The Soup is Getting Cold with Martin Lindstrom
Martin Lindstrom, world expert on branding and one of the “world’s 100 most influential people.”
Welcome to the first edition of The Soup is Getting Cold with Dale Lovell. Monthly interviews with remarkable people in media, marketing and the creative industries.
Martin Lindstrom is recognised as one of the world's primary branding gurus. A pioneer of brands on the internet and in researching how we use our five senses in decision making.
The founder and chairman of the Lindstrom company, a business and culture transformation company, Lindstrom is an advisor to Fortune Top 500 brands the world over.
He is the author of seven New York Times best-selling books, including Small Data: The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends, Buyology - Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and Brandwashed - Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.
TIME magazine named Lindstrom one of the “world’s 100 most influential people.”
And, frankly, I am pretty chuffed that he agreed to be my inaugural The Soup is Getting Cold interviewee! [Interview conducted February, 2021].
Tell us about your new book The Ministry of Common Sense?
The book is really about how bureaucracy is sneaking into every aspect of our lives and how a lack of common sense has completely banned us from feeling good. Whether that is in a company where suddenly red tape is taking over and killing all sorts of logic or in our private lives.
There's a direct correlation between common sense and empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person and see the world from their point of view. Empathy is at an all-time low at the moment.
The book promises a five-step plan to end bureaucracy. What are those?
Step-one, see the world through the customer's eyes, and then once you do that, step-two, remove just one friction. Just a small little friction that doesn’t require huge change but can have an immediate impact on the organisation.
Step-three, realise that the solution you are coming up with is based on the fact that consumers are not rational, they are irrational. Most of us, in fact all of us are deeply irrational. In fact, 85% of everything we do every day is irrational. So, let's admit this and create a basic solution around that.
Step-four, ensure that you implement this stuff in 90 days. And only 90 days. Because if you do it in 90 days you keep momentum up. If it takes one year, forget it. We don't have the patience for it anymore.
Step-five, the very last point is to spread the word. Celebrate this within your organisation so people get a sense of hope. Once you see good things are changing then other people in the workforce come out and say, “well, I want to change this as well.” And then you have real momentum going. Always start from bottom up, not from top down.
What new trends are you seeing on the back of Covid-19?
It's a new hypothesis, but I do think that the younger generation - let's call them the Millennials and younger - have actually been through a time capsule which no other generation has ever experienced. They have become 35 to 40 years older in a matter of a year.
If you ask any young person about their view of life, they will say, “I'm invincible, I will live forever.” Life insurance, pensions, whatever - forget about it, they don’t care. But what has happened during COVID-19 is that that generation has increasingly realised “we are not invincible.” We probably will have a death certificate somewhere in the future.
Previous generations were very much about materialistic things, but of course this generation is not about owning stuff - they're more about renting stuff - but I think this has been further amplified some 35 years forward for them because if you ask them what their dreams are now, it's one big bucket list. Now older generations might first think about a bucket list at 60. “I want to do that before I die.” Now, people that are 22 years old have their own bucket list.
That will mean that the entire way that they will buy stuff, acquire stuff, interact with people will be completely changed and that's an eighth entry point because that means that they'll see the world in a completely different light.
We have to take into account that we have a global, synchronised, behavioural change taking place, which means that there's opportunities appearing left, right and centre which I find fascinating.
One of the things I'm talking a lot about is the lack of touch and tactile stimulation, and how that is not only causing depression but also, it explains the reasons why people are buying more stuff which trigger our tactile dimensions; all these things will stay with us.
There's a lot of analogies being made to liken now to the 1920s, and the roaring 20s. Do you think when the vaccines kick in, that there's going to be an upsurge in business activity and spending?
Yes, but it's going to be different. We'll come back, but it will be very different what comes back, and it will take some time. We see those numbers in China now where people are not going back to restaurants, we see that in Sydney, in Australia right now where people are not going back into the cities. Things could take a long time before it wraps up.
I have heard an estimate that around half of all retail is closing down in the US as a consequence of COVID-19. Now if that's true or not, I don't know, but if the numbers are somewhere up in that range, I don't need to tell you that a lot of people will stay without a job for a long time and we do know it is ten times easier to jump from one job to another, than to have a break for a year.
Retail is in such disarray at the moment it will mean that spending power will go down in that space.
But I do think that spending will go up dramatically when it comes to experiences.
Whether that is experiences within retail, which will convert themselves from ‘picking a product and buying it,’ into having an experience and buying a piece of merchandise which is the product, we’ll have to see.
But then we will probably see local retail coming up big, too, so that people will support their local communities.
But there’ll also be another huge group, which could be stuck with a sense of depression, and a lack of purpose after Covid, who are trying to buy themselves out of it. So there we will see another form of consumption in luxury foods full of sugar and salt-based products.
I do think that the idea of living with distance to cities will become a big thing, too. People want to live on farms; they want to have eggs from their own chickens. All that stuff will be a whole new lifestyle which will generate new types of consumption patterns.
Do you think travel is going to bounce back?
Travel will be a major part, but it will not happen from one day to another.
There will be a large group of people who will be increasingly afraid of booking anything because of ‘what if.’ We can see that with the mutations of COVID-19 coming out. That type of fear will continue forever, the rest of our lives - that there will be a new strain coming up every second year or every year or every month, which will mean that people will constantly be knocked back in their planning.
There will be another group of people saying, “hey, fuck that. I'm living my life.” I think that will be a very solid group of twenty or thirty percent of the population.
How do you think future generations will look back on these first twenty-five years of the internet?
They won’t. Remember, when you're born with it you don’t think about it. It's a little bit like, how would you look back in time to remember a time before fresh air - you really don't know. Because you can't remember it.
So they won't, but what they will look back to are stages in the net and how it’s evolved, which for them will be profound. They will be very aware of the concept of fake news, which is a spin-off of the net. They will for sure be aware of cyber bullying and they will be aware of how we had the home office trend going on. So, it will be more sub-milestones.
I realised this trend already back in 1999, I think, for Lego where, when I was observing kids playing, both with Lego bricks and then online on the screen. They were not talking about “so how's your offline experience, how's your online experience.” Because it’s such an old-fashioned way of looking at the world. So that for sure will disappear.
I do think that what young people will also look at is the feeling of emptiness, and the feeling of being alone, and the feeling of losing your sense of purpose in life. This fear of lack of sense of belonging, all that stuff.
I do think that this generation will appreciate a sense of belonging, to a different degree than previous generations. Experiences will be ever more important to them. So we will have an extraordinary number of concerts and festivals and things where you just hang out in the forest, or whatever it is, compensating for this ubiquitous technology.
I grew up in rural West Wales, which has got a very unique mix of New Age traveller-types and farmers. A lot of the ‘hippie’ kids I went to school with in the 1980s didn’t have TV, for example. I can see the trend of digital detoxing growing, do you think there'll be another generation of ‘hippies’ shunning technology en masse in the future?
We will have very fragmented groups, trying to attack this topic in many different ways. You will have hippies out at the bonfire. And then we’ll have seventeen other types of that going on, too. But it's all about people trying to get into a balance with technology and compensating for the lack of touch through other means.
I attended a leadership group recently with Marshall Goldsmith, who is one of the best leadership coaches in the world. Out of 10 senior leaders present, five of them were considering buying a farm. So, that for me is a really good indication of what we're doing.
There could be a hardcore group who move to farms, who do it because they have the financial means to do it, but on a lesser scale I do think we will see that this [Covid-19] may have been the tipping point for people to take offline moments with their friends.
The problem is, a lot of people have also become increasingly addicted to their phones.
I skipped my phone four years ago and I think we will start to see a movement of people doing that: at the very least cutting it off during the weekend.
It feels like the last couple of years that we have hit a bit of a crossroads in terms of where the world wide web is heading. How do you think it will evolve? Do you think it's just going to break up and become something completely different to what we understand of it today?
In my opinion I think has already happened. Privacy is dead.
And I don't think it's going to recover for a very very long time. Why? Because the younger generation never experienced a World War Two, where privacy meant that Jewish people and gay people or other minority groups were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. That was the reason why the data law was established in Germany in 1945 – and why Denmark has the second toughest data laws in the world, where you can't merge databases at all.
People have left so many digital footprints behind them, that there's no way they can get out of that now because we are fundamentally lazy, and we don't want to delete all our cookies or start all over again on YouTube and miss all the videos we like. So, I think privacy will be out of the window.
Privacy will be a thing of the past. AI and facial recognition and deep fakes will totally mess up the whole thing, in my opinion, and it's just on the edge of doing it now: people will retract away from trusting the system.
It could be extreme, I think we could potentially have our ‘Big Brother’ and 1984 scenario - and it's happening right now - but it could be much much worse, in my opinion, it's just the beginning of a scene right now.
What people will start to do is buy themselves into freedom bubbles, where they are safe within. That's going to be a whole new thing. I think new businesses will come out of it.
We’ve gone too much down one path and it has to come back out again and go along with security.
People cannot trust anything anymore. And I do think as a consequence of that what we'll see happening is a new type of web, that people can trust. Where you buy access for a fee and where it starts to cost money to go online. I do think people are doing it behind a paywall now, to some extent, but I think that paywall will be much bigger in the future. So, an actual paywall to access anywhere on the internet.
Privacy is something people will pay for. If I said you could pay $5.95, a month and then you get a toolkit and you know everything is safe behind that wall and everything there is solid and there's no ads coming up, no data leakage. I'm pretty sure you would pay much more for that than $6.
I suppose the reality of where we are at this stage of time though is that would probably be a product launch by the likes of Google or Facebook?
But then it becomes a trust issue.
I think we're getting to a point now where people feel very much on their knees, and yes, it may indeed be that Google can build up that thing, if they’re charging for it, because then people also know there is a contract going on. But it becomes a trust issue. Do you trust them not to use your data?
Who would be the best player? Probably banks. It won’t be banks, so it could probably be countries. I mean what if Switzerland was to launch it? And what if Switzerland was to say we are launching a whole new internet people-first privacy led walled-garden right here. I think the reputation of Switzerland would be enough for people to say “we'll do it, we trust that.”
Your book Small Data was something of a revelation. Working in digital advertising we are inundated with data points and tracking for our campaigns. Are advertisers obsessed with data?
I don't think the conventional advertising industry gets it. I think clients don't get it either because I think they become increasingly addicted to producing a set of numbers in order to prove a point. Those numbers, quite frankly, rarely make sense, unless you have a guaranteed link to conversion. But those direct links to conversion are not necessarily always there unless you're an e-commerce business.
I do think that in all the stuff we've done, and we are doing right now; there are things so extraordinarily irrational.
You can predict the past, but it stops at the moment where the data stops. The only way you can predict the future is to look in between the lines of numbers and that's what I call small data. That's where you create the hypothesis; so, you see the blank white space and the blue ocean.
The real issue we have right now is that people do not assign a lot of value to that - because it's small numbers - only twenty people interviewed, for example. How can you base something on just twenty interviews? But you and I know the difference. Big data often tells you obvious basics – ‘you are selling umbrellas and it’s raining, so if it rains more, the more umbrellas you will sell.’
I think the new generation gets it a lot, but they forget about the hypothesis, so, they're really good at mining the data and come up with interesting conclusions, but they will not see any new green territories, out of that stuff.
Hopefully in the future we will see a yin and yang of that big and small data come together more as people realise that those conclusions you're drawing from the big data, are just in the air. It has to happen at some point because if it doesn't, we will end up with algorithms working on other algorithms, working on other algorithms. It makes absolutely no sense in the end.
Thanks for reading.
Next Month: Nick Entwistle, Founder & Creative Director of the Bank of Creativity & One Minute Briefs
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