In this episode I’m in Zurich with best selling author and retail visionary Martin Lindstrom, talking about his latest book The Ministry of Common Sense -How to eliminate Bureaucratic red tape, bad excuses, and corporate BS”. We talk in depth in a wide ranging conversation how the systems and technologies designed to free us continue to vex us with unintended consequences, and what to do about it
Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
In this episode I’m in Zurich with best selling author and retail visionary Martin Lindstrom, talking about his latest book The Ministry of Common Sense -How to eliminate Bureaucratic red tape, bad excuses, and corporate BS”. We talk in depth in a wide ranging conversation how the systems and technologies designed to free us continue to vex us with unintended consequences, and what to do about it
Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People”. And for three years running, Thinkers50, the world’s premier ranking resource of business icons, has selected Lindstrom to be among the world’s top 50 business thinkers. Lindstrom is a high profile speaker and author of 7 New York Times best-selling books, translated into 60 languages. His book Brand Sense was critically acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best marketing books ever published”, Small Data was praised as “revolutionary” and TIME Magazine wrote this about Buyology: “a breakthrough in branding”.
Let’s listen in
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Michael LeBlanc
Martin, welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. How are you doing this morning?
Martin Lindstrom
I am fantastic. Good to meet you Michael.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, thanks so much for joining me. Whereabouts are you joining me from?
Martin Lindstrom
I'm in Zurich, in Switzerland, and it's snowing outside. It's romantic. And we are under lockdown. So, what more can you ask for?
Michael LeBlanc
Well, you're on the other kind of side of the world, but we're in the exact same position. I'm in Toronto, Canada, and it's snowy, it's beautiful out and, but yeah, we're in a, we're locked down too so. Jeez, what a world.
Martin Lindstrom
Day 265 okay.
Michael LeBlanc
It’s like that new, like that new Songbird movie. Have you seen trailers for that? It’s a new Michael Mann movie. It's like, you know, COVID 23 or something? Like, a variant, like do you really need to release a movie that raises our anxiety again. You know, like, anyway
Martin Lindstrom
But it's, it's fascinating you asked me about anxiety, because one of the studies we've done has been into the area in, in our brain called the amygdala, which is the fear spot. One of the things I've noticed is that fear is accumulating. It means that if you are exposed to fear, thru movies, thru politics, in the news, all that stuff, it actually accumulates in your brain, and it never really goes down again. It just stays on there. So, I would claim that the fear level we, you and I, are exposed to today is substantially higher than it was 10 years ago, even though and we are fairly safe. So, what happens is that when the COVID, 23, or 24, whatever comes out in Africa somewhere, we will immediately go to the alert levels, and it actually means that we will be much less receptacle for change, we actually will retract back to our homes and stay there.
Michael LeBlanc
Interesting. I mean, I, in some ways, you know, as I watched the economy, I got two comments on that, I briefed the Bank of Canada for, for on behalf of the retail industry. And they, I get invited to some great interviews and, and they put out a report with some charts that showed the first lockdown in March, and the economic response. And then the economic response of this second lockdown. And the economy did much better on the on the whole. Their conclusion was that we've gotten used to it in a bizarre way. Of working and operating and reflecting. And so, it's almost like we become a little numb to it in one way as an overall economy.
And the second really interesting insight. I have a partner, podcast partner, in Atlantic Canada. Our Atlantic provinces created a bubble within Canada. We call it the Atlantic bubble. So, they have they almost have no, they're like a little bit of New Zealand in Canada, right? And but the fear level, when you look at the research, the fear of the people living in the bubble is higher than the fear of the people living outside the bubble. So, the fear of the virus, even though there's it's not there, is higher than us where it is prevalent. So, it's just fascinating stuff.
Martin Lindstrom
What you're telling me is probably not surprising when you look to Australia as well. And you will notice if you go to Sydney now, with its 5.5 million people living there, that is nearly empty. Even though they have one case in the whole Australia, right>? So, I think you're right, I do think that fear changes our behavior, and amplifying things. And certainly, when I talk to people in Australia and New Zealand and Taiwan, where they basically are free of COVID. They’re all saying that they're afraid of the unknown they're afraid of they'll be locked back in again. And that fear has dominates their day to day behavior.
Michael LeBlanc
Interesting, it's like a free-floating anxiety almost. What you and I might call it “in the before time” pre- COVID. We just have free-floating anxiety. I don't know what to be afraid of, I’m just, there's enough going on. And I'm just afraid at any given time.
Well, let's jump right in. fantastic. Let's take a quick step back. Tell us about yourself. Tell the listeners about yourself your personal journey. What you do and what you do when you're not writing bestselling books.
Martin Lindstrom
Well, no, I certainly didn't dream of writing bestselling books when I was 12 years old. But what I was dreaming of when I was 12 years old was to have my own Lego Land, go and get that Michael, right? And I was serious. I went to, I actually got a sponsorship from Sony back then. God knows how on earth I persuaded them. And they flew me to Japan to learn how to cut bonsai trees. And then I created this wonderful Lego Land. It took me a year. With canals and the greeneries and of course, a lot of Lego houses and I opened the doors to this new brand new Lego Land. And two people showed up.
My mom and my dad, was really, was the lowest point of my career. And so, I went into panic and went down to the local print office and persuaded the owners to sponsor me and he was very nice person. So, he said “absolutely”. So, two days later, there was an ad in the paper promoting my Lego Land, $1 tickets were for sale. And I had 132 visitors showing up. There's just one problem visitor number 130 and visitor 131, were the lawyers for Lego suing me.
And that was really, again, once again, I had a hit back here, push back. So, and the Lego owner, the second generation heard about it, and he went from his headquarter. No, I'm born in Denmark. This is a Danish story. Lego is Danish. So, he drew the whole way to my moment at home. And it was a little like Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory type of scenario we're talking about here, right? So, so he arrives and I say,
Michael LeBlanc
Who are you? Who are you again? You’re who?
Martin Lindstrom
Yeah, exactly. And God is waiting there on the front porch, right, with a box of Legos. And he had, he had a really nice proposition to me. He said this. “No, we don't want to sue you. But we want to employ you”. So, I was the youngest kid in history of Lego and getting a job at Lego at the age of 12.
Michael LeBlanc
Wow. That's a, that's an interesting start to life. Where do you, where do you, how do you cap that? Well, you seem to have.
Martin Lindstrom
Well, I learned from it later on. You know, I asked the folks at Lego some years later, no, why, why did you employ me? And they said to me, “Well, the problem was because we wanted to employ our own audience to understand how the thinking we were losing contact with our customers. And by you being our target group working on the inside, you helped us to drive that innovation”.
And I think it stayed with me ever since. Because a lot of my work today is all about empathy. To place yourself in the shoes of another person and see the world, or feel the world, from another person's point of view. And it was actually the first when I think many years later, I was invited to Sweden to visit the owner and then back then, late CEO, Ingvar Kamprad, so the owner of IKEA. And I'll never forget it. I went to his office and he was not there. So, I said, “Where is he?” he said, “Well, he’s down at his usual place”. “Where’s that?” “Well, down at the cash register”. And sure enough, I went down to the cash register. And there he was, already back then this old man, checking every customer out. And I said to him during the break, “why do you do this?” And he said to me, “because I want to feel what people are seeing. And I want to hear what people are thinking”. And that's the reason why we are what we are today. That's a reason why IKEA is what has become. And that really, I think, once again shaped my Lego experience and shaped not only the way I write books today. Where I do an extraordinary amount of insight work, visiting consumer homes across the world. In more than 3000 homes are lifted over the last two decades. In 88 countries. But I also tend to ask a question about empathy, seeing the world from a different point of view when I'm transforming supermarkets or retail chains, or whatever I do. Because we quite often become very narrow. We see the world from inside out rather than outside in.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, your Lego story reminds me of that Tom Hanks movie Big.
Martin Lindstrom
Yeah, exactly.
Michael LeBlanc
The plot right and he's sitting around the boardroom table. It's one of my favorite scenes, I actually use it as a touchstone when I'm talking about how do we get a better consumer view, where he sits there and he’s a little kid and he just, “I don't get it”. And they, the executive thinks he's being smart. But he's but he’s like, “I don't get it. I don't get it, that's not fun”. It's not, like he brings in that, that sense of the consumer right in. And you know, there's your book is just perfect with so many examples of that.
When you write a book, tell me what’s your tradecraft. I talked to a lot of authors. And I remember talking to Dan Pink, a great author, and he's got a process. And Roger Martin, he's got a different process. When you sit down to write a book, I'm always curious what do you do? Do you knock out a first draft? Do you lock yourself in a room and have a word count every day? Or how does this come out of these books? How does this book come together for you?
Martin Lindstrom
Well, first of all, I don't sit down. And I'll tell you in a, in five minutes from now why I don't sit down. And my story really began a couple of years ago when I realized when I was spending time with Malcolm Gladwell, a fellow Canadian guy for you guys, and in some year, and we were talking a lot about you know, observations. And during that conversation, I realized that that started to lose my sense of creativity. So, after that conversation, I skipped my phone, and I haven't had a smartphone or iPhone ever since.
And what I really through this whole process was three things. I realized first of all, you don't see anything when you have a phone. I mean, you're standing in a bar, you're waiting for someone What's the first thing you do? You grab your phone, and you do anything with the phone, anything. So, you don't look like a complete loser, right? So that's the first thing.
The second thing is you don't see details. When you see something important. You grab your phone, and you see it through a screen. Your first newborn baby walking, while you saw it through a computer chip, right?
The third thing is probably the worst. That is we never get bored anymore. And boredom is the foundation for creativity. It is that pause, which we don't really have anymore. Think about it, we're sitting back-to-back Zooms team calls. There is no breaks anymore.
So, I realized through that process that I needed to get more bored. So, I skipped the phone, which has been an amazing experience. But I also realized that when I started to map down my creativity levels, and there was a very distinct pattern going on. And it really was not just when I was bored, but also when I was swimming, accorded the water moment. And you could call it a sense of meditation I guess. But at the end of the day, when you're free floating, I think it generates another type of release another type of chemicals in your brain.
And that leads me back to the answer to your question. I don't sit down. I jump into the pool. And, I have a, this sounds really bad, I know. But I literally have a pen and a paper at each end of the pool. And then I do my laps. And I write keywords down on the piece of paper, which is reminding about the narrative. So, all my last couple of books have actually been you know, produced in the pool. And I take these wet soaking notes, and I hang them on a string. I mean, this is ridiculous, right? You know, it's okay, everyone listening now you're welcome to shut this down. Because why am I wasting my time listening to that guy, right?
Michael LeBlanc
Well, you know, let's just say it's not the response I thought you're gonna get, let's just put it that way.
Martin Lindstrom
And then I'm sitting with these, sometimes some of the papers are glued together because the water is a bit sort of, and sometimes I can't really read what I'm was writing. But it that really becomes the, it's almost like small dots, you know, when you connect these dots, and it becomes a house? Well, for me, it becomes a book. And that's really my writing process. Because what it does is it helps me to be creative and see things from different perspectives.
So, it's not become, its not turning into a linear way of thinking. And I do very much like a counter intuitive writing format, and also a very light writing format, where you smile and laugh a lot. Because I do think that the world is so incredibly serious now that we need to laugh. And we need to join a journey where this is not a business book. But where that is almost like a novel. So that's, that's my approach.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, let's take, let's do, it's good segue. Let's talk about the book, The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses and Corporate Bull, I can't read the rest of it. It's kind of covered up.
Martin Lindstrom
Well, let me, let me just, let me just talk about that bull, and you can't read, but because do you know that in fact, this book has been banned by Amazon. Or let me just rephrase it. It's banned for advertising. You can still buy the book on Amazon, but you can't advertise because it spells B-U-L-L-S, right? And the algorithms on Amazon.
Michael LeBlanc
It’s the book. Did you design that to happen? Like, it’s gotta be, come on, you knew that going in?
Martin Lindstrom
No, I did not.
Michael LeBlanc
it basically is the book in a nutshell, right?
Martin Lindstrom
It is the book in a nutshell. I mean, if I would have stopped everything, I would have spelled out the entire world right? But I just thought B.S., so an algorithm in Amazon is banning the two letters combined saying B.S., and all the bulls right. But what's even more ironic is you can go to Amazon and see my book with a full spell out of the word, the whole word is there. But you can't advertise that word. I'm not sure how that works. And that is the reason why, in hindsight, I wrote the book, because this is really frustrating if you get well.
Michael LeBlanc
And the book is really all about how these bureaucratic processes get in the way of basically common sense. And what struck me as I read it, and I have this experience in, I do some advocacy and lobbying work. And often we say that when we meet with the politicians and civil servants, we articulate, unintended consequences. Like if you do this, you may not think it's going to do that. And have we reached a point in the world where things are so complex? And you give lots of examples of algorithms to do this, you just you know you just your living one in Amazon. It exists for a purpose. But the unintended consequences of that specific purpose are just, are just massive. And you know, these things they didn't mean for them to happen. But the cumulative effect is that they're happening everywhere. Is that, is that an essence of what you're trying to get to?
Martin Lindstrom
I think he's spot on. I think it's, there's a study done in Australia, which is called the Safety Clora study. And this study really talks about how up to 65% of the rules and regulations and guidelines really have been designed for the sake of the person developing them to justify his or her own job. And I've no, I tried it the other day. I was jumping on a plane and as a to,
Michael LeBlanc
A plane, what's that? So
Martin Lindstrom
It's one of these with wings,
Michael LeBlanc
Wings?
Martin Lindstrom
Yea yea yea, wings
Michael LeBlanc
What is this you speak of?
Martin Lindstrom
I don't know what it is, and TSA? You know, that is, that's my dream. So. So, I was I was sitting on this plane, and there was this announcement going on. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board on this plane, I regret to inform you that all cabin service has been completely suspended on this entire flight. If you intend to use the laboratories they have been closed down. You can however use the last laboratory in the very back of the plane. The front laboratories are loosely reserved for the cabin crew”.
So here I am, there was 52 or 51 rows on this plane, and I was literally walking down there, lining up in a line similar to TSA in the airport, right. And then I could breathe in this freshly brewed smell of toilet mixed up with a faint aroma of COVID right.
And, and then I took a seat my note to a whatever sitting at and this new format of entertainment has now been installed in planes, which I think is remarkable, how big and how quick, they've been on innovating entertainment systems. This system is actually an extension of a system you have seen in the past which was called the landing form. You know when you fill out these landing forms with all sorts of stupid questions. For example, one of them is when you land in the United States is have you been a terrorist right? Right, right, and, and of course,
Michael LeBlanc
Do you, do you self-identify as a terrorist is kind of almost,
Martin Lindstrom
Exactly, not what I actually have been threatened more than 60 times? I'll say, because when I get a massage in an airport, or somewhere, they always have these forms asking if you've been pregnant. And I always tick it just to see if anyone if, and no one really.
But so, I'm sitting there with this entertainment form, which is now a new version. And the new version is kind of interesting. At the first question is, “have you been in close proximity with anyone you don't know over the last 12 hours?” And the only thing you have to, the only thing you have to do is to look to your right, and get her name and a phone number with the excuse of a landing form, right? Yeah, and then the second question is, and this is even worse, you know, you don't have a pen anymore, because we all have smartphones except me. So, we don't wear, why should we wear a pen? So, a genius in front row, he's asking this person if he could borrow a pen. And of course, everyone else want to borrow their pen. So, when it lands at the last passenger, the question is, “have you touched anything, anyone has touched over the last couple of hours?” And you could just tick yes straightaway.
And so, this is the common sense we're talking about and that comes back to the Safety Clora, and you're articulating unintended consequences conversation that yes, this has become a life in his own. We are cluttering up our life and our behavior with forms, regulations, compliance, guidelines, all that stuff, which we don't question anymore. Because it's a bit of like, you are, if you want to kill a frog, you know the story, you can put it in
Michael LeBlanc
Into the water boiling water.
Martin Lindstrom
Yeah, yeah. And it's a little bit like it's too slowly heating. And one day, we wake up, and you say to yourself, “Am I just stupid? Yes, probably me”, particularly when you fill in these 16 digit passwords now with two uppercase, five lowercase, five symbols, six numeric things. And of course, you can't use the password you used last time because that's now being taken already. And any name or anything you can remember is of course, ridiculous. So, you write down this whole thing on a post it note and paste it next to the screen. I mean, if you blame yourself today, but the reality is, stop it. Let's change it and look at the world from outside in. A little bit like what I learned back when I was 12 years of age at Lego right?
Michael LeBlanc
Well, and one of the solutions you give to this, you know, as we kind of get to that second half is how do we get past all this? How do we resolve this cumulative effect?
But you talk about this interesting idea the chicken, I called it the chicken feed solution. I don't think you call it quite that. But basically, you know, we're, it's a metaphor, or an example, of how people are trapped in one way of working but can get out. So, tell us about that?
Martin Lindstrom
Well, absolutely. So, the experiment was done some years ago with chickens that were put into a cage. They are stocked there for half a year. And one day, they’re let out on the beautiful green grass, and the sun was shining, and the birds were singing, and the chicken were adults. And after 30 seconds, they turnaround went straight back in again. And I call that the chicken cage syndrome. And really is the idea of that we are afraid of the unknown.
And one of the things I've realized working a lot with retail over the years is that retail, in particular, is held back by the chicken cage syndrome. I mean, one of the things I always tend to say to retailers is that they're driven by the cash register ringing every night. And if it doesn't ring, you can be pretty sure the strategy you had the day before, would be thrown in the air, and you will redo everything. And so, when you want to do transformation in the retail sector, in particular, what I've learned is this, that you have to understand the psychology of, with no intent here but, about chickens. So, how do you get chickens out of a chicken cage? Well, what experiments show is that if you, if you imagine you have four cages standing around the square. Or pointing towards the square. And now where would you place this piece of corn? Most people would probably place it in the center with an equal distance to every cage, right? But the problem is that there's a heck of a distance to that center to the corn there, right. And so, the chicken would be standing then first ask itself. “Oh, my God, this is far away. My KPIs are not really supporting this long distance. I'm not really No, there's no bonus here”. And the second thing would be “if I go this distance, if I go into this unknown, and the my managers fired, look at me What a fool I'm going to be like”. So, what is the chicken doing? The chickens are going to look at the other cage over there on that square. And that chicken is looking back at you, look at me, look at you, look at me, look at you, and then it's ending up including, listen, that's not going to pick it, I'm certainly not going to take out one, are you and is looking at the third and the fourth, and no one is going to do so they go straight back into the chicken cage.
And when I use this metaphor, of course, what I'm saying is that we are like tribes, retailers in particular. Like tribes, and it's tribes in multiple layers. It is the industry by itself, which is a tribe to see how difficult it is for you to release yourself from your straight jacket, as I say.
I mean, just a circle. Let's take the circular for a second right. The circular has been around for what how many years? 50 years, 60 years. And the circular hasn't doesn't give any meaning at all. No one is reading it? Well, I knew I know that around three or 4% is reading it because I have these coupons or COVID coming up. But the reality is people are not reading them. But it still happens. And I've been trying to kill the circular for six years in one of the supermarkets in the US. And it took me six years. And here's the issue. The issue is, as all of you guys listening know that the circular is tied up with a kickback or with a vendor funding. And because the fast moving consumer goods players are CGPs, they have no other way of wrapping up or justifying a spend the marketing they tested to this advertising, which doesn't work, but at least as an ad which we can hang on the wall. So suddenly, it's locked in. And not only that, another way the supermarkets, in particular, locked in is of course, the buying functions. One of the things I realized when we worked with a mid-sized supermarket chain in the US called Lowes Foods, was that the buying functions do not support adjacencies. Meaning that if I go in and buy a steak, and then I want to have salt and pepper and spices to it, and then I want to have a sauce and then a want to have,
Michael Leblanc
It’s a different buyer, yeah, it’s a different buyer, different category.
Martin Lindstrom
Yeah, it’s a different buyer so, the whole, exactly, so the whole first floor is not mirroring what's downstairs. So, we had to reshuffle the floor to create adjacencies in it. So, it is one brick wall after another stuck in an old system which is further cemented by all these independent parties which are locking each other in. Back to the chicken cage where you have these cages and these chickens looking at each other no one actually want to take the first step. And of course, when a chicken then is taking the first step everyone is saying “well I thought so I knew”.
But so, so what I have learned from transformation of retail is to, to place the corn straight outside the chicken cage. And I call that a 90-day intervention and really builds into the mentality of retail, which is this instant reaction that retailers are incredibly fast at changing things on the floor. And it never stays that way. It stays that way if you really earn a lot of money straight away. But it rarely happens. So, it sort of kind of fade back to the default behavior. But when you do a 90-day intervention, where you find one little thing you can change, and you immediately after 90-days can implement it and see a financial return or an increase in NPS or whatever it may be, then you will realize that you're breaking down that immune system, that defense mechanism for change. And then you place another corn and another corn, another corn. And suddenly, you actually have done the transformation. And I think a lot of
Michael LeBlanc
Incremental, incremental step by step. Let me ask you this, is retailers of all formats, including grocery have gone through a nine month intervention, a nine month crisis COVID. Now COVID has done more, in some ways for the retailer to shake up the retail industry in some ways than anything we've ever seen before. This big circuit breaker of consumer behavior.
I have a podcast with Steve Dennis, another author from a great book, Remarkable Retail. And we often talk on the podcast about why it takes a crisis for retailers to change and innovate. And, and we were talking about the curbside example. You know, curbside is it's suddenly it's impossible, we can't do it. It's awkward, don't like it. And then in two weeks, it was done. And so is, you know, the kernel, has this experience, fundamentally up ended your thinking in any way that retailers and the grocery sector have been the big beneficiary of, of the collapse of restaurants and food service in the short term. So, the volumes are there. So, the volumes, you know, cover some sins, so to speak. But in many formats, the retailers I talked to, you know, they're making decisions now they never dreamed of making and taking risks. And, you know, you must experience as well, you know, this idea that it's got to be perfect. And you know, perfect being sometimes the enemy of good and innovation of you. What's your been your experience talking to your clients and as you've been observing during this COVID era?
Martin Lindstrom
Well, first of all, I think my answer to you is yes and no. Because there's no doubt about that this intervention, called 19, COVID-19, has made a lot of retailers wake up, because they have no other choice. So, what has happened, I would say is, first of all the local has come back big way. And we also have noticed that the shopping behaviors, the patterns has changed a lot. I would argue that if you go to the rural areas, you will notice that people are buying products as they did 50 years back in time.
Certainly when I went to the independent groceries around that topic and, the baking powder, whatever it is where you are using craftsmanship. So, I think what has happened is that they got their shine back. But if you look at the conventional retail store, what is it they've innovated per se? the quarter boost? For sure, no doubt about that. They’ve beaten the big players in particular, I would say. But they haven't really reinvented the model per se right? And so yes, they've certainly stepped up they were the first to clean their stores. So, they were first to get the product on the shelf ahead of everyone else. Typically, they even got better meat on the shelf, because they had better contacts to the local farmers. And so, suddenly they actually know what justifying why local retailers should be local. But what has not changed is this, when COVID-19 is over and COVID-22 is coming back, as a joke right. But when COVID-19 once for all his own variants.
Michael LeBlanc
The quiet period between the variants.
Martin Lindstrom
Whenever it perhaps is over, then what is going to happen is that some customers, some guests, as I call them, will stay with this new retail format and some won't. What we have seen is, if I look at the behaviors and the patterns is first of all people are the frequency has gone down a lot. People are buying much more volume per visits.
Michael LeBlanc
Bigger baskets and more they're you know, less browsing, right, less, in all those things.
Martin Lindstrom
Absolutely, absolutely all that stuff. But what we also have seen is that people are selecting the stores based on what is inspiring them the most. The biggest source of inspiration. This is interesting because if you go into, no intent here, but Lidl or any of those stores where they level of inspiration probably is not a home run. Then,
Michael LeBlanc
The hard, the hard discounters, as we would call them, right. They really focus on value and not experience so to speak.
Martin Lindstrom
Yea, it’s difficult to be inspired by a cardboard box. When you go into those stores, then it becomes just a click and run format as you could have done from home. But, when you go into a place where you've been staying at home for a long time, you're looking at the same wall. “Mom, what are we going to have tonight? Is it the same as yesterday and yesterday”, right? So, what is happening is that house mothers and don't forget that they're still the majority in terms of people buying stuff. And then, I would claim that they need inspiration. That's what we see from the numbers. And inspiration comes back to three things in the retail, in the supermarket in particular. It comes back to you being incredibly good at adjacencies. Combine products and skus in ways what inspires me.
Michael LeBlanc
Build the basket, right.Help build the basket.
Martin Lindstrom
It help build the basket. But there's another thing that was interesting. A lot of retailers are telling me “well we don't have enough skus, we need to increase the skus”. That's B.S.
What, the working with McDonald's many years ago, I learned that quite often people when they go into a fast-food restaurant always buy the same and the same. And it was actually the biggest problem for McDonald's for many years, because people got tired of that Big Mac or whatever. Even though they had perhaps 50 other skus. So, people go into habit. So, what using that as a metaphor here, that the idea is not for you to have many skus on the shelf. It is to combine them and inspire people to see them in a context where they become alive. Where you actually using the product. It's not just sampling I'm talking about here, but where you combine products and things in an interesting way.
And that's the second thing. So one is of course to tell the story and another one is adjacent and third one is of course to explore things and using the sensory aspect. And then once you have the sensory aspect, the storytelling the inspiration part, then it's also to show that you are not a robot when you come in here we actually care about you. So, the people part here, the culture part.
Those three factors in whatever shape or format they can take, a really the lifeblood for, for retailers in the future. They cannot compete on volume, and they cannot compete on price, online will always win. But they can compete on emotions and moments. So, whenever we have created new store concepts, which I have to say over the years has been extraordinarily successful. It came back to creating experiences which were designed around people taking as many selfies and photos as they could in the store. And really making
Michael LeBlanc
A typical animal called merchandising kind of idea. And you mentioned Lowe's, which is a fantastic grocery in the USA. I know Lowes well.
Martin Lindstrom
It well, it's, I'll give you a story about Lowes. You know when Lowe's will, I wouldn't say was near bankrupt. But I'll certainly say they were struggling a big way. And they wanted to back out of the industry. And when the owner contact me eight years ago, then what we realized was two things doing ethnographic visits in the local areas across the US. We realized one thing was is the local population had lost the local community. The churches were closing down. The local community center was closing down. Schools were closing down. So, we needed to replicate a community feeling.
And the second thing we, by the way, learned was that we have two ages. We have what I call my real age, my physical age. And then we have what are called my twin age, which is my iterates. And quite often we feel much younger in the inside.
Michael LeBlanc
Right.
Martin Lindstrom
And that was a very interesting insight because we then learned. We should design the supermarket to a younger spirit. And no one wants to be seen as being old. So, we created this crazy design. And one of the things we designed in the store, we did a lot of things but up till about 2, one was Pick & Prep. And Pick & Prep was where we said why don't we inspire people to use the fruit and vegetables in a different way. So basically, you will come up with all the fruit vegetables you bought. You will hand it over. And for $4 and 99, I think, they will cut and slice it and prepare it for you. And if you bought the huge, watermelon and you only needed half, then we fix that. And we actually had a training team in Japan. Learning from the ninjas to how to cut and get the most value out of the fruit. And we developed this concept and it was, it is still today mind blowing. I don't want to put numbers on it. But I can tell you any number you have in your mind double it. And so that was the first concept where we suddenly created an experience. We had ninjas cutting the food and it was very engaging.
Another concept we developed was crazy. And the concept was based on our work in neuroscience. I do a lot of work in neuroscience. And one of the guy called Antonio Damasio, he developed a philosophy called a somatic marker. Somatic marker is the idea of creating something so dramatic you'll never forget it. It's called an emotional bookmark in your brain. 911 is a somatic marker and a negative one, right? We all remember where we were and who you were together with, but you can't remember what you had for lunch at your birthday, right.
Michael LeBlanc
Right. So right.
Martin Lindstrom
So we said we wanted to create a somatic marker and start to make people wake up when they come inside and not see things either from their phones, or through a, but actually say, “Oh, my gosh, this is a new Lowes”. So, we decided to own chicken. And we said, this is the one thing we want to be different at. And I'll be frank with you, the chickens were not that much better, though. Perhaps 5% better, right. But I'm not, but we wanted to own it. So, we developed a chicken center are, and I'm not sure if you've seen the chicken certainly before I haven't. It is a chandelier converted into a chicken, or chicken into a chandelier. And you hang it in the ceiling. And literally all the staff will, with a ding on a bell, congregate underneath his chicken chandelier, and do the chicken dance while there's music played out in the entire speaker in the whole store. And I don't need to tell you, suddenly you have 20 staff dancing with mask, under a chicken chandelier. And of course, all guests of customers are looking at this and wondering what went wrong here.
Michael LeBlanc
Yea, stopped in their tracks wondering what's going on over there.
Martin Lindstrom
And then the phones come up and there is filming and little Pete, is only five years old, is now doing the chicken dance for the first time. And he wanted the chicken by the way. And suddenly, this just took off. And what we did was to create an experience inside a supermarket where you wanted,
Michael LeBlanc
It’s a wonderful example. It's like, it reminds me of Pike’s Place in Seattle, right. Where they throw the fish across the room, just something to break. It's like a, you know, it's like breaking the monotony of whatever you're doing. Shopping or whatever it is you're doing. And you know, it's such a fascinating discussion.
I mean, as you think about it, you kind of wrap up a little bit, advice to the retailers in terms of just, you know what, when I reflect on the book, how to, we all know these things that have been built. Structures that have been built and processed that have been built to have unintended consequences. What's the kind of three best pieces of advice to start today, to kind of beat back uncommon sense and to start this Ministry of Common Sense, as you call it. Give me three things, three pieces of advice for the retailers listening,
Martin Lindstrom
The first thing for you is to see the world from outside in, not from inside out. And by that, I mean, start to spend time with your customers and take the store managers out of your store when they have a minute. And I know they are very busy. And I know they'll come with a lot of arguments for why they shouldn't do it. Believe me, I've been there with 1000s of store managers. But once I take them into a home of consumer and we open the cabinets, and we open the pantry and we open the fridge, and we talk with the housewife, or whatever it is, and at home. We open the cookbooks. We go to the smartphone and look at Instagram. Then what we realize is another world going on there. And it's almost like the store managers have this “aha” moment. They realize why people are buying what they do and why they buy what they're not doing. I mean, you see these contrasts. So that's the first thing I'll do because then you can read this on the store on it.
The second thing I would do if I was you right now, is I will take the entire team outside the store. And I'll stay outside for seven minutes. And then I'll blindfold everyone, okay. And then I'll walk with the first guy guarding everyone else walk inside the store. Everyone holding each other on their shoulders if you're allowed to do that with the COVID rules. And as you walk inside, you will notice that there's a very different smell in that store. And that smell is not very pleasant. The first thing you're likely to smell is the ice cube machine in the entrance. Where the water hasn't been exchanged for a long time. You will pass by the fish department where, yes I know they clean the ice every day, but they forget to flush the water through the pipes in the lock. And Sundays theres rotten and the smell goes into the bakery where it's smells of rotten fish now. So, what I'm saying is you will certainly see the world through your nose.
And a retail is all about our five senses, what we see what we touch, taste sound, and what we hear. And I think the issue is a lot of retailers have forgotten about that. So, 1.1 is to go into the consumer homes. Number two is to go through your store blindfolded. And I think that was the reason I can give you a 700 piece of advice, but I'll take a random one. There's a lot of things.
Number three would be kind of fun. There's a lot of silo mentalities, in particular in headquarters of retail chains which is super dangerous because consumers don't see silos when they walk down the floor. But the silos for sure are happening out there. That's back to the adjacency we talked about. And quite often you will see that common sense, or common sense, is defined by two words. The word “common” and “sense”. And common is, guess what? To see the world from another person's point of view, which is empathy. So, empathy and common sense is very linked together. And as a topic, I'm writing a lot about in the book, because what we think is the issue is lack of common sense. But the true issues actually is the lack of empathy. So, what I would do is to infuse empathy into your retail store. And what I would do is, for example, to skip the, the Friday afternoon beer. And instead, if you have that going on now, I would replace it with a campfire.
Now, let me explain. So, all studies are showing using neuroscience that when we're sitting in front of this campfire, it is a very unique experience. It's a sense of belonging. You're saying the truth. It's the moment where you feel a sort of unique, all that stuff. And we have to know today, there's a special neurotransmitter released in our brain, giving us a sense of pride and sense of belonging.
Now, I would replicate that, in fact, we've done that in Lowes, among others, where people are replacing the afternoon beer with shutting down the light in the, in the office space. And people are sitting on in a circle. They are having a light torch light in the middle. And then they're protecting the protectors, protecting a campfire video on a screen, and you have this crackling sound coming out of the speakers. And then people tell the truth. To tell about the challenges they had last week. The frustrations they have. The stupidity is going on there. All that stuff. And the managers are sitting with them. And as you're sitting there in the dark, it becomes kind of you start to trust each other. It’s that pause we talked about early on what is happening here. And when you switch on the light, you actually made a decision. We need that, because today the world has become too rational. You're not creative when you assume. You're not pausing. But that moment is what can bring back the creative level where you jump out of that back-to-back routine, we have in retail. We don't have a time to stop and think and ask yourself what is going to happen after COVID-19? How do I recover or retain those guests coming into my store? So they're not just disappearing back to the good old days, and I've lost an opportunity.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, the book is The Ministry of Common Sense. Martin, you've been such a treat to speak with such a pile of fun. There's lots, lots more to read in the book and you really stitch it together well. It's not your first book clearly. Lots of great, an entire great library of insights. And I really wanted to thank you for joining me on The Voice of Retail sharing some of your insights and I'll put links to where people, folks can pick up the book and really cherish. It is a really handy guide to help us during COVID, post COVID and for the rest of our career. So, Martin thanks again for joining me.
Martin Lindstrom
Thank you, Michael.