The Ledger, every show

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

“The fact remains that, you know, there are certain circumstances in which the ability to behave irrationally is actually at the meta level, highly rational.”

“Because when a product succeeds, everybody forgets the fact that it was the marketing that was instrumental to its success.”

“Steve jobs was not a technologist. He was a pitch man. He was a hot star. I mean, this is compliments. Okay. He was a brilliant salesman. He was a fantastic marketer.”

“Marketing plays and timing and luck, by the way, let's also include those. These other factors play a much greater role in both the speed of adoption and the success of adoption of anything remotely new or innovative.”

“These are all utterly brilliant things, but it took in the case of the Japanese toilet and the wine box and Google glass, Something about the timing or the marketing, not the product, something was wrong, and the consumer basically never bit. It never reached …”

“There's this fundamental asymmetry, which is creative. People have to present their ideas to rational people for approval. Okay, fine. Don't mind that never happens the other way around. You never get engineers or accountants saying, well, I think the answer i…”

“What you have to realize working in marketing is that people in marketing are very high in openness to experience, very, very keen to stand out. Very keen to be distinctive. The majority of the population are much lower on openness to experience, they're much …”

“It's no good being a luxury car that nobody, that only rich people have heard of, because in order to convey prestige, it's necessary for you to know that other people know that BMW is a prestigious car brand and so on and so forth.”

“Because it's always much more acceptable To spend money on infrastructure than it is to spend money on psychology.”

“Intangible value is the most environmentally friendly way of creating value. You don't have to chop down any trees. You don't have to burn any coal. You generate value simply by getting people to look at something that already exists in a more favorable light.”

“We intrinsically tend to think that marketing value is kind of cheating, whereas engineering value is the real deal.”

“Marketing would make a lot more sense to everybody, because a very large part of marketing is really costly signaling. So, you know, the cost of something particularly the upfront cost of something which may only pay off over time is a very, very reliable gaug…”

“If you're prepared to spend four years becoming a cab driver, And four years of your life which you'll never get back is spent reaching that level of qualification. You're patently committed to the job. Secondly, you have a lot of skin in the game because it's…”

“Someone is going to find a way of hacking that driverless car. Within seconds. By which I mean, you know, they'll work out that by putting a particular pattern of balloons on the road, the driverless car basically starts just going around in ridiculous circles…”

“It's impossible for anything rational, To successfully evolve, because the byproduct of being rational and efficient, optimally rational and efficient, would be that you'd be predictable. And if you were completely predictable, you'd be dead.”

“If you're an academic, your job is to try and be right, unambiguously, completely, absolutely right about something. In business, if only 30% of people do a weird thing 20% of the time, there's still a business opportunity in that.”

“Just as in individual behavior, the big driver seems to be avoidance of regret. In corporate settings, the big driver is avoidance of blame.”

“The problem with the kind of control economy is that you invest money according to how good people's reasons are, rather than according to how good the results are.”

“But then the other explanation is that in terms of cosmetics and in terms of fashion, You're doing it to signal to yourself that it enables you to feel confident in a way that actually you cannot will into existence. So you cut now in order for that to work, i…”

“Particularly with low cost items, effort can destigmatize low price.”

“I think that an awful lot of human innovation has been made possible by really a combination. Now, Jeffrey Miller agrees with me on this, but he, I mean, he's much better thinker than this than me, obviously, but that to some extent, sexual signaling or costly…”

“We instinctively know as human beings that the importance of a communication is proportionate to the cost of its generation and transmission.”

“When Joel said to David, I don't think people buy brand B rather than brand A because they think brand B is better. I think they buy brand B because they're more certain that it's good. In other words, they're considering not only the expected utility, but the…”

“Nearly all middle class values, if you think about it, from everything like education is very largely a commitment device. Our preparedness to engage in, kind of, costly commitment devices or signaling Is basically in sort of indication of middle class probity…”

“It is a serious challenge to advertising agencies. If you genuinely have an advertising agency in a huge metropolitan city, which completely fails to understand 50% of the population of the country which it serves”

“Because the tribal thing is, if you want to signal your membership of the in-group, the best way to do that is by focusing on those things which are disproportionately annoying to the group that don't agree with you. And so there's probably an element where po…”

“Nothing in marketing always replicates, because context always matters.”

“If you test counterintuitive things, it's much more valuable when they pay off. Because as I always say, test counterintuitive things, because your competitors won't.”

“Artificial certainty is less valuable in the modern digital age than it was historically, and yet weirdly people are cleaving to it more.”

“When you pursue efficiency, generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors. And of course, in the process, you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found, and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little o…”

“The major determinant of whether you liked Royal Mail or not was whether you liked your postman, or postie, technically, to be used the gender-neutral term. So people who had a rather unreliable service, but the postman did the odd favor for them, left things …”

“Various real estate agents have said to me that every estate agent does their utmost to make sure that until things are signed and sealed, the vendor never meets the buyer and vice versa. And the reason for that is if one of them doesn't like the other, they w…”

“It seems to be the case that if you meet the vendor, and you basically don't trust them or think they're a bit shifty, it doesn't matter what the price is, it doesn't matter the condition of the house, suddenly you revise your valuation of the house downwards …”

“Actually, someone who's invested 15 years in doing up a house probably cares about what the person buying it is going to do to the house.”

“Your readiness to pay changes partly in accordance to what you imagine to be the overheads of the establishment selling the good. Even though the utility of the beer, as distinct from the, how good the transaction feels. The actual utility of the cold beer is …”

“We're not trying to optimize. We're trying to reduce the risk of downsize, downside variance, you know. And that's true in all sorts of things, investment strategy, etc. You know, the barbell approach. You know, first of all, make sure you don't do anything di…”

“The queue for The priority lane in security is longer than the queue for the amateur lane, but frequent business travelers will still join the priority lane on the assumption that the people in front of them are more competent.”

“The job of the real estate agent is to some extent to be the person who stays behind in the place where the house is sold to suffer the reputational consequences of, you know, of anything outrageous. Because the vendor of the house isn't really reputationally …”

“A really, really good service organization allows for very streamlined, efficient service for people who know exactly what they want, and extremely empathetic service for people who are undecided, uncertain, or find themselves in an unusual situation.”

“Now, don't get me wrong, all that bottom-of-the-funnel short-term transactional stuff is very important to get right. I'm not disparaging it, but it's only a third of the game.”

“And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed, not always by the government, just as much by the private sector, who are much more interested in adherence to approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.”

“First of all, an awful lot of quality human decision-making of necessity has to be tacit and instinctive, not regulatory.”

“Don't benchmark against your most obvious competitor. All you'll do is make, make yourself a copy of them.”

“If you think about it, they survive as Land Rover, Range Rover, because they have effectively created the category they dominate.”

“So, the guy who rescued the British sparkling wine industry effectively did so by improving quality by 10%, 20%, and then putting up price by about a 150%. Because price is a signal.”

“I think also a lot of valuable goods are affordable now by everybody because they started as luxury goods.”

“So you use generally verbs of movement. You use verbs in preference to adjectives, and adjectives in preference to adverbs, I think. You tend to use Anglo-Saxon words rather than the Romance words For the most part, without being silly about it, you convert a …”