When products succeed, we forget the extent to which marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in their success.

He once said, if you can imagine a stand-up comedian doing a routine about your product, then you're onto something.

You need to preserve slightly odd things.

Rolls Royces were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor.

Famously, Verve Plico, it's the one with the yellow label.

Idiosyncrasies kind of count double.

Do you have any advice for early stage founders to help build their brand?

Be consistent, be distinctive and be famous.

When you are not famous, you have to find all your customers.

Suddenly, you reach this magical sort of escape velocity of fame where people start coming to you.

Today, my guest is Rory Sutherland.

Rory is vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, author of the book Alchemy, the Dark Art and Curious Science, creating magic in brands, business and life, and the founder of Nudge Talk, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity.

Rory is both an example and a huge proponent of thinking from first principles.

Through his speaking and his books, he encourages people to not think logically when solving problems, but to think psychologically, using human psychology to inform how you design and build and market your products.

Rory is full of amazing stories and ideas and examples and inspiration, which you'll get a sense of as soon as we start talking.

I don't even ask him a question and he's already off to the races.

This episode is for anyone who wants to think more creatively, help their team be more innovative and learn how to create more magic in your world.

Rory has been one of the most requested guests on this podcast and I can now see why.

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It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously.

With that, I bring you Rory Sutherland.

Rory, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

It's a pleasure. It's an audience that I don't normally speak to.

And so it's an audience which I think is particularly valuable, particularly important, but also actually probably could benefit quite a bit from just a little bit of extra psychology.

Not least, not least, by the way, a very simple observation, which is that do not think that good products automatically succeed or the bad ones necessarily fail.

The other thing I'd say is that timing is so important that don't necessarily reject things simply because they failed in the past.

One of the best products I've ever worked on in a professional capacity was Facebook Meta TV, the TV portal, sorry, Facebook, the Meta TV by Facebook.

And I bought it for about $120. It plugs into your TV.

It allows you to do obviously WhatsApp or Facebook or indeed Zoom on your television with a fantastic face tracking camera.

I mean, it really is sort of $500 worth of equipment, which they were selling for about $120.

One of the best things I've ever owned. I owned about four of them.

When I heard it was being discontinued, I bought another one because I think they're so good.

And yet for reasons I fully don't, you know, I don't really understand.

Apart from the fact that every single review said this is brilliant, there's a product.

But the first seven paragraphs of the article weren't saying this is brilliant.

They were saying who would allow Facebook to put a camera in their home.

And so there were basically, you know, it was nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia because you can't turn the thing off after all.

You don't have to leave it switched off. OK, you know, there were but there were nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia basically followed by one paragraph saying as this these kind of products go, it's brilliant.

And yet we still don't have video calling on TV unless you're willing to plug your laptop in or do something pretty fancy and complex.

That seems really weird to me.

Let me actually read a quote from you around what good marketing often looks like.

So you once said, if you can imagine a stand-up comedian doing a routine about your product, then you're onto something.

The urge to appear serious is in many ways a disaster in marketing.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

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I 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.

So it's a complicated thing. Don't be too weird, OK?

Don't, you know, don't don't be too strange, because if the consumer, there's a wonderful concept from Raymond Lerby, of course, the French designer, called maximally advanced yet acceptable.

In other words, you know, 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, OK, was preceded by the iPod.

It wasn't a complete WTF moment, OK? And consumers effectively like to migrate their behaviour rather than reinventing their behaviour.

But nonetheless, one of the things I always point out is that idiosyncrasies kind of 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, you know, 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 flick the switch.

In the Jaguar, you press the button at the bottom and the light came on the top.

And the creative director said, you know, keep those things.

You know, actually, you know, distinctiveness really matters.

And they were actually really interested because they said, oh, that's interesting you say that because we're actually planning to get rid of it because 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 stalk.

And those things, which I always cite things like the the Doubletree cookie when you check in, for example.

I mean, 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. No, you're too young.

I do. Of course, MCI. You do. OK.

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 sort of 20 percent off calls to those numbers.

I started off with 10 and I think they eventually ramped it up to kind of 25.

But actually, most people, 90 percent. It's a poetic principle.

Most people make 80 percent of their calls to probably five or six numbers.

Now, what was interesting about that was it garnered. It was in a sense, irrational.

OK, but it garnered much more interest than if you simply reduce the cost of calls by 15, 20 percent across the board because you have to stimulate, you know, stipulate your numbers and because you have, you know, actually things that are slightly weird, things that have a little bit of extra friction, things that are slightly counterintuitive.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to get rid of them. Sometimes you kind of 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 MSCI by a marketer called Ed Carter to BT in the UK.

There were whole comedy routines about it. You know, people go, you know, I suddenly realised, you know,

I couldn't think of the ninth number, you know, or it's basically my mum and nine adult lines.

This was the kind of thing. But those kind of things which actually slightly there are 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, you know, the sender is slightly out of whack.

Those things have a place, actually. I mean, famously, Verve Clicquot, the French champagne house, their labels ended up yellow by mistake.

I think there was some printing error and they thought, OK, we have these stupid yellow labels.

We will send them to Le Roast Beef in England. We do not want to sell them in France.

And then the Brits said, OK, 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, OK, we're going to make it really yellow now.

Just, you know, almost as a kind of wind up, I think. OK.

But of course, if you think about it, the entire identity of that champagne, you know, you can't remember the number.

It's the name. It's the one with the yellow label. OK.

You know, 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 four, which is like it's like the PBS of PBS.

In fact, it's the really niche, niche kind of, you know, educational kind of, you know, hardcore factual British TV channel.

And he went to buy to see if there are any programmes 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 it for twenty four thousand pounds.

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 twenty four thousand pounds, thirty thousand dollars and aired it on BBC four.

And then it became hugely popular. Then it migrated to BBC two.

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 Killing, 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, he said, if you're British, true also if you're American, by the way, if you're British, the great thing about Scandinavians is they're just the right amount of weird.

Right. 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, you know, 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 I think that's true of product design. I think with Raymond Loewe, I think the thing was he made a fan. If I've 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 kind of machine learning and AI device that was being used by engineers.

And he was producing a I think it was an electric toothbrush. What might have been a razor was other men's razor with an electric motor, which was that 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 that when 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 know, you can actually you can overdo this. You can over optimize for things.

I love all these examples you're sharing of ways products stand out, sometimes by accident, sometimes intentionally. If you if I were to zoom out and try to describe what you encourage people to do, you basically are intent on convincing people to think less logically to think less rationally, which I think is pretty counterintuitive to a lot of people, especially in business where they're told, be more rational, be more logical.