To really take advantage of CX, companies will have to make data-based decisions. But looking for the expected won’t be enough - you will have to be willing to embrace the surprises in feedback to become customer-centric.

At our 2024 Experience-Led Growth Summit, Rory Sutherland gave a keynote on how to “Find the Magic in Your Customer’s Weirdness.” He challenged the belief that customers know what they want and can say in advance what a good quality experience is. He argued that the greatest wins for businesses are in the things that customers aren’t expecting.

Here are the key takeaways:

• There’s not enough focus on CX
• The three attributes of CX are table stakes, performance, and delight
• CX doesn’t follow any predetermined rules
• Customers are “predictably irrational”
• Consumers don’t trust businesses
• Most businesses optimize for immediate sales, not for long-term experience
• Exceptional CX is about testing
• Go beyond logic to improve CX
• CX potential lies in the anomalies
• Test the weird stuff
• Be inquisitive, not rational
• CX can’t be an afterthought
• Look for three things in CX: unmet needs, unasked for needs, and proof of value

Watch the full recording to hear the full keynote.

Here is a lightly edited transcript with the key insights:

There’s not enough focus on CX

I think it's actually economically important in that I would argue that we don't have nearly enough focus on customer experience, and that's why we don't have really much economic growth. I genuinely think that when you talk about Experience-Led Growth, you're onto something here. 

I think the reason why we don't have economic growth in large sectors of the economy is simply because the way we're defining experience is in a really narrow and kind of mechanistic way. It's to do with things like have we met our service level agreement? It's to do with lazy metrics on time and speed and effectively performing things according to some set kind of predefined range of what is customer satisfaction. It's all predicated really on the idea that consumers know what they want, that they can stipulate in advance precisely what a good quality experience means, and that all you have to do is deliver that at the lowest price possible, and you're off to the races and everybody's happy.

This comes from, I think, a fundamental flaw in basic economics. Which doesn't really understand humans at all. In fact, it achieves its mathematical neatness by really erasing psychology from the equation at all. those of you who studied economics will know that the assumptions of basic economics are effectively that consumers know exactly what they want in advance. We assume that they know the value of any purchase to them in advance, and they know to the penny how much utility they'll derive from that purchase, and consequently, they know exactly how much they're prepared to pay for it. And they also completely trust the person who is providing the service. Now, those are pretty massive assumptions.

In such a world where those assumptions were true, you wouldn't really need a marketing function at all. People would simply tell you what they wanted, and you either delivered it at the acceptable price or you didn't, and nothing else really mattered. The reason that marketing is quite a large part of the economy is because in no realistic world do those conditions really exist.

That's because human psychology has evolved in a world where we don't completely know what we want. we can't describe in advance some of the things we value most, that we value precisely because we didn't ask for them. And I think that's a really important lesson, which is one of the most important lessons about consumer psychology, other than the very basic fact that consumers are very, very weird, is that actually our appreciation of things isn't really proportionate to the standard definitions of what we might consider to be service quality.

The three attributes of CX are table stakes, performance, and delight

One way to make a bit of progress here is to understand a very interesting Japanese theory on customer experience. It was originally applied to product design, but it applies very well to CX. And that's Kano theory, by a man called Kano, who is a professor at the University of Tokyo, who did a lot of work in terms of the Japanese consumer electronics industry.

And Kano theory divides product attributes into three. 

There are basic table stakes. In other words, does it do the job it claims to without disaster? If you sell someone a piece of electronic equipment and it bursts into flames or it simply doesn't work, you're not in the game, you're not at the table, forget about it, you're out. Those are what you might call the basic attributes, basic hygiene attributes. 

Then there's a second component, which companies do tend to measure and try to optimize, which are performance attributes. Now in a product, it might be, if you're selling something like a cassette deck or a music player, it might be, for example, battery life. It might be sound quality. It might be volume and pitch wattage or whatever. And those things, they correlate with consumer satisfaction. And they're not worth ignoring by any means, but it's a kind of linear relationship and one that probably declines beyond a certain point. Once you've reached a certain point of excellence, nobody really cares. In customer experience terms that might be answering the phone quickly, for instance. 

Then there's this third category of qualities, which Kano calls delight attributes. And they're really fascinating because they're hard to quantify. Consumers generally don't ask for them in advance. Indeed they're precisely valued because they're unexpected and unrequested, but they contribute disproportionately, supralinearly with the actual effect it has on customer experience, customer evaluation, and hence customer loyalty.

An example of that, for example, in consumer electronics, for those of you who are old enough to remember, would probably be the cassette deck. Now, okay, a cassette deck has to work, it has to play cassettes. If it mangles the cassettes, it's no good. That's table stakes. It's ideal if it has good battery life, if it has reasonable sound reproduction and a reasonable degree of volume, but the delight attribute there was the eject mechanism.

For those who can remember, it was the same with DVD players. Okay. If you press the eject button. And it merely went clack. People thought that's a pretty crappy kind of cassette deck. I'm not really interested in giving that house room. If on the other hand, it had a dampened and counterbalanced, almost hydraulic effect, and it opened with a great shush, with a beautiful motion, a lovely action.

You thought, oh, that's absolutely brilliant. I love that. Now, nobody would ever say in research, what I really care about with a cassette deck is the eject mechanism. But that was the thing, the heuristic, that actually we used almost to determine quality. And it was precisely meaningful Because it was surplus to requirements.

CX doesn’t follow any predetermined rules

I think that's often true in customer service that what actually happens in customer experience is that it's the things we do that they weren't expecting us to do - the things that are pleasant and positive surprises - which really stick in the memory.

Now, there's a wonderful CX experience finding, which has often been kind of treated as an example of consumer irrationality. That's the finding that if you have a problem, but the problem is very well resolved by the company you're subsequently more loyal to that company than you were before the problem occurred. So if you have a car, for instance, and something goes wrong with the car, but you're very, very impressed by the experience you have at the dealership, you're now more loyal to that dealership than if your car hadn't gone wrong.

Now this is the kind of thing that makes economists very angry indeed, but to me it makes perfect sense. Because what has happened is you've tested the trustworthiness and reliability and commitment and long term focus on you as a customer by having the problem and not finding them wanting.

So suddenly you trust these people because you realize they will actually do something for you when it is not in their immediate financial interest to do so. And that's rather wonderful because, yes, obviously you're going to get a wonderful experience if you go into a dealership planning to buy a car.

That doesn't really surprise you. What does surprise you is the fact that they actually worry about you. When you're not immediately about to buy a car and indeed when the action of satisfying your problem is costly to them. And so that's what a poker player might call a tell. It's actually much more revealing of the overall spirit and trustworthiness of the brand than how well they treat you when they're trying to sell you something.

I think this is really important because consumers are seemingly weird if you're an economist. But if you understand the way in which they perceive the world that they don't entirely trust people to look after them once the initial sales has been made, and therefore they're disproportionately trusting if they find that actually that mistrust was misplaced.

Customers are “predictably irrational”

I was talking at lunch to Dan Ariely. Many of you will have read his book called Predictably Irrational. He argues that one of the best ways to actually sell to a consumer is to engender trust by not trying to sell them the most expensive thing you can, but by selling them the thing that's most appropriate to their needs.

And there's a great example of this kind of customer experience in, one of Jay Leno's videos The video is entitled why I don't own any Ferraris. Leno just says, if you want to buy the rarer Ferraris, he has a multimillion dollar collection, no Ferraris in it. He says, I'm not prepared to play the games they make me go through in order to buy the rarer cars. In other words, they'll only put me on the waiting list. If I hand them a brown envelope full of cash and also buy six or ten uninteresting Ferraris first on which they can make their margin. He said, I just don't want to play those games and he contrasts that with the experience of buying a McLaren.

I think it was the F1. I can't remember which and he said I'm quite interested in having these ceramic brake discs and the McLaren salesman says, Mr Leno, you're planning to track this car or are you really just going to drive it on the streets most of the time. Leno replies, “well, I'll probably take it out on the track once or twice But the vast majority of the time I'm going to be driving around los angeles in it.”

And the salesman replies, well, let me save you 20, 000 straight off the bat. Don't get the ceramic brake discs. They take ages to warm up. They're brilliant on the track after you've been driving for a while. In everyday traffic, they're actually far worse than the standard brake discs and unless you're planning to track the car, I really wouldn't buy them. From that moment on, Leno knows he can completely trust this guy because the guy has downsold him.

Suddenly I'm dealing with someone who's actually interested in my own outcome, not in matching whatever sales metrics they've had imposed on them by the manufacturer. And it's a brilliant way of actually conveying the fact that you have someone's interests at heart and that you're not merely, for example, trying to get them off the telephone as quickly as possible, trying to effectively, shift the problem somewhere else or simply say no in accordance to whatever your computer tells you to do.

Consumers don’t trust businesses

It is actually proof that you care beyond the initial transaction. Now this, I think, has an enormous bearing on why companies aren't growing, and it's because companies aren't growing because people don't trust them. Fundamentally, what happens, and this is true of most retail, is they're absolutely wonderful when they're trying to sell you things.

The second anything goes wrong, the problem is dumped on you. That even applies to really good practitioners. John Lewis, for example. I ordered a Dyson through John Lewis. It went missing. It never even reached the Waitrose store where I was supposed to collect it from.

Did they say, I'm terribly sorry it hasn't arrived? Nope. It was up to me to notice it hadn't arrived. It was up to me to contact them. It was up to me to request a refund and then reorder the thing. In the end, I didn't. I was pissed off. So I went and bought the thing from Dyson directly instead. The one advantage of John Lewis in that case was I thought the trustworthiness of their delivery when that basically fell down, there was no possible reason for buying it from them.

But we find these instances all over the place. And it was a recent report, in fact, by the foundation, which I recommend you read, which shows that a large percentage of customers have had an experience in the last few months, which they find enraging. And they actually use the phrase enraging. Now, this is actually a whole economy problem because if trust in remote purchase in dealing with businesses remotely, whether it's a streaming service you subscribe to, whether it's an online retailer, if the fundamental trust in ordering things remotely breaks down because everybody, not necessarily with your brand.

But with some other brand here the second everything didn't go perfectly to plan, the onus fell on them to sort out the problem. If that increasingly pisses people off, this isn't just a problem for the brand that's annoyed them. It's a problem for the whole category of what you might call remote commerce.

Remote commerce should be growing much more than it is. The reason it isn't growing more than it is, is because of that fundamental erosion of trust. And that is an experience problem. The beautiful example, by the way, which is that if you don't have trust, you don't sell. And I was told years ago when I started in Ogilvy, a story of America's most successful car salesman.

I think it's very telling. America's most successful car salesman was asked what it is that made him. This was back in the 1960s. He said it's very simple. Everybody else in car sales is trying to sell a car right now. When I sell a car to an individual or to a family, I'm asking a completely different question. How can I be absolutely sure that they come back to me to buy their next car? in three or four years time.

That was what he was optimizing himself for, not the immediate purchase, the subsequent purchase. Now, it occurred to me that he's almost undoubtedly right in the long term to adopt that policy. I would argue that repeat purchase is the only real metric that translates into enduring business success and growth.

However, it occurred to me that in following that approach for the first three to four years of his working life, he was probably a less than averagely successful car salesman. That's because most sales metrics in the short term are fundamentally focused on the immediate sale, not the lifetime value of the customer.

Most businesses optimize for immediate sales, not for long-term experience

So we've optimized for the immediate transaction at the expense of the long-term experience. And we've also optimized for that because the immediate transaction is exactly that. It's immediate. It delivers its results very, very quickly. Whereas investment in CX delivers, I would argue, greater, more effective results.

But it does so more slowly and either people don't have the patience to wait or it's simply harder because so much time has passed to disentangle the effect of the experience investment from all the other things that might have happened in the interim period.

I started my life in direct marketing. I still consider myself a direct marketer. Very quickly I progressed to being a creative person, a copywriter. The thing I noticed was that creativity and testing, which might seem actually oppositional, are actual natural bedfellows, provided you have the right attitude to what you test and how you view the results.

Exceptional CX is about testing

It was only a few weeks ago that I realized why there's such an extraordinary kind of benign loop that feeds between creativity and testing. And it's not a loop that's been properly closed, by the way, in things like performance marketing at all. No one's closed the loop. Effectively, media and targeting testing goes on in separation from not very imaginative creative testing in my experience.

I realized why creativity and testing were effectively, effectively two parts of the same Mobius strip, if you like. And it's this. Okay, well, first of all, I'll tell you a story. When I was very, very early on working on BT, we sold these things called network services, star services.

They were the funny little things you could do with your phone, your landline phone, by the way, for the young among you. Things like call diversion, call waiting, three way calling. And to pay for the upgrading of digital exchanges, BT charged for these services. It was a few pounds a month.

We used to send letters to people because that's what you did in the day before email. And you offered people the chance to subscribe at the cost of a couple of pounds a month for one or more of these services. And they could reply in two ways. They could either phone up an 0800 number, which was free, or they could tick a box at the bottom of the pre lasered letter, put the bottom of the letter in a prepaid envelope and post it back to us.

Very strangely, we noticed that twice as many responses came in by post typically, a little bit more actually. But then something strange happened. We had a very weird client who resented the fact that BT were paying money to the post office for their, postal response. and he thought that actually we want to drive a telephone culture in this country.

I think we should make everybody reply by phone. And we said, well, before we do that, can we actually test this? Seems a bit of a rash decision given that twice as many people are applying by post when given the choice. And so 50, 000 people selected at random got a letter that only allowed them to respond by phone, 50, 000 people got a letter which only allowed them to respond by post, and the final 50, 000 got a letter as before which allowed them the choice of both modes of response.

And the response rates were, roughly speaking, I wish I could actually dig out the data, but this was 1989, okay? So, roughly speaking, the response rate for phone only, two percent. Post only, about five percent. Phone or post, about 6. 9%. By which I mean that when you offered people two possible modes of interaction, the overall response rate was more or less the sum total of those people who'd only been offered one mode of interaction, which suggested something which would drive economists absolutely insane.

As I said, people aren't conventionally logical that the biggest determinant of whether someone bought this product wasn't what the product was or how much it cost, but the medium in which you could respond to request it. That's the kind of thing you discover through testing. You'll only discover it through testing because no one would be bold enough in an ordinary kind of business setting to suggest that something so seemingly trivial could have such a monumental effect.

That's the extraordinary thing you discover time and time again, if you focus on CX and you focus on measurement and you focus on quantification and testing. Nope. Why is that testing so critical to creative progress? And this is what I worked out a few weeks ago. I did an interview once on stage with the comedian Jimmy Kahn.

He said, you ought to employ more comedians in your business. Do you know why? I said, because comedians notice things. They notice the things that are trivial, seemingly out of the ordinary, potentially irrelevant, but which somehow have a huge effect on us. In other words, they ask slightly deeper questions.

Go beyond logic to improve CX

They go beyond the immediate surface logic of an answer. This may make perfect sense and they go a little bit further and then it occurred to me that most creativity - indeed most scientific progress if you want to get into Viagra or penicillin or vaccination or anything like that - nearly all scientific progress starts with someone noticing something Specifically something that they didn't expect Something that's changed It could be a technology that's changed, a context that's changed.

It could be an aspect of human behavior that's changed. After COVID, not everybody behaves in completely the same way as they did beforehand. One of the great examples of creativity is always the Fosbury flop. It's always cited as this great example that everybody used to do the high jump by going over leg first and landing on their feet.

And then Dick Fosbury comes along in, I think, 1960. Eight and wins Olympic gold medal by going over backwards and landing on his back. What a brilliant idea, everybody says. But it was a brilliant idea because Dick Fosbury noticed something. And what he noticed was that it had always been vaguely known that you could jump very high heights by going over backwards.

Nobody did, however, because Originally, when you landed after completing a high jump in any athletic event, you landed on some thin straw matting. So you could indeed jump over backwards and land on your back, but you probably wouldn't get to jump more than three or four times, or at the very least, you'd be stumbling your way up to the podium in an extraordinary injured state.

And what Fosbury noticed was that over time, the mats had been getting thicker and thicker, and were now actually mattresses. So suddenly, The same move, which would have been life threatening maybe 60 years before, was now perfectly safe. He noticed what had changed. And nearly all creativity comes from noticing unexpected results, things that don't make sense, things that actually annoy economists because they seem to defy conventional models of rationality.

Things you weren't expecting. By the way, okay, when I said that you've got to look at statistics very differently, if you, if you want to be creative, with testing. That's a really important point. Most people take statistics and they form averages. As Mark Ritson says, the average is the enemy of the marketer.

The marketer is a detective. As Sherlock Holmes said, it is often the the most outlandish, egregious, seemingly trivial or bizarre single data point that actually provides you with illumination. What you do when you average things, what you do when you aggregate things, okay, Is you eliminate the anomalies and you end up with effectively a very smoothed out view of what's going on, but the creative potential lies in the outliers.

CX potential lies in the anomalies

It lies in the anomalies. Maybe only 5 percent of people giving customer feedback on customer experience will say something quite unusual. That thing may be the thing that those people say, which is felt by the other 95% but never spoken. David Ogilvy didn't actually say this, but it's often attributed to him.

He said the trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel. They don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say. It's quite a bit of truth in that. In many cases, it's only a minority of people Who have the degree of kind of self-awareness to tell you the real reason for the problem.

I think I can't voice it. I can't yet explain it. There's something fundamentally wrong with the queuing procedure at Gails because I find myself more annoyed in a Gails queue than I do anywhere else. Most people, when asked if you had a good experience in a coffee shop, we'll talk about the coffee. Okay.

Most people, when asked to evaluate a dishwasher will think, well, I'm supposed to be talking about how good the dishwasher is at cleaning things. Okay. They'll talk about what you might call the core function, what Kano would call the kind of performance value of the product. 

Test the weird stuff

Actually, it's the other stuff. It's the outlandish stuff, which often contains a huge amount of the emotional freight in any exchange. I think this is really, really important to understand, by the way.

Let me give you a few examples. I think one of the greatest examples of CX insight in the last 20 or 30 years, and I've cited it frequently, is the Uber map. Most people would say, how happy were you with your weight for the taxi? And they'd go, the duration was acceptable. Most people measuring the acceptability of taxi waiting would look at a quantitative measure like duration, because it's easy to measure, it's there, and it can be expressed easily in numerical form.

What Uber noticed, fundamentally I think one of the two co-founders noticed while watching the James Bond film Goldfinger, was that what bothers people about a wait isn't so much the duration, it's the degree of uncertainty. I used this insight and said to British Airways, look, it's very simple. Said, look, if you've got a flight that's delayed 46 minutes, there's an enormous emotional difference among your passengers if you can put up on the board delayed 46 minutes versus just delayed.

Okay, the first one is manageable. It's reframable. It's I'll go and have another pint. I'll get my hair cut merely putting delayed Enters people into a whole world of pain and uncertainty. Do I make a phone call? Do I cancel my trip? What am I supposed to do now? Is it worth going to the lounge? Should I go shopping and now I've got to keep staring at this board every three minutes for the next 45 minutes So I can find out what's going on Uber spotted the fact that what made people happy far more than the taxi turning up quicker was knowing where the taxi was and having a degree of expectation management over when it might arrive.

Oh, look, it's stuck at those traffic lights. I'll have another pint. Okay. Oh, look, that's the license number of the cab. So when it actually turns up at the end of the street, I'll know it's my cab, not, and I won't end up waving at random cars like a lunatic. Okay. There are lots of other CX details about Uber, which are very good.

The fact that you just get out of the car without having to engage in any financial transaction, which is great if you're running late for a train, but it also makes the thing feel a bit like a chauffeur rather and less like a taxi. Okay. There are lots and lots of components. We can take them all through.

Zoom was a big business in a way that Skype never was because it spotted a CX thing, which is that fundamentally psychologically, no one is going to make a video call that's like a phone call, except to very close family members or very, very close friends. It's simply too intrusive. So Zoom didn't adopt the model of a phone call.

It adopted the effective model of a meeting room where you booked a meeting and everybody joined when they were ready. dressed, not naked, not on the lavatory and at their own convenience. Okay? These very, very small psychological things make an enormous difference to how people behave. Because fundamentally, This applies to price as well.

People do things for the way they make them feel. Do I feel safe? Do I feel trusting? Do I feel comforted? Do I feel reassured? Do I feel in control? That's why people do things. The other stuff is, yes, important. It's important that your dishwasher actually, cleans your dishes. I'm not disputing that.

However, if you want to actually go beyond the mere functionalist reductionist, easily measured quantification of what value really means. You have to go into psychological value and there it's much less comfortable for rational people. The Doubletree Hotel. I last stayed at a Doubletree about 10 years ago.

It was in Chicago. I can't remember anything about it, except for the fact that when I turned up, they have an oven under the check in desk, and they gave me a bag of freshly made cookies to their own recipe, which are, by the way, delicious. I wasn't expecting it. To be honest, as a Brit, I thought, this is a bit hokey, they're giving me hot cookies.

Then you eat the cookies, you discover they're delicious, and the very fact that nobody at a hotel says what I really want from a hotel is I want fresh cookies. It's precisely that gratuitousness, which makes that a really meaningful gesture in the same way. This is a bit of a male example. If you've been to a Turkish barber recently.

Okay. Now I'm fairly confident that none of you ever said, okay, I really like my existing barber. I just wish they'd flick burning methylated spirits into my ears. I don't think anybody's actually said that. Okay, and I think that's just important because very often the things that make an experience really stand out a slightly silly They're tangential to the main function of what's being performed and they're slightly weird Which is why by the way, you have to test weird stuff.

Don't just test things that people have asked for Sometimes test the opposite of what seems logical. The more of those things you do, when you notice something that's a really weird response to a really weird stimulus, now you're really onto something because you have an opportunity to be really creative, because all innovation and creativity starts with an observation.

And the more weird things you observe, the more opportunity you have to be creative. That's the Mobius strip I was talking about earlier. But also, if you find that weird things work, your competitors either won't know or will often be culturally incapable of replicating the same thing.

Lots of people. Lots of hotels have copied aspects, the Corby trouser press, the minibar, they've copied all those things for other hotels, okay? Nobody's copied the cookie when you check in at the Doubletree. You see, there's a problem with being too rational. There's a problem with averaging. There's a problem with aggregation of data, if you're not smart about it.

Be inquisitive, not rational

I don't want artificial intelligence. I want artificial inquisitiveness. And the problem with rationality is twofold. Okay. Sometimes it sets the bar too high. You can only test something if it makes sense in advance. If you do that, you're not testing enough. In fact, a friend of mine who is the head of data analysis at a performance marketing company found repeatedly that the companies that tested more, in other words, they tested more variables were disproportionately more successful.

You'd expect companies that tested more to be more successful, but the companies that tested insanely Many variables weren't just a bit more successful. They were disproportionately more successful. And his conclusion was that the companies that tested loads and loads of things didn't only test the sensible things.

They tested silly things, and it's actually the silly, irrational, counterintuitive, unexpected things that often make the most difference. It's like meteorology. There are butterfly effects. This is a form of magic, it's a form of alchemy, because you can do very, very small things and make a huge effect.

Selfridges is the only shop I know where, when you pay by credit card, they say, Thank you very much, Mr. Sutherland. Anybody else can do that. Your name's on your credit card, assuming you haven't stolen it. Okay. I've often had a long argument saying that, I think that many, many online retailers would be much, much more successful if they gave the consumer a choice of delivery companies, because I think delivery is a much, much bigger factor in repeat purchase.

And having your favored delivery company deliver is a much, much bigger factor in customer experience than anyone's given him credit for. But that decision probably falls to some guy in procurement. It doesn't fall to the marketing function. I'm absolutely convinced that if you offered people that choice, you'd actually find people appreciate it.

It also would mean that when something went wrong, they blamed the delivery company because they'd chosen it rather than you. Because you hadn't imposed it. But again, nobody's testing these things. They're testing the things that seem to make sense. You know, the price demand curve. Yeah, it's a very good thing to test.

But remember, price isn't just a number. Price to economists is a number. To consumers, it's actually a feeling. You can Test reducing the price. Why don't you test making the thing feel less expensive by comparing it to other things? Again, the problem I have with rationality is this. Sometimes it sets the bar far too high.

Unless you can prove this makes sense in advance, you're not allowed to try it. That's ridiculous. Okay, because actually you're just testing the things you expect to work. The whole value of testing is that it tells you about things you never even dreamt were important, which turned out to be decisive.

But that's when rationality sets the bar too high. But there's another case in which rationality sets the bar too low, which is once you can come up with a rational explanation for something, you don't need to ask any further. People want dishwashers to clean their dishes. Actually, the real value of a dishwasher is that it helps you keep dirty plates out of sight.

Okay? It gives you a place to put your dirty stuff. That's what's really annoying when your dishwasher breaks down. It's not that you have to do the washing up. It's the fact that you have to look at the stuff beforehand. Okay? People don't really have swimming pools to swim in. People like having a swimming pool because you can walk around your garden in the summer in a bathing costume without feeling like an idiot.

Okay, the first why is often perfectly rational. I think it was JP Morgan who said, for every question, there are two answers, a good answer and the real answer. I think for every question, there are a lot of, there are two answers, the rational answer and the real truth. But it's too easy just to pluck the explanation for any behavior or phenomenon that makes sense.

Pluck it down from the air and say, that makes sense. Move on now. Nothing to see here. There's nothing more to know. I think we do that all the time. Why do people shop in sales? They shop in sales because the prices are lower. No. I think if you tested it and you actually held a sale at Harrods, but you didn't tell anybody, you just reduced the price by 30%, I think you'd see a very, very small increase in purchasing.

I think a lot of the sale thing is herd mentality. Some of it is FOMO, you know that the sale only goes on for a limited time. A lot of it is Razzmatazz and hoopla about the sale, which makes you feel that effectively you have to join in. I don't think this is a purely, I don't think a retail sale is a purely economic phenomenon.

CX can’t be an afterthought

I think it's something else. I think there's a total difference between 30 percent off and 30 percent off for three days only. I think these things are all over the place. What my friend calls the real why. There's an official why, which makes sense and makes you look intelligent in the boardroom. Then there's the real why, which goes down to the deep psychology of human behavior.

I got very pissed off because when it came to the practice of, reducing single-use plastic and getting rid of shopping bags, people put a price on a shopping bag. You had to pay for a plastic bag when you went to Boots. And they said, look, charging for bags works, so now we've charged 10p, maybe we ought to charge 30p, or 50p, or 80p, or whatever.

Because they just saw it as a simple kind of economic equation. I said, Look mate, the biggest effect is by charging anything, could be one penny, for a bag, you make it impossible for the store to give a bag by default without asking the consumer if they want a bag. Previously, if you went into Boots and you bought two lipsticks and a toothbrush, and they didn't put it in a bag for you, you thought, you rude bastards, you're just handing me these loose products.

had to bag everything up before you handed it over to the consumer. Once you implied a charge on the bag, you'd broken that social norm, and you had to say, would you like a bag? At which point the consumer would often look down at their capacious half filled Sainsbury's bag and go, nah that's fine, I'll just put it in here.

It's all too easy to look at the economic logic behind something and think it's the only logic. Quite often, the psychological aspect is a much, much bigger factor. But that's what's so important here, I think. I would argue that the greater part of innovation is actually marketing innovation. It's not working out how to make the thing.

It's working out how to sell it. And I think that problem is more acute now than it's ever been. One of the worst injustices we do to marketing and to testing of marketing messages. And one of the worst injustices we performed psychology is effectively comes about when we write the history of a great product.

And we say, someone came up with a great product and everybody bought it. Because we've forgotten the marketing that was necessary because nobody ever says I bought that product because the marketing was great They say I bought it because it was a great product. And so the marketing in hindsight becomes invisible What fascinates me, if you go back through history and you look at some of the greatest discoveries made, and I will include in this smallpox vaccination.

Okay. COVID vaccination, for that matter. Okay. The steam engine, all of those things, the mobile phone, all of them required decades of persuasion. I spent about 15 years of my working life persuading people. It might be a good idea to have internet access at home. I used a mobile phone on Oxford Street in 1989.

Two people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. Now we forget all that now because we think of a mobile phone as an essential. It's only an essential because marketers did the work first. Possibly the best invention anybody's ever had, which might be the smallpox vaccination. I always assumed Jenner came up with the idea.

Everybody immediately hailed him as a hero and basically We're all off to the races. He spent the rest of his life fighting vested interests, fighting skepticism, fighting religious objections. No behavioral change takes place painlessly. It only looks like that in retrospect, when everybody's finally being convinced.

There were 30 to 40 years, maybe even more of advertising, persuading people to put electricity in their homes. We forget all that. And we remember the inventor and we forget the marketer. But there are great ideas, which I think are sitting out there waiting to be discovered, if only we could work out how to sell them.

I'll give you one example, which is something we actually had at a restaurant this evening. Loaded fries. Okay. Everybody loves chips. Everybody would love chips with nice stuff put on top, pulled pork or barbecue sauce with jackfruit, as was the case at this point, okay? Why was no one selling loaded fries?

It wasn't that people didn't want them. It's that they didn't know how to ask for them because there wasn't a name. There wasn't a social norm. Nobody actually found out a way to describe it. You can call them dirty fries if you like, if you're that kind of restaurant. Okay. But until someone came up with a name until someone normalized them, all that demand was sitting there completely untapped.

Look for three things in CX: Unmet needs, unasked for needs, and proof of value

So there are two things I think you can look for in customer experience, which is there were three things. Unmet needs. And in unmet needs, I include unasked for needs. Things that people would actually love, but which they're never going to ask for. And to prove the value of those, you have to experiment, because you'll never win the case any other way.

Apparently, the marketing director of the Doubletree Hotel has been under pressure to get rid of the cookies for years by the finance function. as an act of spite, she made them slightly larger. Heh. There are also things which I think you should look for which are met unneeds, which are metrics that are being pursued to the point of insanity.

I don't want my train to be late, but I don't care if my train is four minutes late. Okay. I don't want my train to be 30 minutes late, but pursuing punctuality or pursuing how quickly you answer the phone in a call center. Okay. Some of these metrics are pursued expensively to the point of insanity, to a point where the consumer really doesn't care and the money would be spent.

Better elsewhere. The only way you'll discover these things is by testing, but doubly important, that's the only way you'll win the argument internally as well, because most of marketing runs counter to the mindset of the boardroom and counter to the mindset of the economist. It's deeply discomforting to these people, the idea that their whole business may rest on little more than what are effectively psychological quirks and foibles.

But trust me, there are trillion dollar businesses that rest on exactly that. If Google hadn't made their first search page so damn simple, they never would have gone anywhere. If Zoom had decided to model the thing on a phone call rather than on a meeting room, they never would have gone anywhere. You cannot really succeed in the modern business world if your customer experience effectively isn't, and by the way, your employee experience, which is something I'm not even talking about, but which is equally vital.

It's simply too expensive, okay, to recruit customers de novo, time and time again, repeat purchase is what really matters. I'm so grateful to you for focusing on this, for providing the tools that make this automatable, but also the tools that actually aggregate from everywhere.

I get very worried, by the way, by the death of the call center. Because the call center is the only way you'll learn about the problems that your website can't solve. I think, personally, there should be a small outpost at the call center that sits next to the CEO's desk that reports back regularly. I think it's that important.

This whole question of feedback is utterly vital. It's how evolution works. It's how business grows. So thank you once again, Chattermill, for doing this so well and for aggregating it so well. And thank you once again, Mikhail, for inviting me to speak.