Rory Sutherland: evaluation

Transcript context

…There's a joke in the UK it's less true that it used to be because there was a famous actor called Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was known as the Muscles from Brussels. But the old British joke 20 years ago was that there are no famous Belgians. And it's a bit weird. Why are there no famous Belgians? And it turns out it's a bit like why there aren't very many famous Canadians. And the reason is, if you're a famous Canadian, everybody assumes you're American. And if you're a famous Belgian, everybody assumes you're French, unless you're a painter from the Middle Ages, in which case you're not called Belgian at all. You're called Flemish. They are actually a lot of famous Belgians, but everybody assumes they're either French or they're called Flemish because they painted in the 16th century or something. And interestingly, for the same reason, there aren't very many famous marketing campaigns to launch new innovative products because when a product succeeds, everybody forgets the fact that it was the marketing that was instrumental to its success. When I say marketing, I mean in its wider sense. I don't just mean the advertising, the communication, the positioning. We tend to look at great products. We go iPhone, the Ford Model T, and we tend to go, "Everything was a bit crap, and then Henry Ford came along, or Steve Jobs came along and they had this invention, and everybody immediately saw that this was brilliant, and they went and bought it." I've got advertisements from 1916 advertising the benefits of electricity in the home. In fact, that was an advertising campaign that went on for about 30 years. I spent an early part of my working career in advertising persuading people to get the Internet in the late 1990s, dial up Internet. Now, we forget all that because when we look back, we concertina history and we go, "There was no Internet. And then Tim Berners-Lee came up with a web and everybody wanted the Internet." No, it's 20 years. The mobile phone was freakish because that was actually driven by social pressure in part. Even people who didn't really want a mobile phone ended up having to get one because you looked like a bit of an asshole when people said, "What's your mobile number?" And you couldn't give one. And also it became impossible to meet your friends because they said, "Okay, I'm not sure which pub we're going to, but we'll ring you on the mobile." If you said, I haven't got a mobile, people will go, "Well, sod you then." But most of these things including smallpox vaccination, Edward Jenner who basically came up with the cowpox as a vaccination against smallpox, which was the absolute plague of the 18th and possibly came from the New World, I'm not quite sure, but it was absolute plague of the 17th, 18th century, and he comes up with his basic vaccination thing, huge opposition, unbelievable skepticism, massive suspicion. If you thought that anti-COVID vaccination was something, this was on a par with that. y, and he comes up with his basic vaccination thing, huge opposition, unbelievable skepticism, massive suspicion. If you thought that anti-COVID vaccination was something, this was on a par with that. His marketing coup was getting the British royal family to vaccinate their children. Now, so what we're saying is that first of all, when products succeed, we forget the extent to which marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in their success. Steve Jobs was not a technologist. He was a pitch man. He was a huckster. I mean this as compliments. He was a brilliant salesman. He was a fantastic marketer. The tech people at Apple didn't respect him. They said, "I don't get what Steve even does. He can't even code." But he was absolutely brilliant at everything from product design to focusing on a limited number to extraordinary taste, to giving those presentations and selling things as a magician, effectively making everybody believe that Apple was capable of magic and therefore you didn't need the skepticism. Now, so first of all, marketing plays and timing and luck, by the way, let's also include those, these other factors play a much greater role in both the speed of adoption and the success of adoption of anything remotely new, innovative. But in hindsight, we forget the marketing and we never say, "Because of the great marketing, I bought that product. " We go, "I bought it because it was a great product." But we thought it was a great product because of the marketing. We had to persuade people to get interesting. We had to persuade people to vaccinate against smallpox. Penicillin came up against a lot of hostility in very early stages. Also, let's not forget, we're only looking at the successes. I think there've been great products, which are genuinely intrinsically a good idea. I mentioned Meta Portal TV. I'd also include Google Glass. I'd also include the wine box. I'd include the Japanese toilet. I'd include the air fryer until recently. These are all utterly brilliant things, but it took in the case of the Japanese toilet and the wine box and Google Glass, something about the timing or the marketing, not the product. Something was wrong and the consumer basically never bit. It never reached critical mass. Somehow, they couldn't cross the chasm of the early adopter. I still think it's barbaric. I've got a Japanese toilet here. I don't have one in my other little flat. I think it's barbaric that the Western Hemisphere dry wipes. The whole of the Middle East has a bum gun. In Japan, your lavatory quite rightly cleans your rectum with water as God intended, and for some reason, we in the sophisticated West are there with a dry bit of paper, scraping it up over our anus. This is medieval. Think about other things, house keys. You compare how easy it is to get into your car. You've got some keys somewhere in your person, in your handbag, in your briefcase. You're not really sure where the keys are. You walk up to your bloody car and you open the door. Your house, it's fucking 1720. You've got to rattle some metal things to get into the house. Why? House building, the way we build houses will be recognizable to a Roman. dy car and you open the door. Your house, it's fucking 1720. You've got to rattle some metal things to get into the house. Why? House building, the way we build houses will be recognizable to a Roman. The Romans never invented the stirrup. Would you believe that? They didn't actually have a stirrup for horses, so you basically had to click on with your knees.…

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