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- [00:00]
Rory Sutherland
Foreign.
- [00:06]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this very special edition of the uncensored cmo. Now, unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you cannot have missed that we've all been talking about Jaguar. Now, I know some of you might be a bit sick of it by now, but I know a man who just happens to have owned not one, not two, but six Jaguars and is a particular expert on transport. His name, of course, is Roly Sutherland, and he's got some points of view about Jaguar that I think might just surprise you. Just to warn you, I don't really say very much this episode, but you know what? I don't need to, because it's Rory. Here we go. Okay, Rory, thank you for joining me on the podcast. Now, I happen to know that you are actually a Jag owner or have been a Jag owner yourself. So I reckon that means you're pretty well qualified to have a point of view on this. What do you make of all the Ferrari then?
- [00:53]
Rory Sutherland
What slightly alarmed me here is that I've owned six Jags. I absolutely love the brand. It was slightly painful for me to shift from a Jag when I went to an electric car. Yet what pains me is that two of the people who are my go to people in marketing, which would be Roger L. Martin and Mark Ritson, both hate this. And I'm going to make a slightly counter case here because I'm saying they're absolutely right in everything they say about building consistent brands based on effectively all the sort of cues and values and typography and visual language and all the pre existing assets of a brand. Okay. Of respecting those. You know, don't redesign the Tropicana. You can lose 25% of your sales and find it difficult to recover. You know, don't alienate your core audience. Da da, da, da da. I agree with all of that. But sometimes you have to pivot and when you do so, you will receive extraordinary hostility and disproportionate hostility. You know, Snickers, for example, drove people. When Marathon became Snickers for the younger among you, it drove people practically insane. Okay? New Coke, still one of the most famous kind of marketing gaffes in a way, but actually there are times when you don't need to change and you're simply winding up your target audience for no good effect. Gillette, I might give us an example of that. Okay, but in this case, what you have to remember, and this happens in tech, right, BlackBerry was a fantastic brand which absolutely believed in the value of the keyboard. And by the way, I'm going to go even further and say they were right. Okay? You can type much faster on a keyboard than you can on a touchscreen. Okay. And in some ways, I think the shift from the BlackBerry to the iPhone was actually an act of sabotage on human productivity because people still, in a funny kind of way, hard power users still miss the BlackBerry, I think. But what happens when you get occasionally these kind of weird tectonic shifts in tech is that all those rules of branding, which is, you know, be highly alert to, respectful of your existing target audience and don't surprise them, sometimes have to go out of the window because they. The entire nature of people's brand repertoire changes when they go from a petrol car to an electric car, just as when the smartphone came in, everything BlackBerry had that was valuable and which a brand purist would say you have to venerate and respect goes out of the window. Interestingly, my car buying basically went jag, jag, jag, Land Rover, Jag, jag, Jaguar, Ford Mustang, Mach E. I nearly bought a Tesla, but I wanted something that had a bit of Detroit in it. In other words, I didn't want my car to be entirely Californian in its conception. You know, I wanted a little bit of hardware, you know. But it is interesting because electrification, when you go electric, what you might call your normal brand repertoire, gets completely reset. And this is a point which I don't think a lot of the critics spotted, which is obviously, by definition, they made the decision to go electric. Now, if you're a complete purist, okay, there are a load of these automotive purists who basically, you know, are very dangerous to listen to. Actually, I've said that that absolute brand fanatic loyalists are incredibly difficult and dangerous to listen to. So real brand purists, the absolute petrol head market, are highly conservative. They're absolutely obsessed with heritage and indeed with kind of technical specifications. And the reason they're dangerous to listen to is that they are incredibly reluctant to cope with change. Whether they buy your cars or not, by the way, is a completely separate matter. There are a lot of unbelievable car fetishists who absolutely adore Jaguars, but who don't own any Jaguars and never have and never will. But if you went on the Apple fanboy websites at the time they launched the ipod, the typical comment was something like, just what the world needs, another MP3 player. So just as tech fetishists are absolutely obsessed with the specification of the thing, not its effect on the consumer, and they have a very, very unusual set of criteria which are based on the fact that they are car stamp collectors effectively. So you have to alienate those people sometimes if you're in a market where you have to innovate. Now, the example I always cite in talking about the Jaguar instance is the Judas heckle of Bob Dylan at the Manchester Free Trade hall when he went electronic. So you had a massive and devoted folk scene back then. And the second that Bob Dylan actually adopted amplification, it was viewed as an act of heresy for the folkies. But sometimes as a musician you do have to move on by alienating your core, some of your core audience to a degree. Now quite often they actually move with you having grumbled and shouted, what is it? Famously Kid A. Okay. The Radiohead album alienated most Radiohead listeners. I'm sure there were loads of Beatles fans who went, why the hell do you have to make Sergeant Pepper when you could be effectively making another version of Love Me Do? Not quite, but I want to hold your hand. Okay, so lots of people basically who wouldn't have dreamt of buying a Kia or a Hyundai are now contemplating buying the Kia or the Hyundai. Because in the electrification world those brands which were also ran as in the petrol car world, they were Johnny Come lately's are seen as the brands that lent into electrification. And so we're going to have native electric car brands, Tesla obviously, byd, mg of course, in a funny kind of way, which have always been electric. There is a thing in behavioral science called the Jack of all Trades heuristic that we'll tend to see an entity that only does one thing as being better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else. It's why I'm proposing a restaurant chain called Bacon Sandwich. Because if you only make bacon sandwiches, people will not unreasonably assume it's going to have to be good. There's a bar and deal called Bloody Mary's and I always order a Bloody Mary there. Because if you call yourself Bloody Mary's you can't really make a shit Bloody Mary. The point I'm making is that I think that you can position yourself in two ways if you're a legacy car maker, which is you could create a brand new native only car brand. Native only electric car brand. Okay, but they're going to be lots of those, right? Then you can either be what you might call a heel dragger or a leaner inner. They're the people like Volvo, you might say, as a brand which has undoubtedly lent into electrification. They're clearly enthusiastic Adopters of the same. And then, of necessity, there are, for example, the German volume carmakers who can't help but look like heel draggers because they're facing Clay Christensen's classic innovators dilemma, where you've got huge, huge sunk cost interests in manufacturing petrol, even diesel vehicles. Okay? And you've got to make this unbelievably painful transition where, in a sense, your investment in electric cars for a 5 to 10 year period is actually hurting your core business. Now, Jaguar is a tiny, tiny carmaker which is dying. I mean, they sold 8,000 cars in the United States last year. Now, one thing they don't have a problem with is having to defend their core business because it's kind of on the way out almost. There are times, I think, where you just have to roll the dice, bet the farm go different, and that will massively offend your existing loyalists, not necessarily the people who buy the car. Okay, I'd consider buying this thing. I think it looks fantastic, by the way, I'd be very happy if the people at Jaguar want to thank me for their defence by offering me a test drive at some point. Okay. You know, I want Jaguars to be magnificent. And this is heroic and magnificent in the way that the XK120 was and the way that the E type was, not in the way that a petrol car is. I mean, you don't want to go into that awful business where you've got skeuomorphic exhaust pipes and, you know, pretend leather and driving gloves and all that stuff, because that does sit in the, in the past and what a car is in the age of electric cars. Okay. How cars differentiate themselves is a really tough question because you're not going to be able to do it on price if you're a Western automaker. So, you know, you obviously have heritage, but to some extent a lot of that heritage is tied up in a world which no longer exists in the sense that Burberry has a problem in that nobody really buys raincoats except for Americans and flashers as far as I can. Right. And you know, I love the. I love the Giles Gilbert Scott red telephone boxes. I think they're glorious, but I don't think they should be the BT logo. But there is that part of your brand which probably belongs in a museum or in this case, I guess, a car collection rather than it belongs in a showroom. And they can afford to alienate their core target audience because they're going massively upmarket. They've spotted the US as their biggest market. There will always be very rich people who want to fit in. And they're always going to be very rich people who want to look different. And they're targeting the second group. Most really rich people are actually boring, actually. They just want to look like other really rich people. Right? They go, where do rich people live? Ooh, they live in Belgravia. I'll buy a house there. Right, okay. Where do rich people go on holiday? Ooh, I'm going there. But they're also the rich people who kind of go to Machu Picchu, or the rich people who, you know, you know, who are obsessed with walking the Silk Road, whatever. Bullshit. Okay, right now the point I'm making is if you're not going to planning to be more than 0.01% of the car market, you have a very clear idea of who your market is. They will want a bit of heritage, okay? They will want a heritage name. It's not like it's called. They call the car Snickers. Okay? Jaguar typography has always changed. It's not a, you know, you can't use the typography of the Mark 2 or the, you know. You know, I mean, come on, you know, they've changed their typography. They updated that all the time. Their logo has been updated. They have switched it. So it goes from left to right rather than right to left. Johnny Walker did that. By the way, the reason things tend to face right to left in logos is actually drawn from heraldry, of all things. I think that's why the cat originally faced to the left. And they just said it looks more forward looking if the cat is facing to the right. Johnnie Walker did that when I think BBH took over. The walking man now walks left to right rather than right to left.
- [11:52]
John Evans
So, Rory, the logo created a lot of controversy, but of course, the other thing that got everyone talking was the ad itself. I'd love to know, what did you make of it all?
- [12:02]
Rory Sutherland
First point, by the way, was it an ad or was it a film that they showed and then released on YouTube?
- [12:07]
John Evans
I think it's been talked about as an ad, but I think it was a teaser film. I mean, I don't know whether the general public distinguishes between the two, but I think it was more of a teaser film to hint at what's coming.
- [12:19]
Rory Sutherland
You know, I thought, by the way, I thought Gillette. The Gillette ad was actually annoying to men, okay? That it was conflating, okay? It was basically saying, I wouldn't have minded. But it started with a whole load of sort of me too commentary on a radio. And then it showed a variety of behaviors, some of which were highly objectionable and some of which were highly debatable. Okay? Like it seemed that barbecuing was an example of toxic masculinity. At one point, you know, there were two kids having a bit of a scrap, okay? And that was considered, you know. Now hold on. Young primates have engaged in play fighting for millions and millions of years, okay? Most of us wouldn't be on the planet if one of our male forefathers hadn't made a slightly unwelcome approach on the street, okay? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not defending that behavior, but I'm saying that it was conflating an awful lot of different behaviors and basically say all men, all men are bastards. Okay, that's not a good idea. I'm not defending that. But just, just to be clear, very, very sympathetic to Bud Light because that was not an ad. They didn't make Dylan Mulvaney the spokesman for Bud Light. It was simply a bit of social media activity where they gave some personalized candles to Dylan Mulvaney, who I think is very funny and quite charming and engaging. And I, I couldn't really understand why that it was Americans who were angry about that. Okay? So as a Brit, it was totally neutral or positive in my effect on the not American. For some reason, Americans went absolutely bananas, but with jag, I mean, they've kept the name, okay? The typography is slightly different. I think it's rather beautiful. My wife thinks what they've done is unbelievably beautiful. I would argue, by the way, by the way, that's probably a category in which Jaguar made incredibly few inroads, which is the female car buyer. I'd be intrigued to know what the percentage of female Jaguars were, but I'm guessing it was pretty minuscule. I know my sister in law wouldn't buy one because she liked the I pace, but thought it was an old man's brand. Now, at some extent, all new cars are old man's or old women's brands because new cars are overwhelmingly bought by people who are about 60. That's about the median age. It's worth noting, by the way, that when you get these scandalous ads that create a scandal, there's a secondary question, which is how much do you spend on media? Right? Because if you spend millions and millions of pounds on media and then you annoy people, that's not a brilliant thing to do. But if you do something that's slightly dubious. Okay? Another thing that Ritson hates is Moldy Whopper. The only thing you've got to say about Moldy Whopper is that everybody talked about it, okay? But the media budget was minuscule. Now, I'm not suggesting that for a second that the best way to do advertising. Well, maybe, maybe the best way to do advertising now is to effectively produce an ad that annoys the American right and then let their outrage do your media buying for you. I'm a six times JAG owner, but I'm not so conservative that I'm alarmed by the sight of women with short hair, for example. I can cope. Right, okay. But it is worth noting, I'm not sure it was an ad Jaguar. There is no way in hell that Jaguar can assemble the kind of media budget you need to create that kind of attention. Now, I understand. What I'm saying is that Bob Dylan had to go electric in the process. You're going to alienate a lot of people, but nonetheless, you have to go electric. And in the same way, I'm not quite sure why Marathon had to become Snickers Midland bank for reasons had to become hsbc. Okay, we can cope with that. In this case, I think they had no choice but to make a change of direction. And there's this thing called loss aversion. You'll know all about it in behavioral science. I'm just explaining. I'm not explaining to you. I'm explaining to the. The lovely listeners, which is that people get much angry about something they've lost than they get excited about something they've gained. So the classic problem you have there is what I call the post box problem. Right. If you go to the O2, okay. Or any new build, high footfall place, there's no letterbox. I tried to post a letter at the O2. In the end, I found someone working in an office and said, can you put this your out tray? Because it was the only. There's no letterbox at the O2. Huge footfall, no letterbox. Okay? But equally, you'll go somewhere up to the Scottish Highlands and there's a letterbox up there which no one's posted a letter in for the last four years. But if you go and take that letterbox away, they go bananas. So you've got to remember that Joe Public is a Luddite. And if you're completely marketing and consumer focused, you will change at a pace which is slower than that which the market sometimes demands. So the problem Royal Mail has is that if you install a letterbox at the O2. Nobody goes, that's brilliant. There's a letterbox here. Thank you, Royal Mail, for your wonderful beneficence in supplying me with a letterbox at a high footfall location. Okay. No, there's no gratitude for the upside, but the loss of a small unused letterbox in Ochter Mahdi drives the local population insane. So you have to accept this fact that in a business where you innovate, you have to risk alienating occasionally. Music would be a perfect example. Okay? You know, kid A with the thing, Me Bobs, you know, a Radiohead. Existing audience don't like it. People don't like it when Dylan goes electronic, but he spotted which way the wind's blowing and in a sense he's got to make a move which preempts his customers willingness to change. I think in the car industry, I think you'd be foolish to deny that this is happening because what you might call our car pantheon is completely changing. Okay? I mean, there are people all over the place. I spoke to the Skoda marketing director and they get loads of people trading a petrol Audi in for an electric Skoda, right? That's how it's changing. None of those people with the Audi would have. Would have bought a petrol Skoda if you put a gun to their head, right? But electrification causes everybody to totally reshape what's in and what's out. I'm 59 years old. I owned my first Jag when I was about 27 or something. My last Jag, they mostly, I think all but one was effectively secondhand. One was a month old or something from the dealership. The last car I had was the 5 litre XJ V8, which I kept for 12 years. Now, I suppose the interesting question I'd ask is, will Rick Rubin buy this car? And he might, because one argument might be that there are enough cool rich people who emphatically don't want to buy a Mercedes. Bentley have always done extremely well from that market. Okay. Historically so of Aston Martin, which is the rich Los Angeleno or San Franciscan. Yeah, well, Jony, I've drives a Bentley because you don't want to be seen in the same car as everybody else. It's a kind of way of saying, you know, I actually think outside the mainstream. I had a wonderful argument with a colleague of mine about succession. And of course on succession, all the people wear this sort of Max Mara, very toned down, recognizable to fellow super rich people, as, you know, highly tasteful cashmere, whatever it might be, okay? And there's a little bit of me which goes, well, yeah. It's wonderfully tasteful. I acknowledge all that. You don't have a ludicrously capacious bag. You carry a bag which carries. Almost has almost no carrying capacity whatsoever. I get all those rules of the kind of American super rich. Actually, my argument with my friend was, no, no, no, you're still worried about what everybody thinks. Okay. There's something wonderful about Versace, which is just. I'm fucking minted and I don't care who knows it. Okay. Because you're not actually. Okay. You know, if you've got a Lambo in one of those bizarre shiny things. Okay. You know, with one of those. What do they call. It's a wrap, isn't it? Okay. Which makes it weirdly metallic. There's a kind of absolute unalloyed enjoyment of your good fortune in that, which in some ways I think makes you much happier. Those people are going, I'm now super rich, but I'm desperately anxious about what people slightly richer than me might think about. Okay. Have you really succeeded?
- [20:27]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [20:27]
Rory Sutherland
Still agonizing about what everybody else thinks, but, I mean, the whole thing is everybody's playing games. And actually, you know, Jaguar will always be what you might call, you know, a bishop or a rook on the board. It's got its place, it's got its niche. And in fairness, you might argue that looked at it from a. From a wider context, they're doing exactly what they did with the E Type and the XK120, which is to sort of misquote John. Well, quote John Hagerty, when everybody else zigs zag, you know, do something that's genuinely extraordinary and out there, and in order to do something highly innovative, I mean, the. The cases where I mentioned that fact with the ipod coming out, if you went on the Apple fanboy obsessive websites, everybody hated the ipod. They hated the iPhone. Okay. They actually thought, you know, the. I don't know what they thought Apple should be doing, but they certainly didn't think it should be making phone. Right. When I say you should, you should understand your target audience. And bear in mind your target audience isn't necessarily the same as your past buyers, and it certainly isn't the same necessarily, as the most fanatical people about your brand who never actually buy what it is you sell. So, you know, there are a hell of a lot of people there who have this massive, you know, infatuation with the Jaguar brand, but they don't buy any Jaguars. I Was just trying to think of other brands I mentioned, you know, I meant, I mentioned the red telephone box. You know, what do I think about the Boris bus? That's interesting because it takes all the cues of the routemaster. The only thing I would say about the Boris bus is maybe it didn't rethink my tendency to take a bus. Now in. I can't remember Route 2117 from Penge to somewhere. Orpington or somewhere. I can't remember. It's in southeast London, they've got this new bus which they call an electro tram or something. And it's like an electric tram, it looks like a tram but it actually doesn't require rails. Okay. Now the point about that is that I'm. I love going by bus, but I don't understand them, you know, don't even get me started on this, you know. Okay. The fact that they only put the number and the final destination on the front of the bus renders buses useless to me because I'm not going to Clapton Ponds or Elmer's End, right? And it's very rare that I have to go there, okay? And I want to know, does the bus stop at King's Cross? But it doesn't tell me that, okay? So I basically don't use the bus and I go and get a taxi instead. Now, interesting thing about the electric tram is it would prompt reconsideration. Hold on. There's this thing that they call a tram, okay. And it's a kind of weird new vehicle. It's the opposite of the route master, which basically says I'm, you know, just. It's skeuomorphic design as the technical term where you retain elements of the old thing for the new thing for purposes of human familiarity. And so that's why a digital camera has to go click. It's why Greek temples retain loads of stone characteristics that they've inherited from the days when Greek temples were made of wood. And so skuomorphic design is often a good idea. You know, you have a dial on a digital radio, that kind of thing, to give it a feeling of familiarity and not frighten the horses. And my only contention here, I think, I suspect John Hegarty might be the only other person in the business who kind of agrees with me. Sometimes you've got to frighten the horses because the market's going somewhere else or else your whole business model requires you to rethink because let's face it, you can't survive off pipe smoking Brits anymore.
- [23:53]
John Evans
Exactly. The thing I was curious about is I'm a bit of a car nut myself, and the concept and the reality are often not the same thing. It's often sometimes, like if you're Porsche, what you see is exactly what you get and the concept is the final car. But with a lot of carmakers, the concept is purely a signal of the direction they're traveling in and it's kind of generally correct. But when you see the final thing, it's a lot more acceptable. And actually, people have got used to the design a bit like when Chris Bangle did his flame surfacing on BMWs. It looked wild at the time. It was like he's destroyed the brand. He got so much bad press, didn't he?
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Rory Sutherland
I met Chris Bangle, I'm someday pleased to say, because he got closer to me ever thinking of buying a BMW than anybody else has ever done, because I thought his stuff, which absolutely irritated the BMW purists, was, as you say it was. It gave them a direction and it gave them, you know, differentiation, which is really, really important in the car industry.
- [24:51]
John Evans
But if you look at the Bangle concepts and the actual production, they're quite far apart, they're directionally the same. And I wonder if Jaguar's doing, playing that game, showing an exaggerated version of the future that by the time they bring it out, you go, ah, we're now used to that sort of design direction. It then feels a little bit familiar, but it's a lot safer.
- [25:09]
Rory Sutherland
There is that fantastic of, you know, which is. Which takes us back to sort of, you know, Ford Edsel territory, which is. Why is the bonnet so enormous in the car? Because one thing about electric cars is unless you literally put a huge chunk of battery on the front, which I don't think anybody's going to do, nearly all of the batteries as low down as it possibly can be. So why, what's underneath the bonnet, literally, in this case, which is not an.
- [25:34]
John Evans
Engine, presumably some very bespoke luggage. Maybe there's some extremely high end leather luggage.
- [25:39]
Rory Sutherland
Yeah, you are.
- [25:40]
John Evans
That would be nice, wouldn't it?
- [25:41]
Rory Sutherland
I can fit my, finally fit my Louis Vuitton steamer trunk into the front. Fantastic. Actually, I've always thought that Louis Vuitton steamer trunk, which is something which you obviously don't carry it up to your room yourself, but when you open it up, it's a ready stocked wardrobe so you don't really have to unpack. I've always thought that's a fantastic, you know, that's a fantastic thing. But I mean, it will be really interesting to see you Know what sort of merch they produce to go with it. And let's face it, okay, this is the guy who did the Defender that annoyed the hell out of people, okay? Because they go, the Defender should be a military vehicle. Daddy, Daddy, Dah. Well, yeah, that's great, but we can't compete in that field anymore, I'm afraid, you know. Yeah, farmers are still our target audience in some senses, but it's pretty rich. Farmers, okay. But I think in design terms, I think the Defender is utterly glorious.
- [26:34]
John Evans
It. Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? No, that, that, that gives me hope because if you look at Defender concepts, Defender reality and how popular, they've done an amazing job. So they, they have, they have the track record, which gives me a little bit of faith that actually this is, they're onto something here. I mean, talk about surprising luggage that. I couldn't tell you anything about the spec of a Rolls Royce except for the fact they have umbrellas in the doors, you know, so, you know what I mean? It's just like one sort of little kind of utilitarian feature suddenly kind of, you know, gets, it gets talked about.
- [27:05]
Rory Sutherland
There was a lovely thing which is Volkswagen, despite having to pay, you know, huge costs for their hacking of the emissions test or whatever it might have been, which was, by the way, far more widespread than just them. The interesting thing is, for years they didn't sell in the US at all because German engineers refused to add cup holders. Even now you have, basically, you don't get many drive throughs in Germany because I can't remember the statistic, but it's like 70% of Germans will not allow food or drink in the car under any circumstances because their car is a temple. It's like a kind of, you know, the idea of sullying your car even, even a bottle of water in a German car is kind of controversial. I mean, you're absolutely right. I know that Rolls Royces have umbrellas in the rear door. That those things which are. The guy who's great on that is Will Gadara in Unreasonable Hospitality. It's a wonderful book about the restaurant in industry. But they're what you might call their delighters. So it's Carnot theory, the whole theory that you have basic requirements, then you have performance attributes, and then you have delight attributes. And the great thing about delight attributes is they kind of pay off disproportionately because they gain an extraordinary large part of the person's attention. Ooh, umbrellas. Funnily enough, the Skoda, the electric Skoda also has umbrellas on the rear doors. Yeah, yeah, They've actually copied it. And it means because people lose umbrellas, you've got a nice revenue stream because you'll have to buy the umbrella that fits.
- [28:32]
John Evans
And it's also branding. It also means when you're walking around, you're signalling the car you've just driven as well. So that'd be fantastic.
- [28:39]
Rory Sutherland
Completely agree. One of my most boring bits of advice to clients is do more branded merch, because consumers love branded merch.
- [28:47]
John Evans
Yeah, it's insane. In fact, I've just been back from Tony's Chocol only, and they've just designed me an uncensored CMO chocolate bar. But I was so excited by the merch. And then I think I did a little post on LinkedIn and everyone was commenting on it. So, yeah, it's. It's cheap and highly effective.
- [29:01]
Rory Sutherland
I mean, it's where conventional research fails, by the way, which is, you know, you. You want to buy a green and highly progressive energy brand to heat or power your home. Would you be more likely to do it if it were called Eco Green Tech, you know, or does it need the logo of a pink octopus? And I think I've said this to Greg Jackson, actually. The sad and tragic fact about the importance of marketing is if you had called yourself green Ecotech and not had a pink octopus as your logo, you'd now have about 20,000 customers. And actually, people buy. If you go to the Octo shop, I think it's called, you can buy the plushie octopuses. And I tragically have to admit, I have actually bought one. So sitting. My wife scowls at it a bit, but it's essential, isn't it? With branded merch, I realized you used to go to conferences and you'd see Martin Sorrell making a grab for like, you know, the branded pen or something. You realized, okay, this stuff has a power we shouldn't underestimate.
- [29:59]
John Evans
And I think there was a time where the meerkat was the number one soft toy in the uk, just because everyone who signed up for, you know, compare the market ended up getting a free olev, you know, soft toy or whatever. So it's just. Yeah, it's one of those things that no marketer will ever admit, but it's secretly one of the most highly effective bits of marketing.
- [30:17]
Rory Sutherland
You must have data on this in System One that basically brands that feature animals are more successful than brands that don't feature animals.
- [30:24]
John Evans
Yes. Yeah. Well, my colleague Orlando did this work. Yeah, it was based on McGilchrist work, and he looked at. He broke down advertising into its different features. So whether it's got a character acting, you know, whether it's got an animal in it, whether it's got a hummable tune or it's a story that unfolds or fast cuts it. He basically took all his left and right hemisphere theory translated into advertising. And if you rank it based on what has the greatest power to create, to capture our attention and create an emotion and be remembered. Animals. See, if you were to hack marketing, you'd basically create a branded animal that sounds a bit like your name, that looks distinctive. So basically meerkat or octopus or something like that.
- [31:08]
Rory Sutherland
Jaguar.
- [31:08]
John Evans
Yeah, yeah. Jaguar should have come out with a cuddly toy.
- [31:11]
Rory Sutherland
Jaguar have at least got an animal. Actually, it's interesting if you think about it. The great DDB advertising, the Hofmeister bear, the Cresta bear, the dog for John Smith's. Okay, John Webster used to say, it's not whether the idea's got legs, it's whether it's got four legs and a tail. Now, one interesting problem with advertising is there are too few old people in it. Now, let me explain why that matters. It's because one advantage of being old is that if you're young and you say something simple but true, it sounds inane. If you're 59, as I am, and you say something basic and simple but true, it sounds profound. It's just how it works, okay? And there are a lot of things that never get said in advertising because everybody's 28. Things like, if you put an animal in your ad, it will work really well, and things like, it's better to be famous than not to be famous, okay? Those things are all absolutely true, okay? But nobody aged 27 wants to say them because they want to be talking about some performance advertising algorithm to make themselves sound clever. And the great thing about being old is you can actually say simple stuff.
- [32:16]
John Evans
That is so true. It's like jingles, isn't it? Jingle is like brilliant hack.
- [32:20]
Rory Sutherland
It's brilliant. Brilliant hack. Shaken vac. This is a terrible thing. If you ever get an earworm, what the Germans call an earworm, where you get a tune stuck in your head. The vaccine for an earworm, which only works in a limited way, is to think of the shaken vaccine because that will then replace the earworm automatically. And I can. I don't suppose that ad has run since I was something like 19, but I can still recite all the words unfailably, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [32:47]
John Evans
I mean, the payback on jingles must be insane because they last probably 30, 40 years, don't they?
- [32:52]
Rory Sutherland
Sort of watch this thing. But his certain things, okay, that really, really work are just unfashionable. Long copy press advertising, okay, or long copy advertising jingles. It could be a second one. Physical direct mail. They all work fantastically well. Okay, now why should you do them? Two reasons. They work incredibly well. But secondly, because they're unfashionable, your competitors almost certainly won't copy you. I go to tech firms and say, use physical direct mail for two reasons. It'll really work. I think there was an app where it was something like 20 times more effective prompting app downloads than anything else. It's still an incredibly potent form of acquisition for people at HelloFresh. But if your competitors are dominated by geeky nerds, the idea of doing physical direct mail is just anathema to them. It's nothing to do with it. Don't think people are objective, right? You can show them all the results you want, and it just feels wrong because they've got an efficiency mindset, not an effectiveness mindset, and they want to digitize everything. And the fact that analog still works pains them. Okay, so Roger L. Martin's good on this. Do the things that your competitors have been capable of doing, okay? That's a really important thing. Now, sometimes they're incapable of doing it for legal reasons. You've got the patent. Sometimes it's technological or reasons of sort of, you know, capability that you have. You know, you can make chips which nobody else can make. And the third thing you can exploit is things your competitors are culturally incapable of doing because it just runs counter to their whole kind of mentality. I mean, in fairness, okay, let's be honest, okay? Apple did something utterly weird when it opened shops. That was an interesting thing to do because the whole culture of Silicon Valley is we do everything remotely. You know, there's an app for that. But it turns out the app for buying a new iPhone isn't an Apple. It's a sodding shop. Right?
- [34:48]
John Evans
But I agree, and I also think it was advertising. It's like how many people have walked past an Apple Store and it just looks like the perfect product demo. And lots of cool people with headphones on are kind of playing around with the latest iPhones, swiping all over the place and, you know, pretending to be graphic designers.
- [35:05]
Rory Sutherland
Airport retail is very largely done for advertising because you get high footfall and people see it. Which is why airport shop retail is a pain in the ass. Because if you want to buy suntan cream or you want to buy aspirin, it's impossible to find a branch of Boots. But you can find six branches selling you luxury goods where you can buy a belt for 400 quid. You know Heathrow, Terminal 5.
- [35:27]
John Evans
Exactly.
- [35:27]
Rory Sutherland
Okay. I didn't ask for a replica.
- [35:30]
John Evans
Prada or Pratt.
- [35:31]
Rory Sutherland
Isn't it basically exactly that you've got it. Exactly.
- [35:34]
John Evans
Prada or Pratt. That's your option. That's it. I know this to my cost as well, but airport shops, so where most of my career was in soft drinks. And one of the premier sort of outlets to get into is WH Smith's Travel, because so many people are in to buy, you know, buy a cold drink as they're kind of taking their airport or jumping on the train. And it's funny, when we, when I used to pitch for a listing, they'd go, yeah, yeah, of course we'll agree the terms. Listings, fine. But we need £100,000 investment in. In our media pack. And what I realized is basically they were just selling advertising space. They were selling windows, you know, window advertising in airports and railway stations for obscene amounts of money at a 99.9% margin. And it didn't matter how much I was selling my bottle of water for two quid. That wasn't where the action was. The action was actually, how much money can they make out of the media?
- [36:22]
Rory Sutherland
They're operating a poster site which also sell drinks. Yeah, effectively.
- [36:26]
John Evans
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And as soon as I got my head around this, I said, oh, I get it. You basically have to value it as advertising. And if you can sell products, that's great, but that's ancillary to the advertising. It's mostly an advertising business, you know.
- [36:40]
Rory Sutherland
So, anyway, I hope, in my defense, here I am, you know, a lot of people are having a real go at Jaguar, but a lot of the people having a go at Jaguar haven't bought many Jaguars. My principal concern for the brand is that the business behind it survives because you don't have a great brand without a great business. And I don't know whether they're right going wholly electric. I don't know whether they're right going up market, but I don't know the. I don't have access to the JLR balance sheet. I imagine there are a lot of very bright people there. They're making about a billion a quarter out of the Land Rover business. The Range Rover business is going great guns. I'm tending to Assume there are a lot of people there who know what they're doing, okay? And they, they exactly know what they can make money from. I don't, I don't have expertise in all those areas. And given that they have to make this pivot, what I always say is don't judge a consumer until you know what they're really trying to do. Okay? So people go, ooh, that consumer behavior is really irrational. People spent £200 on a pair of sunglasses, but they're not trying to protect their eyes from the sun, right? They're trying to pull or whatever, okay? What they're trying to do is not what they're ostensibly trying to do. They're trying to look cool or whatever it might be. And it's very interesting, by the way, because you can sell those things at airports. Why? Because people are going around exposed to a load of people who don't know who they are. So an investment in looking cool when you're surrounded by strangers is much more important. If I turned up in the pub in Monmouth where everybody knew me already with a pair of sunglasses with machino in inch high letters across the top, I would have been a target of massive ridicule, okay? Whereas when you travel, you're more keen on asserting your status with luxury goods because you're surrounded by people who know nothing about you and you can reinvent yourself effectively. Okay? And so, you know, so it's very, very interesting, the psychology of kind of luxury goods purchase. It's why there's a wonderful paper on why Neiman Marcus opened in Dallas, not in Boston. It's new money. It's an overwhelmingly male. There were more males than females, so males had to bling out a bit more. Okay? And, but most important of all, there were people who'd moved to Dallas from elsewhere in pursuit of oil money and they could reinvent themselves. You know, in Boston, everybody knew where you went to school, basically. You know, if you went to Our lady of whatever it is, you were upper class. And if you went to whatever it is, you worked. So, so you have these things where, you know, behavior is hugely context dependent. Now my argument is if, if you don't know what the consumer's really trying to do, don't criticize them for being irrational. Really good lesson. Similarly, if you don't know what a business is trying to do, don't criticize it the advertising, because they presumably have a big strategy and attendant on that strategy is an approach to communication. And it's completely wrong to say, I don't like this personally, is not a relevant factor. Okay. In a weird kind of way, I don't totally like it personally, although I would quite like the pink one, because that. I'm kind of. That kind of. I do. I do actually quite like that kind of thing. You know, they have a business strategy. Does. Does their communications approach serve that well? You know, if we analyze what they're trying to do, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but this business of it doesn't. You know, I like the Jaguar brand. I've never bought a Jaguar, but I like the Jaguar brand. And I don't like. This is not really a relevant response.
- [40:00]
John Evans
I don't know whether you saw it, but there was a fascinating post on LinkedIn where somebody changed the pink to silver and suddenly the car looks completely normal. It's. It's amazing how much the color is driving so much the response, because it suddenly looked like a sort of a. You can imagine a Hyundai or something, you know, if it invented a sports car. If you turn it silver, it sort of looks like a, you know, a EV sports car that you'd expect to see. So something interesting about the color choice that is so surprising that. That it turns it into sort of, you know, Penelope Pit Stop meets sort of some transformer design or something.
- [40:39]
Rory Sutherland
You know, actually, all four people trying to break this hideous automotive monotony in terms of color. I'll give Ford credit for that with the Mustang Mach E. They've come out with the. The 2025 series. There's a thing called something like Eruption Green, which is fantastic. I really, really like the return of green as a car color, by the way. I mean, geez, you know, this gray thing is tragic. I think it actually says something slightly unpleasant about wider society, actually. I don't want to live in a society which is obsessed with conformity. It just. It's just boring.
- [41:12]
John Evans
Yeah, I completely agree.
- [41:15]
Rory Sutherland
You must be Welsh as well, aren't you? So we both have this superpower being Welsh, which is. We don't really. The great thing about being Welsh is we don't really care what other people think that much. You know, my wife. My wife's from. Drawn from our Saxon occupying forces. And I always notice that she's much more concerned with, you know, what. What total strangers think of you. I don't give a fucking shit, to be absolutely honest.
- [41:40]
John Evans
Well, Rory, I must. You probably have to be somewhere, I'm sure, in five minutes, and I do, actually.
- [41:46]
Rory Sutherland
I must dash. But what a pleasure.
- [41:48]
John Evans
Thank. Thank you, Rory. It's good to see you, mate.
- [41:51]
Rory Sutherland
Always, always a pleasure.
- [41:52]
John Evans
So, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed listening to this one off bonus episode with my good friend Rory Sutherland talking all about what's been going on at Jaguar, which I think it's fair to say has been the hottest topic in marketing for the last few weeks. We will be back to normal on Wednesday with our regular episodes coming out. If you'd like to check them out wherever you get your podcast, please do. Also hit the subscribe button to never miss an episode again. And I would love it if you give me a review. Please do give me a review wherever you find your podcast. If you want to follow me, you can find me over on LinkedIn at John Evans and also on X at Uncensored CMO. I really appreciate you listening and watching and I look forward to you joining me next time. Thank you.