Rory Sutherland: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, I do. Of course I remember MCI. You do? Okay. They have the concept of friends and family where you nominated a certain number of calls, a certain number of numbers that you called particularly frequently, and you got 20% off calls to those numbers. I think it started off with 10%, and I think they eventually ramped it up to 25%, but actually most people, 90, it's a Pareto principle, most people make 80% of their calls to probably five or six numbers. Now, what was interesting about that was it garnered [inaudible 00:10:21]. It was in a sense irrational, but it garnered much more interest than if you'd simply reduced the cost of calls by 15, 20% across the board because you have to stipulate your numbers. And actually things that are slightly weird things that have a little bit of extra things that are slightly counterintuitive, sometimes the right thing to do is to get rid of them, sometimes you celebrate them. And that's what I mean about the comedian. The comedian notices things that are slightly weird, notices things, and actually there was a great comedy routine When Friends and Family Came to the UK. It was introduced from MCI by a marketer called Ed Carter to BT in the UK. There wrote whole comedy routines about it, people going, "I suddenly realized I couldn't think of the ninth number," or, "It's basically my mum and nine adult lines." This was the kind of thing. But those kind of things, which actually they're a slight little splinter on the attention. In other words, it's something that slightly raises up from the normal shape or it's the step that isn't quite the riser. If you go down a flight of steps and one step is slightly... The sender is slightly out of whack. Those things have a place actually. Famously Veuve Cliquot, the French Champagne house, their labels ended up yellow by mistake. I think there was some printing error and they thought, "Okay, we have these stupid yellow limos and we will send them to [inaudible 00:12:00] in England. We didn't want [inaudible 00:12:04] by selling them in France." And then the Brits said, "Okay, by the way, that champagne, can you send us more of the champagne with the yellow label? It's going down really well." And they said, "Okay, we're going to make it really yellow now," just almost as a kind of wind-up, I think. But of course, if you think about it, the entire identity of that champagne, you can't remember the name, it's the one with the yellow label. And so visual distinctiveness and other forms of what you might call UX distinctiveness, as I said, don't go crazy weird, but there's this concept of MAYA, which is maximally advanced yet acceptable. There's a wonderful phrase which I'll share with you, which was there's an English guy who went over from the BBC for BBC 4, which is like the PBS of PBS, okay? It's the really niche, niche, educational hardcore factual British TV channel. hare with you, which was there's an English guy who went over from the BBC for BBC 4, which is like the PBS of PBS, okay? It's the really niche, niche, educational hardcore factual British TV channel. And he went to see if there are any programs to buy from the Danish state broadcaster, and he ended up buying a series called The Killing. He bought the first season of The Killing went for 24,000 pounds, so about $30,000 he paid to run The Killing, which had aired on Danish television about a year and a half earlier and been quite successful in Denmark, but nowhere else. And he paid 24,000 pounds, $30,000 and aired it on BBC 4, and then it became hugely popular, and then it migrated to BBC 2, and then Netflix came along and bought the rights to the series. You'll probably remember this. So actually the Danish state broadcaster ended up, he said, "There should be a statue of me outside this Danish broadcaster because I ended up making them tens of millions of pounds by both selling the rights to the original series and also by Netflix buying the rights to the basic storyline." I said, "Well, why did you do that?" I said, "What made you buy it?" And he said, great phrase. He said, "Well, if you're British," true also if you're American, by the way, he said, "If you're British, the great thing about Scandinavians is they're just the right amount of weird." So if you think about it, if you have to watch something set in Denmark and you live in San Francisco, it's not like watching something set in Korea or Somalia. You're not sitting there going, "What the hell is going on here? Why is this man doing this?" Basically, they're a bit like us, they're enough like us that we basically figure out what's going on, but they're weird enough to make it just that little bit more interesting. And I think that's part of the reason for the popularity of Scandi Noir and Scandi Crime is they're the right amount of weird, and I think that's true of product design. I think with Raymond Loewe, I think the thing was he made a fan, if I got the story right, he made a fad that was insanely quiet and people didn't believe it worked because it was just too quiet. And years later, I remember that story because there was a guy who had this extraordinary machine learning and AI device that was being used by engineers, and he was producing I think it was an electric toothbrush or it might've been a razor, it was either a men's razor, with an electric motor, which was they could somehow make it insanely quiet by using some weird machine learning algorithm about what caused the noise. I said to him, "Look, be a bit careful because it's probably a good idea to make a razor a bit quieter, but if you make it too quiet, we genuinely won't believe it's working. Actually, it's the crackly noise whether you rub it over your face and it's the buzz of the thing and the vibration of the thing that actually convinces us it's doing a job. And you can overdo this. You can over optimize for things."…

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