Rory Sutherland: evaluation

Transcript context

…Today's episode is brought to you by Cycle, the AI-powered feedback platform for product teams is your customer feedback, a tangled mess of slack threads, survey responses and overflowing inboxes? Wish that you could know what your customers really need? Cycle unifies all of your customer interactions from support chats to user research, gong calls and app store reviews into one neat collaborative space. Cycle's AI then extracts actionable insights on autopilot. Cycle will learn what you're building so that it can label incoming feedback automatically. That means you'll get a full voice of customer report without manually triaging feedback. Then simply use Cycle Ask to dig deeper into any topic and generate custom AI-generated summaries across your entire feedback repository. What makes Cycle different is the way that it lets you close feedback loops in each release. Feedback is not used just as a way to prioritize what to build, but also as a tool that creates trust with all stakeholders. Sign up for a free Cycle trial today at cycle.app/lenny and put your feedback on autopilot. That's C-Y-C-L-E dot app slash Lenny. I've had a conversation earlier today with someone who's in the hotel industry and is in a particular, without giving away where he works, he's looking to reinvent the hotel. Arguing, I think with some reason, that it's one of those areas which is actually ripe for a good degree of disruption. There's a complicated thing, don't be too weird, okay? Don't be too strange because if the consumer... There's a wonderful concept from Raymond Levy course, the French designer called maximally advanced yet acceptable. In other words, there is a pace of change which consumers will accept, and generally they're more comfortable with evolution than they are with complete reinvention. There are exceptions to that. Well, actually even the iPhone, let's face it was preceded by the iPod. It wasn't a complete WTF moment. And consumers effectively like to migrate their behavior rather than reinventing their behavior. But nonetheless, one of the things I always point out is that idiosyncrasies count double. The wonderful thing actually, years ago, back in the 1990s, Ogilvy won the Jaguar account and one of the things the creative director in New York said is that one of the things you need to preserve is slightly odd things. So in a Jaguar of the 1990s, you turned on the light above your head, the reading light or the central light with a switch that was actually on the central console. Every other car you reached up and you flipped the switch. In the Jaguar, you pressed the button at the bottom and the light came on the top and the creative director said, "Keep those things. Actually distinctiveness really matters." And they were actually really interested. They said, "Oh, that's interesting you say that because we're actually planning to get rid of it. We thought it was inconsistent. For years, I don't know if this is still true because I don't drive many Rolls-Royces, but for years, Rolls-Royce was the last car, now obviously now cars dip their headlamps automatically, or you have an automatic setting, but for years, Rolls-Royces were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor, perfect for an automatic, not so good for a manual, but they had a pedal on the floor where you dipped and undipped your headlamps rather than having a stop. And those things, which I always cite things like the Double Tree cookie when you check in for example, a brilliant example of this, which when you think about it was extraordinary in terms of the attention it garnered. You probably remember MCI the American phone... No, you're too young. Yeah, I do. Of course I remember MCI.…

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