[Music] [Music] so good morning welcome to b2b marketing ignite 2018 my name's Joel Harrison I'm gonna be your host on this stage for today I'm editor chief of b2b marketing it's fantastic to see so many of you here today this is this is the biggest event we put on and we're delighted we've grown it so substantially this year about 1200 people were expecting today and as well as been the biggest event probably most importantly is gonna be the best of them we've got we've scoured the world - b2b marketing to find amazing set of speakers and panelists and some fantastic sessions today and I'm really sure that you're gonna leave today being inspired engaged infused all those things to help you go and take your b2b marketing to the next level where you go back to the office so so thank you very much for coming I also feel strangely unpatriotic as an Englishman standing on a stage in the middle of summer by saying thank God the temperature went down by 5 degrees yesterday isn't it a relief you've noticed this building is a wonderful Victorian piece of architecture it's essentially a greenhouse so yesterday we're putting the stands up it was a little bit hot in here so I've never been so pleased to see the weather temperature take a climb I feel very unpatriotic and British for saying that so so yeah so we've got a very packed agenda today people from all over the world speaking coming to speak and to listen and to take part on today so it should be a fascinating agenda this is the kind of the floor plan of the event of the venue if you've not been here before a lot of you who are here today have been previously ignite events but if you're not familiar with the venue just worth pointing out how it actually works so where we are right now is the transformation stage and there'll be activities that we sessions going on here all day but they'll also obviously be lots of other sessions happening at the center at the same time except for the morning keynote and the very afternoon one and those sessions will happen when it's in the syndicate room the delegates up on the left hand side which so you need to go up the stairs on my left and into those doors there and they'll be people there helping you to find your way through so most of them out there or there's another one which is the I believe is the Mart Xtreme which is actually the other side of the room it's down those stairs on the other side so to just just take a minute to familiarize yourself with how those things work and it's worth saying as well obviously we've got 1200 people here it's a packed agenda we're and marshalling people making sure everything happens on time is really important for us we're going to do our absolute best to keep everything on time but it's very important the things run synchronous in couldn't is that can I even say that synchronistically is that word and so we you know we be mindful of that in terms of when you're moving around the building we'd really appreciate your help with that just to remind you that other kind of strings that we've got this is transformation upstairs we've got the Guru stage which is just full of some really interesting people that we know from b2b marketing no particular agenda lots of interesting things to talk about and other content streams our engagement account-based marketing obviously a very hot topic CX a hugely hot topic as well insight leadership and a Martic of course which is a big deal as we all know in b2b now it's worth saying as well that a lot of you would have taken your time to taking the time to complete your delegate form so we know which sessions you wanted to go in but if you haven't had time to do that it would be really grateful if you could make you make an opportunity to do that and you can you can do that by going up to a desk which is again on the balcony level it's backed by those telephone boxes on your way up to the main delegate rooms now why should you do that why is that important well obviously we've got lots and lots of people in the room some of those rooms hold about a hundred people and if you don't book your sessions it's possible we won't get to see the one that you'd like to like to see so please do take the opportunity to go up there and register your sessions and if by the way if you're standing at the back there please do come down to the front there's lots of seats on the back on the left hand side in the front side we've got a fantastic morning keynote in a minute Rory Sutherland who is absolutely worth getting comfortable for because he's gonna be absolutely highlight of the day so please do take a seat there's lots of seats down the front please do come on down don't be shy as somebody once said so thinking about our sponsors today we're delighted that we've had so much support from industry we're really grateful to you as our sponsors we couldn't be here today we couldn't make this happen without you loads of names there lots of very familiar names lots of exciting new names as well we've got a tech playground where you can look at some that new technology I haven't obviously got time to talk about everybody this there and otherwise we'd be here until five o'clock and that wouldn't be helpful for you I'm sure but somebody I wanted to mention particularly was was DKMS who are listed along the bottom there our chair a partner for today and DKMS is a charity dealing with blood cancer which is a very very serious issue as something that's been brought to us by by Matt garish who used to work for b2b marketing he network for the crocodile but we won't hold that against him and and he's raised this with this as a it's a really important issue if you get a moment while you're here well you're not in a session or you've got a you're just taking some time out if you if you felt able to go to the stand and register yourself you could become a blood donor for blood cancer and potentially you could save somebody's life so around the world you get registered on its national database it's a very very worthwhile thing to do it'll take about eight minutes of your time you need to get swabs but it's totally painless thing to do and I say it could be you it could allow you to leave here today doing something really remarkable so I really would add you to do that if you get a minute you can just take a second to do that now we do have an app of course you have an app and I'd advise you to download this as well you can find it by searching for a crowd compass attend the hub on the App Store or Google Play so have a look for that and download that and once you've downloaded it you can then search for b2b ignite and that way you'll find this this page here there's lots of good content on the app obviously and you can also take part in you can also take part in polls and ask questions and things like that so do tickets to take a minute to do that that'll hopefully improve your delegate experience here today and it's also a saying on the app you can actually do it you can do a delegate survey and we I get asked every year all the session all presentations all the conference's that we do Joel can we see the presentations today and of course you can we did Leiter to share those with you but to do that just we need you to complete a very very short questionnaire about what you've thought about today first of all we need your feedback to actually make this event better to improve it so we're really really grateful if you just if you take the time to fill in that survey let us know what you think before you before you get access to those sessions so whatever time we do that again will you get a minute today that'd be really helpful today obviously being in showing wine we're in the social media world we're lucky enough crocodile again to mentions in one session are doing and I'll do a live streaming today so they've got we've got a stand over there to get into the left of the stage and so do you check it out on on Facebook well on Facebook live some of the leading some of the you know sessions will be broadcast from here so do have a look do share it this get some amplification we'd really appreciate your support on that apparently Facebook it can be quite useful for b2b who knew so so we'd appreciate you support with that so I mean that's in terms of the kind of did you kind of the preamble that's there the kind of the what I wanted to say first of all the further but it's slightly odd to talk about the I can't talk about the entire agenda but the one person wanted to draw your attention to was our keynote speaker for this afternoon because I know what it's like this event we have an awful lot of content which we just which we show and it can be a bit overwhelming for everybody and so what we wanted to do was to I want just to point out mark Christie's our closing keynote now when people leave if you get to a point today where you feel about overwhelming your content and you think oh I had enough today I've consumed what I need - please don't go please stay around see Mark Grace who's talking before 5 o'clock if you not seen mark before or heard of him he's a absolutely fantastic speaker his story is one of the most fascinating compelling heartwarming and inspiring stories I've personally ever heard he's a fantastic speaker he's a just a genuinely lovely human being the journey that he went on from an English teacher in in Cambridgeshire to becoming an international rap battle superstar is something which sounds very incongruous and very unlikely but it is it's it's truly remarkable and I would really really advise you to listen to it because it's a really inspiring story so so please don't go before you've seen mark Crist our closing keynote and by the way we're serving drinks then as well so you have the opportunity to have a quick drink and a network of people there's lots of people here you haven't met I'm sure and we'd love to meet you too so I think that's all from me so what I'd like to do now is hand over to our opening keynote who were absolutely delighted - who could be here today who is one of the best speakers we've ever had at b2b marketing events and I was so thrilled I was able to persuade him to come back this year after many years of trying I think one of the reasons was in previous years we clashed we can we're not clashing this year so thankfully he's decided to be in Islington rather than the South of France well he's been described as many things over there he's a spectator columnist he's a he's a regular wit and raconteur on social media he's executive director or chairman of Ogilvy I forget which one of those is right but most recently he's been described or he just told me today he's been described over there and as being the Walter Raleigh of vaping then go figure that one but so if jay-z gentlemen really be grateful if you could join me in giving a really really big warm welcome to mr. Rory Sutherland IV for promptly 30 years mostly as a copywriter and I've done pretty much an equal mix of b2b and consumer marketing and there's one really big difference between them which is that essentially in consumer marketing consumers don't act like rational consumers are supposed to act and in b2b marketing business people don't act as rational business people are supposed to act the closer I get to behavioral science and understanding what you might call behavioral economics and and some of the depths of human psychology I realize there's only one discipline there's essentially marketing and it's based on human insight into what people really want as distinct from what they say they want now there is one respect in which b2b marketing is more difficult than consumer marketing and it's not the complexity of the target audience it's nothing like that it's actually your colleagues your pain in the arse non marketing colleagues or worse in a b2b environment that they are in a consumer environment why is that but is in a b2b business the pretense of buyer rationality is much much harder to shake off than it is if you're in a consumer goods company for example and so the extent to which your colleagues will behave and will never ever be blamed for behaving as though all purchase decisions were completely driven by an economists idea of rationality is even more powerful in your sector than anywhere else and I call this on innovation innovation isn't a spelling mistake I genuinely believe it's a thing and what it is it's the obverse of the particular innovation coin which is there are two ways of creating economic value you can either work out what people want and find a really clever way to make it or you can work out what you make and find a really clever way of making people want it and there is no worthwhile economic distinction to be made between those forms of value creation as I said the difficult bit in b2b is that everybody pretends that everything is rational and every decision is objective and so the position you find yourself in is that classic case of being the only person who thinks different in the room now non-comedy actually revolves around this if you can just play this with slightly louder louder volume once more this is yourself and expect instant what's more maybe we ought to turn on the searchlights now [Music] it's just what they're expecting mr. what you have that is actually a more interesting clip it's not only funny it's actually very very revealing what you have to be to be a good marketer is to have an absolutely overriding fear of the obvious what nearly of everybody else in your business has is Nova riding love of the obvious because you never get fired for being obvious it's much much easier to be fired for being irrational than it is for being unimaginative the problem I have is that in 30 years of experience practically every time I get to test something that doesn't make conventional sense it works an explanation for this by the way is actually found in evolutionary psychology that the human brain evolved a sense of reason not to make decisions we didn't evolve the whole prefrontal cortex mechanism and our capacity for reasoning and rationalization to make decisions we evolved it as a social species to defend to sit our decisions and to argue our case so the brain we have isn't the brain of Stephen Hawking it's the brain of George Carman we've evolved the sense of reason of a lawyer of a defense lawyer not the sense of reason of a scientist and it's a really really important facet to understand Dan Hugo Murcia and Dan's Berber to French psychologists have written a book called the Enigma of Reason which is precisely about this I think it's one of the most important breakthroughs in psychology in the last 50 years that actually we assume we have this power of reason we're not really a rational animal we're a rationalizing animal we decide things instinctively and then we dragon off the shelves post rationalize justification and then we delude ourselves that that was the initial reason for our action genuinely our behavior doesn't work like this so the most important thing you can do is fight what you have is in that case by the way it's very interesting if you think about it military strategy is like marketing you can't be obvious very very very important point there are large fields of human activity we're being rational is fatal because if you're a rational mish military strategist your enemy will be able to predict exactly what you're going to do and they'll lie in wait and they'll kill you the whole point of military strategy very similar to marketing is the judicious and imaginative deployment of deliberate inefficiency if you think about it if you'd allowed the procurement department to plan the d-day landings they would have insisted that you made the journey between Dover and Calais to minimize fuel costs the problem with that approach is that's exactly where everybody was expecting you to do it if you actually pursue logic in marketing of course you often end up in the same place as all your logical competitors which is an overcrowded space so the vertical thing you have to do in a marketing culture is crate permission for people at the very least to test counterintuitive things it's the only things you test are the things that are logical you'll find quite interesting things if you test illogical things sometimes you'll fail but sometimes you'll practice a kind of alchemy one of the one of the weirdest bits of recommendation I ever made was to a fast food company in South Africa who had a product that wasn't selling I said try putting the price up now economists get really really angry when I tell this story because they claim it's impossible sales went up when the price went up now anybody who goes to fast food restaurants occasionally will know that actually there are two completely opposite reasons you go to a fast food restaurant one of them is for a bargain and the other one is for a treat if you price something halfway between the two so it isn't a bargain or a treat you've actually created no emotional value at all you know there's TK Maxx and there's Bond Street and the same people go to both but it's just a different context and so I always describe marketing very simply as the science of knowing what economists are wrong about and there's a really really important reason why this has to be so I don't know how many people who have studied economics or read about a little bit all even on models basically assume that the person making a purchase decision is doing so in an environment of perfect knowledge and perfect trust now in an environment of perfect knowledge and perfect trust marketing wouldn't need to exist everybody know exactly what they wanted how much they were willing to pay for it and they'd go and buy the thing that maximized their utility two things for three things actually one that means that anybody who studied economics at business school instinctively hates marketing because they see it as a necessary evil not as a source of value creation second thing those conditions they assume never exist in the real world or somewhere between very rarely and never third thing even if we could create those conditions our brains have not evolved to make decisions under such conditions we are not optimized to make decisions with perfect information we're optimized to make non perfect but pretty good non-catastrophic decisions based on imperfect information in an environment of imperfect trust and that's what we do and we make the decision instinctively and then we post rationals does anybody ever had to do appoint an agency where you have that what is it that stupid form where you have to balance scorecards anybody done that okay can you all admit the same thing that you decide which agency you on to win and then you backfill the numbers right okay because everybody does that because the other way of doing it is a totally unnatural way for the human brain to make decisions we don't make decisions by adding up a variety of different attributes and actually looking at the maximum we probably asked ourselves a different question we go can I imagine myself in four years time working with these people continuing to produce great work and still liking them and then we answer that question and we choose the agency and then procurement forces us to fill in those stupid little numbers just for the purposes pretending the decision was made rationally now this is a really important thing this applies to b2b marketing enterprise to consumer marketing in terms of the science of knowing what economists are wrong about here are five things humans care about massively but which economists don't understand at all okay status now actually interestingly that's probably even bigger in much b2b marketing questions of status than in b2c certainty no one ever got fired for buying IBM is probably the greatest idea a b2b end line ever written so certainty is something we really care about low variance in other words I'm not sure this is the best decision but it's the decision that's least likely to be terrible I argue interestingly that I think most brands appeal actually to our love of certainty we actually pay a premium for brands not because we necessarily think they're better but because they're less likely to be bad in the same way that McDonald's is the most successful restaurants in the world not because it's brilliant but because it's really really good at not being crap okay say what we like about the golden arches you're never significantly disappointed you're never ripped off and you never get the shits okay something you can't say about any michelin-starred restaurant to be obviously honest okay autonomy this partly explains brexit which is why economists are particularly baffled by brexit vote but we like optionality we don't like getting tied in the mobile phone market discover this when it finally had to introduce pay-as-you-go okay relatedness we like we make a distinction between dealing with the same person three times and dealing with three different people once as human beings we naturally seek connectedness and reciprocation and social capital something that by the way procurement is in danger of actually destroying by actually setting a time limit to a business relationship you destroy the incentive for the supplier to invest in the relationship the main reason I would argue that a good agency adds more value to its clients doing things it hasn't been asked or paid to do than by doing things it has been asked to do the reason you do those things is it's an investment in the longevity of the relationship if procurement come in and say every two and a half years you have to effectively reap itch for the business your past record doesn't count and we're gonna make the decision on price the incentive to make those discretionary efforts goes away or put very bluntly there's no point in doing a favor for an amnesiac ok because they'll never pay you back and so that procurement which is a behavior very heavily influenced by classical economics not by actually a knowledge of human relationships or anthropology often destroys more social capital invisibly than it actually saves money and then finally fairness now it isn't just humans who've evolved a great sense of fairness in economics by the way we shouldn't care what the other guy gets we should simply care about the exchange between what we pay and what we get what the other guy pays and what the other guy gets should be absolutely irrelevant to us how likely is it that as a social species we really evolved that way well I think I can prove that it's pretty unlikely with the next film to you is our fairness study and so this just became a very famous study under snow many more because after we did this about 10 years ago it became very well known and we did that originally with capuchin monkeys and I'm gonna show you the first experiment that we did it has now been done with dogs and with birds and bees chimpanzees but we Sarah Brosnan we started out with capuchin monkeys so what we did is we put two capuchin monkeys side-by-side again these animals they live in a group they know each other we take them out of the group put them in a test chamber and there's a very simple task that they need to do and if you give both of them cucumber for the task the two monkeys side-by-side they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row so cucumber even though it's really only water in my opinion but cucumber is perfectly fine for them now if you give the part the grapes the food preferences of my capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket and so if you give them grapes there's a far better food then you create inequity between them so that's the experiment we did recently we videotaped it with no monkeys we've never done the task thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction and that turned out to be right the one on the left is a monkey who gets cucumber but the one on the right is the one who gets grapes the one who gets cucumber note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine the first piece see eats then sees the other one getting grape and you will see what happens so she gives a rock to us that's the task and we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it the other one needs to give a rock to us and that's what she does and she gets a grape and each of the other one sees that she gives a rock to us now gets again cucumber [Applause] she tests a rock now against the wall she needs to give it to us and she gets cucumber again so this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here so these instincts and millions of years old and there's no way that a bit of economic logic is gonna make them go away I mean they predate our existence as humans patently I think what's interesting is if you look at that scarce model how well a tech service like uber delivers on it that two levels of certainty before you actually book a cab you're given a reasonable expectation about how long you might have to wait so you don't have that annoying mini cab experience where you ring up not knowing whether they're going to say one minute or an hour and a half it's a pain in the ass cuz you end up leaving the party too early or too late there's the map which reduces the pain of waiting because you can watch the vehicle approach there's status because if you think about I don't know how many people do this do you do time your arrival onto the pavement to coincide exactly with the arrival of the car because it makes you feel like Keyser söze at the end of the usual suspects you know it makes you feel like louis xiv there's the fact that it doesn't feel like a transaction because you get out of the car with no paper changing hands there are a whole bunch of things I would argue that uber is predominantly an innervation not an innovation after all you'll be able to use a telephone to order a taxi in London since about 1904 okay it's not that that's new it's the psychology around the experience and so the most vital thing you can do as a marketer is follow the advice of variously Will Rogers Mark Twain this quotes attributed to everybody to be honest if you want to be creative don't actually create anything first seriously spend a day not creating a thing just ask one question what does everybody assume that we might be wrong about it's the removal of an assumption which is the greatest source of creative ideas than the addition of something creative creativity is to some extent a subtractive process one of this is wrong and behavioral science gives you a huge license to ask what if that's not true you know everybody in research might say I don't do this because of X and behavioral science advances in psychology give you the license to say that's why they think they don't do it but maybe it's not the real reason and the most interesting thing in attempts to make economics of science what they're looking for is physics they're trying to create a science of human behavior that has rules which are independent of scale and context so a billiard ball behaves in the same way in Vancouver as it does in Perth as it does in London and physics works because the laws of universal the problem with human behavior is that depending on context people will either do one thing or they might do completely the opposite gift-giving now imagine you had a friend at work and just before Christmas you bought them a present that'll be really nice for nez generally I think it'll be nice if you bought that same friend particularly if they're of the opposite sex perhaps a present every week that wouldn't be nice but that'll be creepy right okay if you return a present as far as an economist is concerned the recipient has gained something in fact it's the biggest insult you can possibly pay someone so that huge thing about human behavior is it's massively mediated by context and circumstance and so I'll give you a few examples of this depending on how you think of something and this is innovation it can be good or it can be the same thing you know that business with your plane lands at Gatwick or whatever and you're expecting an air bridge to walk across into the airport and then the engine spool down about a mile from the terminal everybody on the plane has the same thought oh it's gonna be a bus right and partly because we hate bus replacement services the bus we just assume is total shite and then one day this easyJet pilot says I've got some good news I've got some bad news and some good news the bad news is we won't be able to get you an air because there's a plane blocking our gate but the good news is that the bus will take you all the way to passport control so you won't have far to walk with your bags and I looked to my companion said Oh on that's always true isn't that they just never told us I'm actually quite glad there's a bus now because I don't have to walk two miles through a bloody shopping centre just to get out of the airport next time you're on a plane try this experiment when they announce there's a bus say loudly to your companion actually I'm quite glad there's a bus because it saves you having to walk to passport control because it drops you off right outside okay and you've just synthesized happiness in everybody within earshot I mean when you think about it the bus thing is just a human instinctive framing of it's the poor man's a bridge if you're connected and collected in a 7 Series BMW you'd think that was fantastic right and so what the pilot did is by encouraging you to focus on a different thing the same thing goes from being rubbish to being brilliant probably the most masterly reframing I'm famous for talking about the Eurostar thing so I won't do it again you know I I know I know it's a bit like going to see the Eagles and they don't play Hotel California but I'm not gonna do it again okay I'm sick of it but canard is the most fantastic branding for 30 years the whole competition in transatlantic oceanic travel was on speed they were competing for the blue ribbon suddenly jet travel comes along and they've got a lot of ships which are now totally useless so they reinvent themselves essentially as we're good because we're really slow and civilized and exactly the same product is just marketed and remarking in a different way by just pointing out a different attribute it's the same thing looked at in a different way London housing is classic example okay now in economic theory if London house prices go up people who don't want to live in London that much will sell up move to the seaside and reduce pressure on London house housing you know value of asset goes up people sell market self-corrects right now that probably happens in crude oil people who have a lot of crude oil and don't want so much of it will sell when the price is high I would argue in London housing the opposite happens which is that people are frightened of moving out because a they they fear they might miss out on future gains and be they're frightened that they'll never be able to afford to move back in again now how can you claim economics is a science when depending on the context human beings will either do one thing or completely the sodding opposite you imagine I mean imagine what the world would be like if physical objects have that kind of property Oh unfortunately the billiard balls are in a bad mood so they're going to behave completely differently today the attempt to make economics and Newtonian science is one of the worst things ever to happen in in business I'll skip the other two just for reasons of speed I apologize that I might share them with you later we are being bombarded by sensory information our brains do a remarkable job of making sense of it all [Music] it seems easy enough to separate the sounds we hear from the sites we see but there is one illusion that reveals this isn't always the case have a look at this what do you hear but look what happens when we change the picture and yet the sound hasn't changed in every clip you are only ever hearing bar with a bee it's an illusion known as the McGurk effect take another look concentrate first on the right of the screen now to the left of the screen the illusion occurs because what you are seeing clashes with what you are hearing in the illusion what we see overrides what we hear so we don't even perceive the world objectively why because evolution doesn't give a damn about accuracy it cares about fitness and inside our brain is a device that Bix gives us not an accurate depiction of the world but a decisive depiction of the world on which we can act so in that case you think you can separate what you hear from what you see in fact you can't because your brain is performing what IT people would call error correction because it's more like to have misheard that I've miss seen so I'm just gonna overwrite that B with an F and this happens beyond your awareness and beyond your control this is what's absolutely vital to understand and by the way wine tastes better if you pour it for heavier bottle analgesics are more effective if you tell people they're expensive painkillers are more effective if they're branded and you've probably all noticed this your car drives much better after you've had it cleaned if you notice that and I have the engineering friend who has driven insane by this he has it must be because the vibration the polishing taught as the body panels and reduces vibration it's your brain just thinks this is a better car it's quieter it accelerates more smoothly at corners better you know because you're more proud of it and your brain assembles perceptions just as when you only see one side of a tree it basically creates the other side from you most perception is actually information retrieval from past experience it's non information processing and our perception is also relative not absolute the brain makes the bottom half of that thing look right to compensate for what it assumes to be shadow if you hold up your hand or your fingers depending on how close you are got getting a bit dangerous there and you cover the middle so you can't see the join between the top half of the bottom half of the thing on the left the black square has done that for you in a sense and the right what you'll see is that the top and the bottom are objectively exactly the same color your brains crazy the difference and we have evolved because it's more valuable to detect contrast rather than to detect absolutes and context determines how we perceive everything if you just run this very quick [Music] Freddie's are supposed to be square have any of these diamond shapes gone out new diamond shreddies cereal same 100% whole grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape in research people actually claim they taste the difference you presented them as diamond shreddies and they started talking about how they had a slightly different taste and sensation what we detect is relative not absolute valley even applies to price a pound isn't a pound isn't a pound economists assumed that the amount of pain you suffer from spending a pound is independent of the conditions under which you spend it this is causes complete and utter rubbish okay what something that's expensive in one context can be cheap in another context but the way paying contact list C reduces the perceived cost of things by about 15% okay now rolls-royce and Maserati stopped exhibiting their cars at car shows because it's 300 thousand pound car looks really expensive at a car show they started exhibiting them at yacht shows an aircraft shows because if you've been looking at Lear Jets all afternoon a 300 thousand pound car is an impulse buy it's like putting the chocolate next to the tail I'll have a couple of those while I'm here okay in the same way this magnificent thing forget on to the next slide what if you have to buy that in a jar like Nescafe a jar of an espresso coffee for an equivalent dosage of caffeine would cost about 40 or 50 quid and you look at it next to the Nescafe that's Tokyo semi insane I can't pay that but it doesn't come in a jar and we don't know what an individual Nescafe costs okay because we've never done the math subway we've never worked out how many cups of coffee you get from a job unless you're in procurement obviously okay where you probably put it in little bits of sort of foil wrap with the price marked on each one right like a drug dealer now the thing is about this is that it doesn't come in a jar it comes in a pot we don't know what a Nescafe costs so when we put a twenty nine people in our Nespresso machine I got one myself I love it like a child our frame of reference isn't Nescafe its Starbucks and we actually think to ourselves well it's 29 peeled coffee two pounds 20 in Starbucks this machine is practically making me money okay now that also applies by the way brilliant in b2b I don't know if anybody knows a company called Backhouse Jones which is a legal firm in the northwest which specialises in transport law and they've done the most brilliant innovation guy called Ian Jones is both the solicitor and the kind of marketing director of the company they price it as a subscription people paid paying for lawyers but they especially hate paying for them by the hour you know you really you're in a bad situation not only you in this bad situation where you need a lawyer but the bastard screwing you for every hour so they charge the subscription and the subscription is 26 P per vehicle per day that's how they frame it and when Ian Jones appears at conferences at transport conferences he leaves 29 P on every single seat and says you can have the first day for free okay now that is a totally brilliant thing that economists think that money is money and that it actually is free of any perceptual influence nothing could be further from the truth the other thing you've got to learn is that people don't necessarily do things because they want to do them they may be doing them because the context teaches them to do them so be very careful of looking at behavioral data and going this reveals what people want to do all right I'm very very worried about online choice architecture I think that for example there are totally disastrous facets of online choosing the fact that when you buy a house you have to choose flat or house why okay maybe you'd rather have a brilliant flat than a but if you if you're forced to choose at the very beginning and them and the the algorithm doesn't show you any random wildcards you can actually end up narrowing yourself into a corner far too soon just in order to make the choice manageable you actually express preferences you don't really have its now this is an extraordinary case of nudging which happens every single day all over the world restaurants want to sell you wine why because you can markup wine like a bastard okay you can't charge 30 quid for a glass of Johnnie Walker red because people know what it costs in the shops but you buy a case of Chateau tube scure 2014 for like three euros a bottle you basically charge 19 quid for it there it is marvelous hint of blackcurrant I'm a skeptic here my view is basically that wine loving is basically a way to disguise alcoholism as connoisseurship I may be wrong but you noticed this you go you know it basically makes alcoholism okay you know you get you go for an under to have a bottle of wine it's fine if you went out had tequila slammers you get reported to HR right okay because it's sophisticated so the restaurant wants you to drink wine and what do they do they put wine glasses already on the table when you come in in fact if you say you're not drinking wine they take the glasses away in a bit of a half don't they okay secondly they bring you know it's not called the drinks menu is it it's called the it's not called the drinks list it's called the wine list so you've been trained again and then the choice architecture of the wine list is basically about four pages of a ludicrous range of different wines including rose' which some people claim is actually a drink okay and then there's this crappy back page like under laminate for the perverts and deviants who want to drink something that's actually been brewed by a competent scientific process okay rather than having frenchman trampling on grapes for half an hour okay and then finally there's the final bit of genius this is even clever still they only bring one wine list and the guy with the wine list there's only one alcoholic drink you can really share among a table then automatically turns to the rest of the people he's with and says red or white at which point it's game over for the gin drinkers right and you would think that everybody wants to drink wine but is it a product of preference or is it a product of context and context is so powerful in human decision-making that experimenting with context in every direction you can is about the most valuable thing a marketer can do quite often UX reveals more about the person who designers the UX that it does about the actual customer I always find it absolute is teracle that Google I don't know if you notice this is Google Maps because it's designed by Americans you have a choice you have a car or public transport and because there's a bunch of septic tanks designing this they go jeez this person is looking for public transport therefore they're obviously an impoverished immigrants who can't afford a car and they tell you how to make your entire journey by a combination of buses trams and tubes I live in Western you drive to the sobbing station but the algorithm can't get its head around the fact that someone may actually make a journey that involves a car and then public transport okay it's a totally ludicrous bifurcation of choice it I mean it does the railways a massive disservice by the way because it you know it takes me about 35 minutes to get into London by train but it would take me about an hour and a quarter to get to the station by bus this is one of my favorite innovations recently I simply said to a pizza delivery firm nearly everybody orders their pizza in 30 minutes that means you have to make a separate journey for every single pizza order you receive do you think everybody's ordering it in 30 minutes because they wanted in 30 minutes or do you think that's just the established social norm you look at your web you look at your mobile app you look at your website the default is ASAP you make a phone call the assumption is ASAP I said why don't you test tweaking the default try making the default either one hour 45 minutes 50 minutes 40 minutes they still choose to have it ASAP but the default is 45 minutes or the default is now secondly try making at a time of day rather than a duration of wait to reframe the nature of time now why is this important it is hugely important because if you have a 30 minute buffer within which you can deliver you can batch process deliveries and you can put three deliveries to Eastern Sevenoaks on one bike and you can put three deliveries to Western Sevenoaks on another bike that means you can make six deliveries with two bikes rather than six the big big bottleneck in pizza delivery is people order pizzas on Saturday night which is exactly when young people want to be going to parties not riding mopeds and so there's a huge labor shortage on Saturday nights caused by this they tested it what happened you could make the default as long as an hour with no fall-off and sales secondly you saved a fortune and benefit of the environment by being able to actually make three deliveries per trip rather than one because you could now consolidate deliveries from a slightly wider time frame okay the third thing which I didn't even predict customer satisfaction went up by 50% I have I genuinely don't know okay maybe it was just that actually people like the fact they went actually I was gonna have a shower anyway and I'd rather the pizza arrived at half time than halfway through the first half I don't know I wasn't even predicting that I was looking at this as an efficiency game but don't assume that what people are doing is independent of the way you've presented the choice to them in the first place one of the most successful things we didn't have b2b campaigners as Ogilvie's behavioural science practice was we had a software client and people would ring up to cancel their subscription for software and we tweaked various changes in the call center script are the most potent one we found was that the first question they asked when someone rang up to cancel was could you please tell us why you are cancelling your subscription to this wonderful software and they did that because they wanted to gather data that would help them improve the software the only problem was it was starting a a customer rescue call by getting the customer to reiterate a list of negatives about the product we changed that bit of the call center strip to could you just remind us why you first bought while you bought this product in the first place two million quid a year in extra subscriptions from one sentence being changed okay now one thing Bowie you can achieve butterfly effects like this tiny tiny things can have huge effects if you want a greater diversity in employment hire people in groups don't hire people one at a time the human brain does it automatically when you hire a group of people you look for complementarity and breadth when you hire one person at a time you instinctively look for conformity a lot of what's I think believed to be gender bias ethnic bias is nothing other than status quo bars it's just the fact that when you have one decision to make you want to make a decision that doesn't look weird how about 5.2 okay if there are logical answer we wore or already founded okay you want to compete with coke you'll produce a drink that tastes nicer than coke cost less than cocaine comes the really big can don't you no one's gonna get thrown out of the room for making that suggestion what's the most successful attempt to compete with coke and a hundred and fifty years it's this comes in a tiny can cost a fortune it tastes disgusting okay we've got to leave more room for testing things that don't make sense why doesn't videoconferencing take off again I think the reasons are entirely sociological I think the way to make progress in video conferencing is as much through innovation as innovation this is one device that interests me the meeting owl if anybody's a bit of a home working nerd at Google owl Labs and meeting owl because by putting the camera in the middle of the table it means you can host a video conference without all sitting as if you're on a bus and making the meeting feel weird okay and bear in mind we've been sitting in circular groups for a million years right something weird psychologically like that the other great tip you can do a few video conference get a separate webcam and put it at 15 degrees to your laptop why but here's seeing someone talk at a slightly weird angle isn't off-putting with the webcam on the top of your laptop they're nearly making eye contact but not quite you know if I spent the whole talk talking to your left shoulder you'd be pretty weirded out by now okay now I think they're huge psychological potential there is one big distinction army I'll end this very very quickly we don't actually optimize it's not like archery when the human makes an instinctive decision we assume imperfect information and agree of variation it's more like darts don't necessarily aim for the triple 20 because you might get a 1 or a 5 if you're not very good at darts aim for the southwestern quadrant of the board you might get triple 19 but if you fail you might actually get 16 instead it's actually a better overall outcome what we're often doing when we make a decision is as I mentioned with McDonald's we're trying to reduce variance now once you accept the fact that it's purple it is though a perfectly rational to choose things not only on how good they are on average but how low the variance is lots and lots of things become rational that at first glance make no sense has anybody here brought their first car from a friend or relative like an armed right you hated it right it was beige it was automatic it wasn't the brand of car you wanted but you were answering a different question which was who can I trust to sell me a car the one thing you knew about the car your aunt sold you assume your aunt didn't hate you was it wasn't going to be totally shite because if she knew it was totally shite she'd be selling it at auction instead once you accept the fact that human decision-making is not just about optimization it's about variance reduction it's not just about hitting the ten it's about or hitting the triple 20 it's about avoiding the 1 and the 5 lots and lots and lots of pieces of information that marketers can supply which reduce perceived variance can be hugely reassuring even though to a rational economist or procurement person they appear to make no sense whatsoever okay so I'll end very quickly on this the one difference that's by the way why too few people historically always kick the ball straight down the middle you send a higher term of scoring on average if you make a penalty kick straight down the middle the reason no player wants to do it is you look much stupider if you fail and the one thing we've got to watch in business I'll skip through this very quickly is there's one big difference would be to be versus consumer marketing in consumer marketing people are trying to avoid regret in b2b marketing people are trying to avoid blame what has happened is that people play it safe by making a whole series of small incremental improvements like you know we've gotten in a small improvement in our programmatic with a 3% improvement over the past year because you keep your job that way the risk the bigger creative gains are slightly riskier so no one actually takes them and so we've got telly the dolphin was a fantastically clever dolphin they trained it to retrieve rubbish in the bottom of pool ok and every time she brought up a bit of rubbish they gave her some fish what about the 8th journey she discovers a massive piece of rubbish does she take it to the trainer to get some fish no she hides it underneath a rock at the bottom of the pool bites off one pieces of time and turns it into ten pieces of fish and I think that that digital marketing has turned to the same thing it's become digital Taylorism gradual incremental improvements but we're spending far too much time as a result looking at the plumbing and far too little time looking for creative possibilities they are both important and they're often interrelated but the ratio of time you spend in each has to be proportionate and at the moment I would claim it isn't we're too obsessed with the plumbing and also you've got to remember that companies like Google and Facebook who they can't claim a monopoly of good creative ideas but they can claim a plumbing monopoly so it's in their interest to pretend that the whole of marketing is about the area where they enjoy real monopoly power they can't stop you having good ideas they can't charge for them final final point this is about sorry going now the only one with one sense this is a book by an Italian economist who believed something which I've long instinctively believed never had the balls to say he believes that the limitation to economic growth for the last 70 or 80 years isn't production or capital or manufacturing or distribution or any of those supplies that side things he thinks that what limits economic growth is the human capacity to adopt new forms of consumption and there's a speed at which we can actually change our behavior as a society and it's the speed of adoption of changes in consumption that drives but also inhibits economic growth is it true I don't know if it's true bear in mind that 80 years ago you had to have electricity salesmen to persuade people that installing electricity was a good idea all right if he's right and he might be right and if he isn't right he will be right in 50 years time the importance of marketing to the economy is much much greater than even we have dared to believe thanks very much indeed it's truly loathe me to ask Laurie to leave the stage because I could get him to speak all day but it absolutely brilliant one thing I've been asked to do my my colleagues in the marketing team is this and I which I apologize having to do