is exactly what happened. If you look at real  
00:20:59.440 life, i.e business decisions, which anything that involves human behavior, it's simply all  
00:21:05.520 those conditions that we are expected to look for in something when we call it scientific. None of  
00:21:12.000 those conditions are met, single right answer, proportionality, the scale of the input being  
00:21:18.120 proportionate to the scale of the effect, none of those things are met in real world decisions,  
00:21:24.360 and yet we select and promote people on their ability to perform those artificial activities.
00:21:31.680 I'm curious if you've seen a company figure out how to do this better. So you clearly  
00:21:36.840 are incredibly good at out ofthe box thinking, thinking incredibly creatively. All these examples  
00:21:42.160 are examples of where something was not what you would expect. Have you seen anyone actually  
00:21:47.320 implement a way to operate where they allow their employees and companies to think this way?
00:21:52.589 Yeah, I've across a few really interesting stories of companies which have a much less top down. In  
00:21:58.120 other words, it's a much more... You know how in evolution, there's this theory of multi-level  
00:22:03.680 selection, which is we don't just select for individuals or genes, we select for groups, for  
00:22:09.040 example. Two examples I've heard of anecdotally, which are interesting, there's a British company  
00:22:14.320 called Octopus Energy, which also has a software division called Kraken, which it's effectively  
00:22:20.680 a way of managing utilities in a much more sophisticated pricing environment. And they have  
00:22:25.880 extraordinary tariffs where if you charge your car after midnight, you pay a tiny fraction of what  
00:22:32.520 you pay the rest of the time. It's very much about marrying supply and demand. The way they operate  
00:22:37.640 is almost multicellular in that you have lots of small autonomous teams. Their ultimate brief,  
00:22:45.560 what the objective of the company is is very, very clear, but actually they allow people considerable  
00:22:51.360 autonomy within teams of 10, 15, 20 people in terms of how they actually achieve their ends. 
00:22:59.720 The second example is Shopify, where their customer service teams are in groups of 10. And  
00:23:06.520 Toby Shannon, who is the chief operating officer of Shopify, modeled this on sports teams. He said,  
00:23:13.920 if you look at teams of people in sport, your typical sport will have somewhere  
00:23:17.880 between rugby might be 15 and soccer is 11, and cricket is 11. But generally teams have  
00:23:25.840 those double-digit team sizes, and he thought there was something meaningful about that. 
00:23:31.040 And so although it meant in some ways a much less lean structure,  
00:23:37.200 because normally in a call center environment, you'd have one person managing 100 people,  
00:23:42.720 and you had effectively a team leader with a team of 10. And what was interesting that emerged from  
00:23:48.720 this is although he had to fight for this to an extent, these people were extraordinarily happy in  
00:23:56.040 their jobs and extraordinarily motivated, but also kept each other motivated because the teams were  
00:24:02.400 small enough where people felt debts of obligation to their other teammates. In other words, if you  
00:24:08.520 work for an organization of 100 people and you pull a sick day, you don't really feel terrible  
00:24:13.080 about it. But if your pulling a sick day means the other nine or eight people have to work quite  
00:24:19.160 a lot harder because you are not there, natural human instincts of reciprocation and obligation  
00:24:27.320 don't really scale up into... There's the Dunbar number famously of 150 people, which is the size  
00:24:34.640 of military units and Oxbridge colleges and so on.And there's that famous Dunbar number coined by  
00:24:41.080 Robin Dunbar once described as the number of people you know where you could join  
00:24:47.840 a conversation in which they were engaged with someone else without it feeling weird.  
00:24:55.960 Brilliant. And most people know about 150 people where effectively you're at a party,  
00:25:02.640 you see friend X who's one of your dumb bar number one of your 150 people talking to a  
00:25:08.000 complete stranger, and you can go over and join that conversation without feeling you're a bit  
00:25:12.840 of a wallflower or being a bit of an idiot by butting in. And that's the Dunbar number 150.  
00:25:19.160 There does seem to be some number around sports teams around 10. So that's a way of designing for  
00:25:24.600 humanity rather than designing for the organogram.And a third case would be talking to someone at  
00:25:31.000 a very successful British online retailer called AO, Appliances Online is what it stands for. And  
00:25:38.880 he said something fairly similar in terms of the brief to the staff is very simple briefs like,  
00:25:47.560 "Treat the customer like you treat your grandmother." And if you look at yourself  
00:25:53.280 in the mirror, the shave test, and you come home at the end of the day, would your mum be proud of  
00:25:58.400 what you've done? They actually said not those metrics of speed and efficiency and how many  
00:26:05.760 deliveries did you make, but the way in which they define customer service, and this would apply to  
00:26:11.880 call center staff as well, is imagine, treat the customer like you're talking to your gran. I said,  
00:26:18.760 "There are lots of different ways you might talk to your grandmother, you've all got different  
00:26:21.920 grandmothers, et cetera," but basically everybody knows what that means. And similarly make your mum  
00:26:28.480 proud is effectively the brief.And I think undoubtedly, there are  
00:26:35.160 two great virtues to this, one of which is that the metrics often actually get gained or they lead  
00:26:42.240 to a complete distortion of behavior. The second thing with metrics is that either people gain them  
00:26:50.800 to their own advantage or they obey them, but find them stupid. But the loss of autonomy that results  
00:26:59.480 when you're simply chasing a few metrics. Imagine what it's like to work in a call center where you  
00:27:03.832 are basically incentivized to get the customer off the phone as quickly as you possibly can.  
00:27:11.360 The loss of autonomy and judgment, the tokens, I think, and that is deeply depressing. It's deeply  
00:27:19.800 demotivating. So a final case of that is Zappos. We're talking to the fantastic guy who is I think  
00:27:26.360 chief marketing or operating officer for Zappos.You won't believe this. I think that he refused to  
00:27:33.480 make speed a measure in the call center. He said, "The call is as long as it needs to be to solve  
00:27:39.920 the problem." And they had one extraordinary outlier, which was something like a customer  
00:27:44.360 service call, which was seven hours long. Now, I think it involved a couple of bathroom visits on  
00:27:50.840 both sides. I have no idea what the problem was that actually takes that, but that was almost a  
00:27:57.080 point of principle, that if it takes seven hours to solve the problem, that's how long we spend on  
00:28:02.120 the line. And so this business where in the urge for quantification and the urge for what you might  
00:28:10.120 call de-psychologization of problems, in other words, you define them by entirely objective,  
00:28:17.480 non-psychological non-emotional measures. We've eventually created what I call Soviet-style  
00:28:24.840 capitalism. It's deeply demotivating. It's all about of quarterly targets. At least the  
00:28:32.240 Soviet Union had a five-year plan. We've got these stupid quarterly obsessions with revenue  
00:28:38.920 for meeting our forecast for quarter two. And effectively people feel it's like metropolis and  
00:28:47.280 people feel fundamentally dehumanized by this.And the persistent cost-cutting has effectively  
00:28:58.160 destroyed much of the pleasure of the workplace because there's no discretion. There's no  
00:29:04.800 discretionary judgment allowed anymore because someone saw any deviation from this imaginary  
00:29:11.800 optimum as being a cost. And we go into work to some extent, to exercise our humanity. And that  
00:29:22.400 would include not only economics or reason or logic, it would also include things like ethics,  
00:29:30.240 for example, what's fair. And this attempt, the great [inaudible 00:29:35] Canadian philosopher,  
00:29:35.360 I didn't really know much about until I came across him in a festival in Wales where he was  
00:29:39.000speaking called John Ralston Saul, who writes, he writes actually, I wish I'd known about this  
00:29:44.440 when I wrote my book because it is kind of... This book famously called Pascal's Bastards,  
00:29:51.480 Voltaire, sorry, Voltaire's Bastards.And it's all about how effectively the  
00:29:56.400 French in the French as distinct from the Scottish enlightenment basically became  
00:30:02.240 fixated with reason, which is one of what he calls six human skill sets, ethics, memory,  
00:30:10.960 instinct, creativity. He lists about six human qualities. And what happened effectively with the  
00:30:18.760 French enlightenment was that they became utterly fixated with reason as a problem solving mechanism  
00:30:25.760 to the exclusion of anything else. And he said, "It's not designed to be used in isolation."
00:30:31.360 You've used this term psychological psychology, psycho-ology a few times-
00:30:37.800 Psychologic and psychological. In other words, there's a different mechanism for  
00:30:45.160 logic and decision-making within the evolved human brain, which is actually quite a lot more nuanced  
00:30:50.960 and more sophisticated than the mechanisms for decision-making that economists theorize because  
00:31:00.960 it has to account for imperfect information, it has to account for variance in outcome. It has to  
00:31:06.640 account for asymmetrical information, and it has to account for imperfect trust. So we've evolved  
00:31:14.160 to effectively operate in decision-making under uncertainty as Herbert Simon called it. And yet  
00:31:20.680 most of the actual design of procedures that we encounter are designed for effectively information  
00:31:29.120 decision-making under certainty. And that's a very special case,  
00:31:33.240 which actually never applies completely, I would argue, or certainly very rarely actually  
00:31:39.560 occurs in the real world. It mainly actually is found in economic models.
00:31:45.400 You have a really good insight into why we think in this irrational, illogical way, which I love.  
00:31:51.560 You talk about how if we were evolving in the savanna, if an animal's very predictable and  
00:31:55.640 very logical, they're a lot easier to catch. Can you just talk a bit about that because I think-
00:32:00.120 No, things like the ability to behave irrationally, okay, there's a claim, and by  
00:32:08.080 the way, of all the negative reviews I get, they weren't where I expected at all. There's about  
00:32:14.360 three pages in the book where I basically say, "Being a bit Donald Trump has its virtues," which  
00:32:22.880 is that no one's going to dick with you because they're not entirely sure what you're going to  
00:32:26.920 do. Now, bear in mind this does not mean I'm absolutely an uncritical admirer of the Donald,  
00:32:36.000 far from it. But the guy has operated in the new real estate scene for quite a long time,  
00:32:41.840 and one of the things you've got to learn in that business is no one's going to survive in  
00:32:47.760 New York real estate if they can actually predict what you're going to do. I imagine  
00:32:55.040 that is not a world where being completely, consistently logical, never losing your temper,  
00:33:01.280 never walking away from a deal, et cetera.You have to be able to play those game  
00:33:07.240 theoretic kind of moves. And there were people who basically encountered this thing. Maybe I  
00:33:12.680 shouldn't put it right at the end of the book, and I put it somewhere early on who were then  
00:33:16.680 driven practically insane by this assertion. But the fact remains that there are certain  
00:33:23.280 circumstances in which the ability to behave irrationally is actually at the meta level,  
00:33:30.520 highly rational. The fact that, okay, if I'm never going to fight back against anybody who's  
00:33:39.840 slightly taller than me, it's very rational, but I'm going to spend my whole life being dicked  
00:33:44.680 around by people who are quarter of an inch taller than I. Very rational, they're bigger,  
00:33:51.800 stronger than me, never do anything to retaliate. But no, okay, we have to have some degree of,  
00:34:00.080 and Darwin spotted this, some degree of kind of random number generator in our maker. 
00:34:05.400 And the most classy example of this, which is I learned from Robert Trivers, the evolutionary  
00:34:09.880 biologist, is that when a hare is being chased by a dog, it goes into this incredibly random  
00:34:17.679 pattern of movement where it will zoop straight up in the air. It will suddenly do a 90 degree turn  
00:34:22.639 to the right, it will then suddenly double back on itself at huge speed. And it appears,  
00:34:27.840 I don't know how they find this out, that it doesn't actually know what it's doing,  
00:34:32.280 that there's a random number generator and the hairs, I think it's called in submarine warfare,  
00:34:37.040 it's called doing a crazy Ivan, where you just execute crazy maneuvers. It was Russian submarines  
00:34:43.679 when being pursued by American submarines would do something called a crazy Ivan. And the hare  
00:34:48.679 has the equivalent thing, which is basically it just enters this random movement, high-speed mode. 
00:34:54.679 And the point is, it can't consciously know what it's going to do next because the dog would then  
00:34:59.640 learn to anticipate what it was doing. It has to be random, and it almost has to be unconscious  
00:35:07.200 because the hare cannot give away any telltale signs of what its next move might be. And so  
00:35:14.840 if the hare knew what the next move might be, it would actually start to reveal preparatory  
00:35:20.960 muscular movements, which the dog could learn to read. But there are other reasons why we need to  
00:35:28.160 be irrational for far less controversial or far less survival dependent reasons than this. For  
00:35:35.480 instance, the exercise of social intelligence. We have two very strong inbuilt. We don't  
00:35:41.640 utility maximize. We have two very strong inbuilt default modes in the human brain,  
00:35:48.040 one of which is habit, do what I've done before, and the other one is social copying,  
00:35:52.880 do what everybody else seems to be doing.And they make extraordinarily good sense in  
00:35:58.280 evolutionary terms because an organism that had to learn everything from first principles would  
00:36:03.680 eat a hell of a lot of poisonous berries. Rather than going, look, "I've always eaten  
00:36:08.080 the yellow berries. I seem to be fine. I don't have the shits. Let's just stick to the yellow  
00:36:12.280 berries." Well, unless there's a massive shortage of yellow berries, that's probably a pretty good  
00:36:17.280 idea. Or equally, if you find yourself in a new environment or new habitat and all the  
00:36:22.520 other primates are eating the purple berries and nobody's touching the yellow ones in that  
00:36:27.280 environment, it is probably a good idea to copy them because there's extra intelligence there.  
00:36:34.160 In other words, I can learn effectively from copying my past behavior or copying the behavior  
00:36:40.560 of others. Actually, it's a fairly low cost way of discovering low variance, low downside behaviors. 
00:36:50.200 By the way, very interestingly, actually, it was an AI which actually went into investigating what  
00:36:56.560 would be necessary for more people to have solar panels and more people to have heat pumps. And  
00:37:01.920 it is not tell them the environmental benefits. It is not tell them how much money they'd save  
00:37:07.440 by having a heat pump. No. The single thing that would persuade people to have more heat pumps is  
00:37:12.640 if three people on their street had a heat pump. Now, to an economist, that drives them practically  
00:37:19.480 insane because they go, "No, no, no. The behavior of your neighbors should be entirely irrelevant.  
00:37:24.920 You should simply do the maths andcalculate how much you'd save, compare that against the return  
00:37:30.520 you'd get in a high interest savings account and then decide whether the heat pump is worthy of  
00:37:35.520 the investment." But that's not how we work.We're not prepared to be the first person with  
00:37:43.360 the worst solution. With electric cars, there's probably a very strong heuristic,  
00:37:47.920 which is every consumer's learned, whether it was computers or DVDs or cassette decks or fax  
00:37:54.640 machines or actually washing machines, but going back with anything electrical, it pays to wait  
00:38:02.160 because they get better very quickly and they get cheaper very quickly. So are people wrong,  
00:38:09.600 therefore, not to make that decision? Well, no. What they're doing is they're learning  
00:38:14.520 heuristic from past experience, which by the way, when it applies to anything with a plug,  
00:38:20.440 it's been pretty much proven. I have friends who bought the early flat screen televisions  
00:38:26.680 and they paid thousands and thousands of dollars for these things, and you go into their house,  
00:38:31.600 you go, "God, that's shit." So an awful lot of these things are instinctive intuition  
00:38:41.360 that we've just learned to experience, and we don't know what the future's going to bring, but  
00:38:45.760 actually it's what you might call decision-making based on a reasonable expectation of something.
00:38:53.040 This episode is brought to you by Coda, and I mean that literally. I use Coda every day to help me  
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00:40:21.560 Why is this so important? So there's many ways to try to win in business. There's  
00:40:27.800 like the typical approach, just let's think and brainstorm and come up with  
00:40:30.840 our best ideas. Your basic premise is too many of these are just very rational,  
00:40:35.440 logical approaches to a solution. Why is it so important to think outside the box like this?
00:40:41.800 There's a joke in the UK it's less true that it used to be because there was a famous actor  
00:40:46.160 called Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was known as the Muscles from Brussels. But the old British  
00:40:51.600 joke 20 years ago was that there are no famous Belgians. And it's a bit weird.  
00:40:57.400 Why are there no famous Belgians? And it turns out it's a bit like why there  
00:41:02.200 aren't very many famous Canadians. And the reason is, if you're a famous Canadian,  
00:41:06.400 everybody assumes you're American. And if you're a famous Belgian, everybody assumes you're French,  
00:41:11.000 unless you're a painter from the Middle Ages, in which case you're not called Belgian at all.  
00:41:15.440 You're called Flemish. They are actually a lot of famous Belgians, but everybody assumes they're  
00:41:20.600 either French or they're called Flemish because they painted in the 16th century or something. And  
00:41:27.800 interestingly, for the same reason, there aren't very many famous marketing campaigns  
00:41:33.760 to launch new innovative products because when a product succeeds,  
00:41:39.640 everybody forgets the fact that it was the marketing that was instrumental to its success. 
00:41:45.040 When I say marketing, I mean in its wider sense. I don't just mean the advertising, the  
00:41:48.320 communication, the positioning. We tend to look at great products. We go iPhone, the Ford Model T,  
00:41:56.120 and we tend to go, "Everything was a bit crap, and then Henry Ford came along, or Steve Jobs came  
00:42:00.440 along and they had this invention, and everybody immediately saw that this was brilliant, and  
00:42:04.560 they went and bought it." I've got advertisements from 1916 advertising the benefits of electricity  
00:42:11.720 in the home. In fact, that was an advertising campaign that went on for about 30 years. I spent  
00:42:16.440 an early part of my working career in advertising persuading people to get the Internet in the late  
00:42:21.560 1990s, dial up Internet. Now, we forget all that because when we look back, we concertina history  
00:42:29.120 and we go, "There was no Internet. And then Tim Berners-Lee came up with a web and everybody  
00:42:33.560 wanted the Internet." No, it's 20 years.The mobile phone was freakish because that  
00:42:41.760 was actually driven by social pressure in part. Even people who didn't really want a mobile phone  
00:42:48.320 ended up having to get one because you looked like a bit of an asshole when people said, "What's your  
00:42:52.760 mobile number?" And you couldn't give one. And also it became impossible to meet your friends  
00:42:57.960 because they said, "Okay, I'm not sure which pub we're going to, but we'll ring you on the mobile."  
00:43:01.880 If you said, I haven't got a mobile, people will go, "Well, sod you then." But most of these things  
00:43:08.040 including smallpox vaccination, Edward Jenner who basically came up with the cowpox as a vaccination  
00:43:15.720 against smallpox, which was the absolute plague of the 18th and possibly came from the New World,  
00:43:23.440 I'm not quite sure, but it was absolute plague of the 17th, 18th century, and he comes up with  
00:43:28.480 his basic vaccination thing, huge opposition, unbelievable skepticism, massive suspicion. 
00:43:34.760 If you thought that anti-COVID vaccination was something, this was on a par with that.  
00:43:39.680 His marketing coup was getting the British royal family to vaccinate their children. Now,  
00:43:48.360 so what we're saying is that first of all, when products succeed, we forget the extent to which  
00:43:53.920 marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in their success. Steve Jobs was not a technologist.  
00:44:01.280 He was a pitch man. He was a huckster. I mean this as compliments. He was a brilliant  
00:44:05.920 salesman. He was a fantastic marketer. The tech people at Apple didn't respect him. They said,  
00:44:10.600 "I don't get what Steve even does. He can't even code." But he was absolutely brilliant  
00:44:17.400 at everything from product design to focusing on a limited number to extraordinary taste,  
00:44:26.080 to giving those presentations and selling things as a magician, effectively making  
00:44:32.720 everybody believe that Apple was capable of magic and therefore you didn't need the skepticism. 
00:44:38.400 Now, so first of all, marketing plays and timing and luck, by the way, let's also include those,  
00:44:45.160these other factors play a much greater role in both the speed of adoption and  
00:44:50.640 the success of adoption of anything remotely new, innovative. But in hindsight, we forget  
00:44:57.280 the marketing and we never say, "Because of the great marketing, I bought that product." We go,  
00:45:02.960 "I bought it because it was a great product." But we thought it was a great product because  
00:45:06.320 of the marketing. We had to persuade people to get interesting. We had to persuade people to  
00:45:10.520 vaccinate against smallpox. Penicillin came up against a lot of hostility in very early stages.  
00:45:19.640 Also, let's not forget, we're only looking at the successes. I think there've been great products,  
00:45:26.800 which are genuinely intrinsically a good idea. I mentioned Meta Portal TV. I'd also include  
00:45:33.360 Google Glass. I'd also include the wine box.I'd include the Japanese toilet. I'd include the  
00:45:41.000 air fryer until recently. These are all utterly brilliant things, but it took in the case of the  
00:45:48.400 Japanese toilet and the wine box and Google Glass, something about the timing or the marketing,  
00:45:53.440 not the product. Something was wrong and the consumer basically never bit. It never reached  
00:45:59.560 critical mass. Somehow, they couldn't cross the chasm of the early adopter. I still think it's  
00:46:04.960 barbaric. I've got a Japanese toilet here. I don't have one in my other little flat. I  
00:46:09.120 think it's barbaric that the Western Hemisphere dry wipes. The whole of the Middle East has a  
00:46:14.120 bum gun. In Japan, your lavatory quite rightly cleans your rectum with water as God intended,  
00:46:23.120 and for some reason, we in the sophisticated West are there with a dry bit of paper,  
00:46:27.400 scraping it up over our anus. This is medieval.Think about other things, house keys. You  
00:46:36.360 compare how easy it is to get into your car. You've got some keys somewhere in your person,  
00:46:40.760 in your handbag, in your briefcase. You're not really sure where the keys are. You walk  
00:46:44.240 up to your bloody car and you open the door. Your house, it's fucking 1720. You've got to  
00:46:51.080 rattle some metal things to get into the house. Why? House building, the way we build houses will  
00:46:59.800 be recognizable to a Roman. The Romans never invented the stirrup. Would you believe that?  
00:47:08.320 They didn't actually have a stirrup for horses, so you basically had to click on with your knees.
00:47:14.240 Oh my God.
00:47:15.040 How? Okay. So what's so fascinating, the wine box by the way really fascinating to me because  
00:47:20.920 in a logical... The Kindle has only really, it's taken up. I thought when the Kindle and tablet  
00:47:27.760 came along, I admit this, I thought, "Okay, well that's the end of the flaming line for physical  
00:47:31.920 books." In fairness, I travel a lot, so I have quite a lot of eBooks because I can then pack  
00:47:36.640 one tablet in my bag and I'm carrying a library around with me, which on a long plane flight,  
00:47:43.240 it's a lot better than having to pack eight books and decide which one you're going to read when  
00:47:47.440 you get there. But if you don't travel much people seem to refer physical books, for example. People  
00:47:53.120 like these things actually like what's that funny Scandinavian thing you write on, that pad thing?
00:47:59.800 The Remarkable tablet?
00:48:02.040 Remarkable. Okay, people like that actually because it allows you to do less. It allows  
00:48:07.960 you to concentrate because you don't get emails, you don't get distractions, et cetera. But the  
00:48:12.280 wine box should have basically... It keeps for weeks. It's got its own tap. You can have a  
00:48:22.640 glass of wine in the evening without opening a bottle and letting the other five glasses  
00:48:27.480 go off. You're not forced to become a raging alcoholic if you live alone, which you are with  
00:48:33.320 wine bottles. All of these things, vastly better keeping in the fridge. Didn't succeed. Entirely  
00:48:42.480 psychological. In terms of logical products, and it was fascinating. The Japanese toilet, why the  
00:48:50.640 hell is that? I looked at you recently at the most expensive flat in London, which is some place in  
00:48:56.920 Knightsbridge, which is going for $110 million or something and you're going to wipe your own ass. 
00:49:07.120 It's 110 million for this place and the toilets, now, I imagine if there's a Middle Eastern owner,  
00:49:12.520 they'll go and retrofit some bum guns in there. How flaming weird is that? Seriously strange. And  
00:49:21.480 you realize that actually, I mean Google Glass, it was a kind of marketing. They launched a bit too  
00:49:27.920 soon. Then they only gave the bloody glasses to developers. Now with the best will of the world,  
00:49:33.200 developers probably aren't the world's coolest people. They're not the people you want to have  
00:49:38.440 walking around your bar wearing Google Glass. The user imagery wasn't that great. And so you have  
00:49:45.040 these really interesting phenomena. I would've bought Google Glass actually even at the insane  
00:49:50.680 launch price of about $1,000 because I would really, really like being able to walk around.  
00:49:55.880 Now, I don't know what I'm talking to you now.I don't know what the time is. I don't know when  
00:49:59.200 my next meeting starts. I don't know what the weather's like outside. If I just had regular  
00:50:03.920 in eye updates, a heads-up display for shit that's going on in my life that just reminds me of stuff  
00:50:11.160 I'd easily pay, without having to look at a digital watch, which I've bought these bloody,  
00:50:16.560 both Android and Apple watches, and nah. I might as well get my phone out basically. I've got an  
00:50:22.880 ordinary analog watch here, but actually having something which you can wear, which just goes,  
00:50:28.680 "Your next meeting starts in five minutes. The guy you're talking to is called Lenny."  
00:50:33.640 All that stuff would be really, really good. I have no idea whether the Meta Portal TV apart  
00:50:39.520 from this business of the privacy thing with Facebook, but if any product deserved to succeed  
00:50:44.640 in the pandemic for crying out loud, it was video conferencing on your TV, and yet it just didn't. 
00:50:53.960 The other thing I'd say is don't think because a product's failed in the past that you shouldn't  
00:50:58.200 try again, because you know that famous thing that the definition of insanity is trying the  
00:51:04.160 same thing again and again and expecting a different result? That's not the definition  
00:51:07.920 of insanity. That's the definition of a complex system that actually quite a lot of Internet  
00:51:15.560 ideas failed. Quite a lot of online ideas failed because they were just mistimed. Because typically  
00:51:22.000 some good ideas were too early.Great little thing actually called the Chumby,  
00:51:27.320 which I had about three of them, and they were little Internet connected devices,  
00:51:31.280 and they just cycled through little screens, which would say... Little applets,  
00:51:35.080 like little kind of... You're probably an iPhone user, but what we call them Widgets on the screen,  
00:51:42.320 and they go, "These are the trains through a local station. They're on time, they're not on time,  
00:51:46.920 they're running late. This is the weather. This is the latest newsflash from the New York Times." And  
00:51:52.360 they just cycle through that stuff and they'd sit in a little cuddly little thing. I had about three  
00:51:56.840 of these. I thought they're fantastic. But again, I'll give you two examples of this about timing. 
00:52:06.840 No, hold on. It's 1989. I sign out a mobile phone. It's like a brick. It's made by Motorola. Sign out  
00:52:15.240 a mobile phone from the office in1989 because I'm going to a meeting somewhere off site and  
00:52:20.720 I need to be contactable. So you didn't have your own mobile phone. No. The office had about eight  
00:52:24.760 of them, and you signed one out and they were kept charging in the office. You signed one out,  
00:52:29.320 you told your team what your number was for the day, and you set out to your trip. So I'm  
00:52:34.720 walking down Oxford Street with this mobile phone and someone rings me, so I haven't  
00:52:39.080 got any choice. I have to answer it. So I'm speaking on a mobile phone in Oxford Street,  
00:52:44.120 one of the busiest streets in London in 1989, two people shout abuse at me from  
00:52:49.120 passing cars for using a mobile phone.A second case, let me see if I can date  
00:52:56.600 this. It would be about 2000 and crikey, about 2003, 2004, there was a company started by some  
00:53:07.040 American expats called Food Ferry in London, and I think it was a hybrid CD-ROM. You actually had a  
00:53:13.640 CD-ROM of most of the stuff, and you went online, you ordered your groceries and they delivered them  
00:53:18.120 to you. And I mentioned to someone, it would've been the early two thousands that actually  
00:53:25.320 ordered my home groceries on the Internet, and they laughed in my face. Just literally,  
00:53:32.600 they went over, they said, "Hey, you'll never get this guy. He fucking orders his groceries  
00:53:37.800 on the Internet." And this is my point I'm saying is that there's this huge psychological hurdle to  
00:53:44.760 changing behavior or to getting people to adopt behavior which is slightly unusual. 
00:53:54.760 One story, I then bought my own mobile phone. It was '89 I was borrowing the phone. It would've  
00:54:02.320 been about '95, '96 when I actually had my own mobile phone, maybe '94. I'm trying to work it  
00:54:08.840 out. And I'm on the top of a bus in London and somebody rings me and they ring me from the  
00:54:14.280 States. It's my friend Ted who was a biochemist pen, I think at the time. And I said something on  
00:54:21.640 the phone. I'm sitting on the top of a bus and I said something on the phone, which made it  
00:54:25.960 obvious I was speaking to someone in America. It was like, "What time is it with you?" Or,  
00:54:29.600 "What's the weather like over there?" Basically, it was obvious I was making an international call  
00:54:33.640 on a mobile phone at the top of the bus.I actually thought there was a mild risk  
00:54:38.280 of physical attack because that was such an extraordinarily twatty thing to do. And  
00:54:44.320 I suddenly realize this because I'm old. I'm 58. I suddenly realized that a lot of younger  
00:54:50.480 people don't have the chronological context. They just assume that there was no Internet, and then  
00:54:55.800 the Internet came along, so everybody got it.The smartphone was [inaudible 00:55:02]. The  
00:55:02.080 mobile phone itself was not rapid. They've existed for about 50 years. You had to be pretty rich, and  
00:55:08.640 they mostly were in people's cars. I saw someone with a portable telephone, I think in 1984,  
00:55:16.040 and that was a really weird thing for someone to have. They weren't fast. The smartphone was pretty  
00:55:21.840 fast. I grabbed that. That was a freak exception. Most of these things are really gone on slow,  
00:55:29.440 and also if you get your marketing wrong or if you miss time your launch, or if you just misjudge  
00:55:35.840 some aspect of your launch psychologically, you can take something which is intrinsically  
00:55:41.000 a brilliant product, and it will fail to bite. That's why I think this is really important  
00:55:46.600 because we have survivorship bias. We only look at the successes. No one's there going... Certain  
00:55:53.560 things, the fact that we still open our houses with keys for crying out loud, all that stuff.
00:56:00.880 I agree. I'm excited. I'm excited for the Tesla version of keys.
00:56:06.800 Yeah, completely. I'm completely.
00:56:09.680 You've shared all these amazing examples of products that are great but didn't work out.  
00:56:14.600 Many of the reasons that that happens is within a company it's very hard to share  
00:56:18.920 and suggest silly ideas as you describe. And you have this actually really cool suggestion  
00:56:23.320 that I wanted to highlight, which is first, share the logical, rational,  
00:56:28.480 typical answer and then create time to think about the silly,  
00:56:33.400 crazy idea. Can you talk a bit about that? Just how to operationalize this a little bit.
00:56:37.400 According to Herodotus writing in about, what is it? I suppose the sixth century BC,  
00:56:41.760 it was about the fifth, I should know [inaudible 00:56:46]. The ancient Persians,  
00:56:47.120 when they had to deliberate, they debated everything twice,  
00:56:50.520 once while sober and once while drunk. And only if they agreed in both states  
00:56:56.560 would they go ahead with the course of action.Now, I don't know whether being drunk is just an  
00:57:01.680 opportunity to come up with a better idea or whether it's a question of does this  
00:57:06.920 appeal to us rationally? Does this also appeal to us emotionally? I don't know.  
00:57:11.520 There's something really, really interesting about having what you might call a two stage,  
00:57:16.280 a double lock of decision making, which is okay, there's this fundamental asymmetry,  
00:57:21.840 which is creative people have to present their ideas to rational people for approval. Okay, fine,  
00:57:26.440 don't mind that. Never happens the other way around. You never get engineers or accountants  
00:57:31.680 saying, "Well, I think the answer is 3.75, but before I go and present this, I'm going to share  
00:57:36.880 it with some wacky people to see if they can come up with a neater, more cunning idea." So that's  
00:57:42.600 one issue. The other issue would be, talking about products that failed by the way, Ford and  
00:57:49.440 Edison collaborated on an early, I think the first decade of the 20th century, an early electric car. 
00:58:00.320 Watch this on Jay Leno's Garage, by the way. I think that Jay Leno is a greater philanthropist  
00:58:05.840 than Bill Gates. Bill Gates is quite useful if you're in Africa, if you've got malaria or  
00:58:10.720 something, but he's not much use to me. But Jay Leno on the other hand, takes a vast fortune,  
00:58:16.040 buys and restores amazing cars, and then shares videos about them on YouTube. Now, that's great  
00:58:21.120 if you're in Africa, and it's great if you're me. It's fantastic. I obviously adore this guy.  
00:58:27.880 Interestingly, the electric car, according to Leno and according to other articles I've read,  
00:58:33.040 was actually quite good. It was quiet, it was unbelievably good acceleration, and the range  
00:58:38.240 wasn't terrible. And for the time, the speed wasn't bad. What killed it, interestingly,  
00:58:43.640 user imagery. And the user imagery was because it was quiet, you didn't have to hand crank it. 
00:58:50.640 It didn't give off fumes, it didn't make a loud noise. They were really popular with  
00:58:56.240 women and they became stereotyped as women's car. Meanwhile, all the people doing the jalopy  
00:59:04.080 racing and the customization, all the farm boys were using gasoline cars. Now, fast-forward,  
00:59:13.520 what's so fascinating, fast-forward to 2025. I'm quite pro cars. I've got two and my wife  
00:59:19.280 has one of them [inaudible 00:59:20]. And I like them both. I wouldn't go back to gasoline because  
00:59:24.280 I think they're great. They're lovely to drive. They're like a limousine and a go-kart. They have  
00:59:30.400 very few moving parts. They're incredibly quiet. They're just lovely. Just drive one and you'll see  
00:59:38.200 what I mean. And when I write in favor of electric cars, I get all these comments in the spectator  
00:59:45.360 comments belowof people who really hate them. And when they write to me, what it boils down  
00:59:50.280 to is they think, it's user imagery like Google last, and actually there's a problem with all  
00:59:57.600 tech products because the first people to adopt innovative products tend to be slightly weird. 
01:00:04.520 And weird people do not confer the reassurance of social norms in the way that adoption by  
01:00:12.280 conventional people does. If you've got your weird millionaire, rich nutter and he's got a  
01:00:19.040 wind farm and he's got a heat pump, it doesn't make ordinary people think, "Oh, I must do the  
01:00:23.480 same." Now what's happening here is I didn't realize this, but all the people who don't have  
01:00:29.560 electric cars see the people with electric cars and go, "Smug environmental tosser who's looking  
01:00:36.000 down on me because I've got a diesel and thinks he's saving the planet even though you've had to  
01:00:41.160 mine all this cobalt and lithium and whatever to produce the battery, what a twat." Now,  
01:00:47.240 interesting thing about this is that in very few cases I can encounter, I can remember  
01:00:56.680 is are the electric car owners actually very interested in the environment? They're not. 
01:01:01.240 Similarly, when you meet environmental people, they don't have electric cars. They've always  
01:01:06.520 got some crappy excuse, "Yeah, but my wife needs to do the school run and so we decided we'd get a  
01:01:11.640 diesel." I don't know why. But you meet these people, you go to environmental conferences  
01:01:17.720 and you say, "So you're really keen on the environment. You've got an electric car?" "Well,  
01:01:21.360 we thought about getting one, blah blah."Meanwhile, all the people in Essex,  
01:01:26.920 Jersey who just really like cars or really like tech are people buying electric cars. It's got  
01:01:33.600 almost nothing to do with environmental credentials. And yet by actually imbuing  
01:01:40.800 these electric cars with Prius style values of smugness, it's actually a huge obstacle to  
01:01:50.760 adoption because people just, "I don't want to be that kind of person." Now, actually, okay,  
01:01:57.400 when I had an electric car three years ago, there are fewer charging points than there are now,  
01:02:02.680 but what I noticed was really odd was that if you wanted to charge in Billariki in Essex, imagine  
01:02:10.560 New Jersey, imagine Trenton, loads of charging places there. You went somewhere really woke,  
01:02:20.000 you imagine, I don't know, Cambridge Massachusetts or whatever, nowhere to charge. Cambridge England,  
01:02:26.120 absolute desert for car chargers, Brighton, which is like the most right on city on the  
01:02:31.360 south coast of England, nowhere to charge at all.But you went somewhere a bit bling a bit eh,  
01:02:38.680 loads of chargers. I don't know the hell's going on here. And to be honest what's happened is we've  
01:02:46.720 imbued electric car owners with this holier than thou aura, which causes other people to resent  
01:02:54.880 them despite the fact that incredibly few of them are really doing this for environmental reasons.  
01:03:01.920 They may be happy to have zero emission cars. I would like to get solar panels to charge my car.  
01:03:08.160 Not really to reduce carbon emissions, but just because it'd be really cool to have a car that  
01:03:12.880 runs on the sun. I quite like solar panels on my house, not really because I'm going to save the  
01:03:18.920 planet, but I like at dinner parties or rather lunchtime, to go to a picnic and go, "Oh look,  
01:03:26.120 I'm getting two kilowatts of my app."To be honest, that's the kind of... And  
01:03:32.120 actually the reason most people adopt new technology is peacock's tail, it's showing  
01:03:37.720 off. The first cars weren't as good as horses and carts. They were done to show off. They were done  
01:03:42.440 for novelty seeking reasons or for reasons of status display. And that's what rich people  
01:03:47.920 are for. They provide the early stage funding for promising ideas before they really reach maturity.  
01:03:56.960 Famously, the argument is that birds evolved wings as sexual display plumage before they  
01:04:04.400 became large enough to function as a mode of propulsion. So birds, which seemed to  
01:04:09.400 have evolved from dinosaurs for the most part, the logic is that they first of all got wings  
01:04:15.560 as a form of sexual display. The peacock got the tail, but most other birds did the display with  
01:04:21.360 the wings to look cool because I think dinosaurs had feathers, didn't they? I think I'm right. 
01:04:27.560 Okay, so there was a sexual display thing going on and eventually they thought, "Oh, actually I did  
01:04:31.800 this to show off, but I can actually get to that branch." And so there's that early stage funding  
01:04:38.160 argument and what actually provides the early stage funding for new promising ideas is quite  
01:04:43.240 often slightly [inaudible 01:04:45] people like me. But we've got to be conscious of the fact.  
01:04:49.520 And also if you really evangelize new things, I was an air fryer evangelist literally going back  
01:04:55.720 over 10 years. 15 years ago I was like the John the Baptist of air fryers and I'd occasionally say  
01:05:02.320 to an audience of 500 people, "Anybody here got an air fryer?" And there'd always be six people go,  
01:05:06.720 "Yeah, best thing I've ever bought." And it suddenly occurred to me that actually  
01:05:12.040 in a way that actually annoys everybody else.It's not people going, "Oh, these with air fryers,  
01:05:17.720 they really like these air fryers. Maybe I ought to look at getting an air fryer." Instead,  
01:05:21.240 it's like, "These people are in a cult." What you have to realize working in marketing  
01:05:26.000 is that people in marketing are very high in openness, very high in openness to experience,  
01:05:31.000 very, very keen to stand out, very keen to be distinctive. The majority of the population are  
01:05:37.520 much lower on openness to experience. They're much more driven by habit and social norms and  
01:05:43.160 largely they want to fit in. They feel comfortable when they fit in with the people around them. It's  
01:05:52.040 a slightly unusual corporate environment where people actually want to effectively play constant  
01:05:57.880 games of one-upmanship with their workmates, which tends to happen in marketing and other functions  
01:06:04.400 and tends to happen actually at the higher levels of corporations. But it's actually slightly an  
01:06:10.560 unnatural state. You've got to be very careful working in a marketing department or being a  
01:06:14.680 person who works in marketing to continually remind yourself that you're an outlier.
01:06:19.440 One of my favorite stories from your book Alchemy, was the story of the Walkman and  
01:06:24.640 how the engineers, basically, they had the technology to add recording to the Walkman  
01:06:31.000 and they're just like, "Hey, of course we need to add a speech we can do it."
01:06:34.040 It would've cost 50 cents because apparently they built the first Walkman on I think it was a thing  
01:06:41.400 called the Sony Talkman, which was a dictating machine which had both a speaker and it had a  
01:06:47.160 microphone. And it would've cost 50 cents or a dollar per unit of the Walkman to add recording  
01:06:53.680 functionality. Of course later on, they did add that, much later on when people were familiar with  
01:06:59.080 the concept. But I think it was Marita, I think it was Accio Marita at Sony who was the instigator of  
01:07:05.840 the Walkman project, and he was the single driver who said, "No." And they all got very upset about  
01:07:12.280 this because they said, "Look, it costs nothing and it doubles the functionality of the device."  
01:07:16.240 And Marita said, "You don't want to double the functionality