B (40:24)
Of course, we, you know, we draw inferences to the behavior of other people. Completely rational thing to do. They are hacking that a bit. It's a bit naughty. But equally, you could look at it another way and say in the consumer adoption of important new technologies, let's take a technology which we all agree is quite important and useful, the washing machine or whatever it may be. You do get this sigmoid curve, which is people find it difficult to do something they haven't done before and they find it difficult to do something that nobody else around them is doing. Unless you're one of those people who's just willfully perverse or eccentric. Most people, you know, set their default mode in life is do what I've done before, do what everybody else does. And it's not a bad heuristic for avoiding catastrophe, certainly. And you can see why we've evolved that instinct. But it does mean that the adoption of new behaviors is painfully slow at first, which leads me to wonder actually what proportion of great ideas were abandoned too soon. Google Glass would be an example. Okay, Google Glass would be an example where I think because it requires quite a lot of behavioral change and it's visible and you've got to wear it on your head. I'm the sort of, to be honest, I'm the sort of awkward cranky fucker who just go and do it anyway. And also, we both have a superpower in that we're Welsh, so we don't really care what other people think because, you know, what these Anglo Saxon invading forces think of us is of no concern of ours. But Welsh people are a bit, I would argue Welsh people are a bit less self conscious actually about things like that. But nonetheless, it's going to be painful to do. And I would argue that a product like Google Glass really You have to realistically plan for a five year, a five year wait before it makes it into the, I mean mobile phones, for crying out loud. Were we all assume that they arrived instantaneously because we're looking at history backwards and concertina ing it? No, no, no. There were years and years between the mobile phone becoming available, then affordable, then it reached a ceiling and then they introduced pay as you go. Because bear in mind, until they introduced pay as you go, there was a sort of 30, 40% holdout of the population who weren't prepared to get a mobile phone contract. Yeah, they then, they then got a pay as you go phone, put it in the car glove compartment and then discovered they were using it all the time. And in fact many of them ended up spending more on pay as you go than they would have paid had they been on a contract. But they just didn't like they were commitment phobes. And so the mobile phone, you know, television in the US was weirdly slow, slightly faster in the UK because the BBC kind of got it up to, you know, speed. You know, in other words, you, you already had the programming, as it were. But TV adoption in the US from the, what was it, 50s, I guess if you actually look at it, really, really long period where it's almost being adopted in the air fryer. Another example. Now here's an interesting thing. So I think there are various things marketers need to teach the rest of the business world that we know and they don't. And one of them is multi channel that actually the same person at different times will buy you in one channel and won't buy you in another or vice versa. And therefore, you know, that business of physical availability is crucial. What I think the finance people in a business do is they go, let's try and force all our customers to use the cheapest to serve channel, which is, I'm totally in favor of those screens where you order at McDonald's. I'm not in favor of getting rid of the person behind the counter because they're different, you know, they're contextually different. You know, there are times also is it really a restaurant if there isn't someone standing there looking at the tables? You know, what, what are you, are you a canteen? Well, it's weir. Okay. I'm totally in favor of ticket machines at railway stations. I'm not in favor of closing down the ticket office because sometimes you don't know what ticket you need. And so I think that fact that that's one marketing lesson, the other marketing lesson I think everybody needs to learn is this business of the Bass diffusion curve, which is that adoption of. So I used to think that the bigger the idea you had, the less marketing it needed. Because obviously if it's a really big idea, it'll just sell itself. Then I realized it's the opposite, that the bigger the idea you have, the more behavioral change it requires, the more unusual it makes you seem by adopting it and therefore the more marketing it needs. Because people need the, the psychological reassurance to get over all those initial hurdles. Now a perfect example of that, you know, penny post, one of the most fantastic business ideas in the last 200 years. 1840, Roland Hill, who suddenly works out it's a mathematical insight in a way that whereas there had been single flat rate postal same day, next day services or same day services in London, he worked out that with the coming of the railways, you could get so many letters on a trunk route between say London and Edinburgh, that distance had become distance. Price per letter per mile had almost gone to zero. Because if you watch the film Nightmail with the Auden poem, I think they're quarter a million letters on that train. So it's a sort of 400 mile journey. But actually if you think about it, you know, the price per letter per mile is as close to zero as you can imagine because they're quarter of a million of the buggers. And he worked out, hold on, you can take this same day principle which exists within London, you can extend it to the whole country. It then extended to the whole of the British Empire that never made money except Australia and New Zealand, you had to pay extra for those. But India, you know, Canada, all of those other, you know, the whole of Africa, you had a penny post. And the interesting thing of course, like it lost money for the first few years because people weren't in the habit. They didn't know anybody 200 miles away and they, they weren't in the habit of writing to people 200 miles away. Cause it would have cost a fortune. And so you had to wait three, four, five years before it hit break even for the behavior to catch up with the importance of the idea. And I think people think that good ideas are self evident and therefore will be adopted immediately. And they go and look at the initial. I was hearing about a thing on a podcast which is Cisco had invented a video conferencing for your tv. And the. No, I'm just trying to think who it was. Was it Gary Hamill on a. And the truth of the matter is, okay, the Idea was it didn't succeed very quickly in the first year. Well, first of all, you've got to wait for somebody else to do it, right? Okay, so it's not an obvious sort of, hey, I'll just buy that and I'm all set. But actually what they needed to do was to maintain that product line, let it grow incrementally and, you know, and one hopes, you know, slightly exponentially or geometrically at least. And wait for Covid to happen.
