Hype

BBC Sounds. Music, radio. This is the podcast version of the program. It has some extra content in it that we didn't have room for in the radio broadcast. I hope you enjoy.

Hello, welcome to the programme. Now, as we record this, we're in the middle of an election campaign in which several political parties Are trying desperately hard to be noticed and to win over our support. In pursuit of these goals, they may exaggerate a bit from time to time, perhaps overstate their case even. But we're not here to talk about politics. It just gives us an excuse to focus on marketing and in particular our subject today.

Hype, the word, sometimes connected with hyperbole, and sometimes a 20th century American slang word for a con man, a hyper. Today I think it's more used to mean excitement, pumped-up excitement about a product, whether that product is a film or a car, a fashion product, or maybe even a share that you can buy in a company. Now, I have wanted to talk about this for some time, since someone on social media posted a long thread about something which I had noticed.

the confusing way that dishwasher tablets are branded on supermarket shelves by Finish, the company. So to name but three versions of their tablets that I have seen next to each other on a supermarket shelf, you have Quantum all in one. Ultimate all in one and ultimate plus all in one. Now I guess that ultimate plus comes above ultimate, but I really have no idea whether ultimate is meant to come above or below quantum.

Well hype can come in many forms. Overstatement, exaggeration, attention seeking. Manufactured scarcity. And we're gonna look at how these are made organically, perhaps even by accident, and when things can go wrong. And I've three guests to help me. Let's meet them. And first up, Ellis Gilbert is Founder of the streetwear fashion brand Soho Yacht Club. And I think you're no longer really involved with Soho Yacht Club, but just tell us what it is.

It was just a streetwear brand that I started up with a friend and it kind of just took off locally using a lot of hypes. What do you mean when you say hi? Like having limited stock and then also just different kind of marketing campaigns. So how did people find out? Originally the first drop we'd done is when I was working in a school during COVID and we was actually raising money to get uh School.

breakfast so like when kids had to come in early'cause parents were working or doing something else. And so people say, Oh, this is something interesting. Young people around here aren't really doing stuff like this, so we're gonna get behind it and initially I thought we were gonna sell sort of like twenty or thirty T shirts and it ended up being about four hundred. Right. And then I was like, Oh, this actually has potential to be something.

So what's interesting about listening to you is you use this word drop and I guess that is itself a word that is about

Hyping stuff. It's that this is the latest release and it's it's it's I think people in the past used to release full collections and now a lot of people do it drop by drop so they might have one T shirt and they'll be like, Okay, we're gonna do a drop on Friday, post picture on Wednesday, first people to kind of sign up for the email, get an email and then you can buy it and then that's the drop done. And presumably the product is not particularly expensive to make.

But you didn't um so I started the company with me and my friend, we both put in I think it's fifty pounds. Um and to make T shirts and screen print it might work out to be about ten pounds. But then the more sort of exciting products I'd say, so making jackets, things that are waterproof, I'm big into sports, so making things that are actually durable.

I didn't want to make it too expensive'cause when I was younger I couldn't always afford like the super luxury brands or, you know, some things like Nike football boots and things like that. So I wanted it to look nice but also have a price tag that people in the lower income bracket could still afford. Yeah. Okay. And then you've started another venture, Talk Nice Studios. So just tell us what that is and and whether that has hype. It's more sort of consulting.

I think it's actually probably got more hype now than Soho Yacht Club just because a lot of people don't know what it is. I've sold clothes on the page, I've posted pictures of events that I've done, so I've worked with numerous artists, musicians, and then I'm also doing insights for some of the bigger sportswear brands around the world.

So it can range from doing insight for an hour, maybe about football, to helping someone m make a full brand identity, helping them find graphic designers, photographers And sometimes also just doing talks in terms of giving people advice on how I got into the industry and stuff. Before we move on, I do want to ask you about the name Soho Yacht Club. Yeah. There's no yacht club, presumably. No. Is it Soho New York, Soho London?

Solo London. I when I was younger I used to really want to be a footballer. and um didn't quite work out and I was chilling at home and my mum was like, You can't stay at home all day doing nothing, you have to go and get a job So I was like, All right, where's the coolest place in London?

Where there's loads of good food and stuff and I went to Soho and I had I think three C Vs with me and I went into a shop and I was like, listen ママ I need a job so if I don't go home with one today I'm gonna be in trouble and just start had a laugh and a joke with one of the managers and I got a job in Soho and I just absolutely fell in love with the area and um one Soho. It was the br part of the uh the the the branding. Very aspirational.

Um it was just like a little bit of a play because there's obviously nowhere to fit a yacht in so.

Well that that was very much in my mind as I uh thought about the branding. All right, Ellis, thanks. Now and my next guest, familiar voice to regular listeners of the bottom line, Rory Sutherland, vice chair of the branding agency, Ogil V UK. Okay, Rory, before anything else. I want you to explain what finish are doing by having on one shelf multiple brands of hyperbole driven dishwasher tablets.

There are several reasons for this, in fact. One of which is very simply what economists would call price discrimination, where some people are principally interested in low prices, some people are overwhelmingly interested in quality. I probably fall into the category of people who are slightly dishwasher obsessed. And will almost go for the most expensive variant, almost just out of a kind of principle.

So in other words, what you do is you capture more of the consumer's available spend. I mean the more expensive variants are actually functionally better, but the margins are considerably higher. It enables you actually with the very high priced variants to actually sell them at fifty percent off and still make a profit. So you can promote very, very successfully if you want to do that.

The other thing is that the presence of the high priced variants makes the ordinary variants seem comparatively reasonably priced. And at the time disposable nappies were considered egregiously expensive and what the actual company did is they launched a very expensive disposable nappy brand. With the full intention of getting rid of that brand over time. They launched that brand simply to make another brand, which they launched later, seem reasonably priced by comparison.

Now I buy all of that. What I don't get about the Finnish dishwasher tablets is they're all almost claiming to be the expensive one, the ultimate, the ultimate plus and the quantum. They're all kind of hyped up and you just don't know whether quantum is above ultra or ultra. They don't say here's the bargain one and here's the medium one and here's the top one. It is all just ultra quantum, all in one, five in one power, super.

I th I think they've kind of run out of superlatives. It's a bit like job title inflation in the advertising industry where director is about the point at which you start, you know. I guess they've done their job because we're talking about it. Yeah, yeah. And I suppose it's a very interesting thing. I we it's known in behavioral science as choice architecture, and people probably navigate using price.

Based on that fairly simple assumption that the more expensive it is per unit, then the better it's gonna be. Although comparison can be difficult because of course they all come in different size packages as well. Now, give me an example. What what would be a a a kind of archetypal hyped product for you, Rory? There are various categories where it's enormous. I mean, th the restaurant scene. You occasionally get a massive PR blitz for a particular restaurant.

Obviously I suppose women's fashion would be an extreme case where you get extreme hype. Can I make a tough accusation which is a lot of accusations will be pointed at say advertising and marketing for hyping things? But I would argue that the news media are just as guilty of this. Absolutely. But in other words, the story is as big as you make it. There's a famous line in Citizen Kane, if I make the headline big enough, it'll make the story bigger.

And you know, what seems to happen more and more now, and partly digital media have accelerated this, is you just get these feedback loops where it it's important because it's important Because everyone's People are famous because they're famous. Yeah. And so m I think these feedback loops, because of the speed of things like the news cycle, are just more prevalent than they used to be.

Feedback loops, really important. Look, let me introduce uh my third guest, Katherine Jansen Boyd, reader in psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising in consumer behaviour. Catherine, give me examples of hype that you you've noticed or thought think are particularly interesting.

I think maybe building a bit on what Rory was saying, because it's actually quite an interesting point. And whilst there wasn't hype for a brand, we can see how human behavior and psyche actually works really well. And this was during the pandemic. mewn gwirionedd wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i

All of a sudden, even though we weren't actually running low on petrol, everybody started queuing for petrol. And there is an element of a herd effect when it comes to hype and it is often kind of Reinforced by the media. There is no doubt about that. And we always assume that other people know something that we don't. So if we see a very long line of people queuing, we assume that they're doing the right thing effectively. So we will then join the queue.

And when the media keeps pointing this out, it escalates and escalates and escalates, which is exactly what happened during the pandemic and we then had no petrol. And this is quite an important element of human behaviour because we compare ourselves to others all the time. And the more we compare to others, the more we will want to do what they are actually doing.

That's so so interesting. So that gets you into the feedback loops that uh that Rory's been talking about. But I what I find interesting is you don't have to believe that other people know more than you. You only have to believe maybe they know more than I do, and then you're you're thinking I don't want to be the sucker here who who is left out or who is

So there's very much a fear of missing out as well. If we think that someone is buying something and they're very happy with this item in particular, i.e. they will put it on Instagram, them photographing with a massive smile saying, I got my new comfortable trainers that I love over everything in this world

then of course people will think I really need to go and buy these trainers because this person knows that they're good. I am now worried about missing out on an opportunity that potentially could lead to happiness. Because we're always thinking that the next purchase item is gonna make us happy, right or wrong, but that's what people tend to believe.

You could argue that it's the collision of two human biases with a multiplicative effect, which is social proof combined with scarcity. So the drink prime, of course, if you remember the It was an extraordinary case of people going practically insane precisely because the overwhelming story was how this was difficult to get hold of. Tell us about the the case, when it was, what the drink was, just Well I I was only a bystander in this. I think

can help I have two kids. We queued for days. So Prime was effectively a or still is done by two quite well known YouTubers. So they are quite big celebrities in their own right. and had a big children's following and teenage following. And they released this drink, energy drink called Prime. And they they launched very small numbers at every time.

the global phenomena went a little bit crazy in the people bought ten of them, sold them on for twenty five pounds. Yeah. Twenty five pounds a bottle, sometimes more. I mean my my youngest son who is twelve basically went, Mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy, it's really cheap on Amazon for the moment. It's only twenty quid per bottle and I'm like, darling, it's meant to cost two pounds fifty.

So it really took off and interestingly his particular year group, so this is uh now a couple of years ago, they all got the app. There was an app for this so you could track where the deliveries happened. So you could run to the shop and try to be first in line. People were fighting over these bottles and schools in the UK actually banned them from coming into school because at school kids came in with one bottle, flogged it to their friends for 40, 50 quid. I mean it was insane.

Okay, well look I want to draw a distinction. So let's take a product which I think is at the moment enjoying let's call it hype, Azempic, Wigovi, these semiglutide weight loss drugs. Much written about in newspapers and others about Wonder Drug, and they do seem to have a massive effect on appetite and weight. Now, is that Hype that it's enjoying.

It's very different to the prime example, isn't it? Where the the drink has been lifted by its bootstraps into a sort of area of sails that is just completely outside. Well, I actually think what is quite interesting here and what you're talking about is also very much to do with insecurities and self-esteem. So we know that people who lack self-esteem tend to be more prone to be fearful of missing out. they are also more likely to take guidance from things like price.

So if it's a higher price, they're more likely to think it's a better product. And this is also quite interesting because this kind of fits in with um, you know, the wonder drug kind of thing, you lose weight. because that means people who are quite insecure about the weight Whether they need it or not doesn't matter. They will instantaneously run to it.

Prime is actually another example here because it was particularly geared towards younger audiences. Younger people tend to lack self-esteem. They will want to be like everybody else to show that they're cool, that they can afford it. And the fashion in this Yeah. very much is using that throughout most of its marketing. It's about you need to look different, you need to be a different person, which means we are really targeting insecurity and self.

It's interesting. I I need to give you a right of reply on that, Ellison. I think for a lot of younger people now it's a sense of belonging. So some products become hype because the company is obviously engineered and they've paid people to do marketing but Others people wear it and they feel comfortable in it and other people see that and they want to be like them. So people might want to dress a certain way to try and belong to something.

But look, I just want to know the difference between ordinary marketing and hype, because obviously marketing is going to be saying nice things about the product, I imagine. Yeah, pretty much. But it is also very much what Ellis was started talking about. It's the numbers. You're controlling how many people can get.

If you do it physically in real life, it will be small deliveries to shops. So people do need to be there early and queue. If it's online, there will be messaging stating, you know, only three left or it's already in sixty-two people's baskets, buy it now or you're missing out, that sort of thing. So you can hype it in different ways. But this sort of accessibility is very much key when we're talking about genuinely hyped products.

because if everybody could go out and buy it instantaneously, people would lose interest because it's not there's no challenge. By the way, a fascinating discovery from online female fashion retail is that it's very potent saying two thousand people are looking at this item. If you say five hundred people have already bought this, it actually depresses demand.

So you want something effectively that lots of people want but not many people have. Once you suggest that the the dress or whatever it may be is going to be fairly commonplace, people actually lose interest. I think it depends on like the item as well in terms of like if it's to dress up or you're going out on a Friday night you don't want to have the same dress as everyone, but if you're going for a run, you want the shoe that everyone's wearing'cause it must be comfortable.

So practicality and how it looks is two very different things. This has just hit the really interesting the really interesting paradox of marketing is there are two ways you can sell things. Either lots of people have one of these, so it must be good, or not many people have one of these, so it must be good.

Look, we're hitting all sorts of really fascinating things. I want to bring in a clip, if I may, because uh we've heard about how it works and how it can work well. There are also pitfalls, and I just want to share with you a short case study of a small business that's generated more hype than it expected and how it copes. My name is Sean Evans. I am the co-founder of a small bakery called Chatsworth Bakehouse in South London and I own it with my partner, Tom Matthews.

We started our business kind of off the back of Tom closing his restaurant pop-up when COVID hit and we went home with loads of produce. and didn't want to just chuck it in the bin. So we pivoted really quickly and just got on a WhatsApp group that was on our road and we started baking and cooking bits up for the neighbourhood, anyone who couldn't get their hand on stuff. And then we started getting real significant orders. We did that for six months.

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the name of a sandwich. We'd come up with like a name, we'd make a graphic for it and then maybe add some music, do whatever to it. On Instagram we would set a timer on a Sunday. You could add it to your phone. and then on a Monday you would get a reminder that the sandwich would go live and you would have the opportunity to send us a DM and pre order your lunch. And they sell in about three minutes. And it's been like that for three years.

So the Chatsworth bake house with its sandwich of the week drop. Um now social media has plenty of stories of people travelling from across the country specifically to get their hands on one of the two hundred odd sandwiches the bakery drops each week. A lease on a a second shop has been signed to cope with the demand. Now Sean does take credit for some of the hype at Chatsworth Bake. Her day job is in marketing after all, but she admits the extent of it has caught her off guard.

I think it's just really important that we continue to get more customers in and so spread the word a little bit, but also try and honour the people that really helped us start start this, the customers that really got it off the ground. So we know we're in a bit of a sticky situation now where we aren't able to service people and people are obviously not able to get hold of a sandwich. If you've been trying for six months to order one sandwich for lunch, it kinda gets a bit silly.

We have really long queues as well, up to two hours long. And one of the things that I hope has worked is is hiring someone to manage that queue, walk that queue, give people a taster of what we're we're doing so we bring out tasters so people can try the product.

Something else we've need to come to terms with is that people have phones, they're gonna use them, they're gonna post content whether you like it or not. So yeah, seeing the amount of content that is posted and and something you have no control over and just getting used to that really.

So Sean Evans from Chatsworth Bakehouse dealing with I suppose you might say the uh the downsides of success. Ellis, I don't know, her experience sounds not massively dissimilar to your Soho Yacht Club experience. Did you have frustrated customers? Uh Yeah, I still do. I have a friend that he owns a brand and he really thrives off of people posting and things like that'cause he then interacts with them, which builds more hype.

So he might say, Oh well, you know, you chose to come up and queue, you know what you're waiting for, but the product is worth it, so da da da and then there'll be a little bit more back and forth and You know, a bit like Marmite, some people hate it, some people love it, but the people that love it really then dial in and double down on the brand. Ellis, resellers, is it a problem when you're You're trying to create scarcity that other people are buying it and then reselling.

And so then perhaps making a profit that you could be making. Personally I think that the resale market is super interesting and important for growth of a business because someone's already bought it so you have made your money and then it's going to another market so it might be Somewhere your company's not shipping at the time. And also the marketplace, for instance, Supreme in around two thousand and fourteen, two thousand and fifteen had a massive resale market in China.

It's a streetwear brand before they had a shop there. So they was then getting to places where they weren't yet and they was looking at it and almost using it as insights to say, Okay, well clearly if they're selling a T shirt for that was retailing at thirty pounds for two hundred pounds, that's a market that we need to be in. Other people don't like it simply because people are profiting off of something that shouldn't be that expensive and exploiting others.

But I suppose it adds to the hype, the fact because it's not a good thing. Yeah. The consumers know that there are resellers and that tells them that this is a And or also a lot of the time it would be used if I was releasing less T shirts and then there was a big resell value, I could say, Okay, well now I can broaden how much I'm making and still sell out. So I don't have to be scared of making a hundred t shirts. I can make two hundred because I can see a hundred for sale.

In the French luxury goods market and also apparently with Ferrari. You can only buy the limited edition stuff that's resellable if you've proven you've spent a lot of money on things that don't have a resale value. Okay. So um I had a colleague once whose wife was kind of a dealer in very high end handbags. And he was incredibly well dressed because she would go into one of these kind of super luxury stores in Paris or Milan and just buy him three suits.

The purpose of buying the suits wasn't because she desperately cared for him, although I think she did. It was simply that you establish your bona fides as a customer of Yeah. Everyday things, and then they'll allow you into the back room to look at the kind of limited edition Kelly bags or whatever it might be. Rolex as well. Rolex as well. They won't sell you the effectively the resellable stuff until you've actually effectively bought quite a lot of the mainstream stuff. So they manage it.

Ellis is to some extent using resale as a a for source of market intelligence, w what's going on and adds to I I do know some people that so once you get your confirmation email, if you try to resell before you have the product, they cancel the order because they don't believe in it. I personally I think it's free game. If that's something that you're into and that's how you're making a living, fair play to you.

There is a risk. I mean one bit of advice I'd give where possible is get famous slow. And of course by starting local you have that advantage. You have some sort of organic form of growth. But also if you disproportionately appeal to people who are effectively trend chasers, what may happen is you alienate those people who would otherwise be regular, reliable customers of yours over time.

Who don't want to queue for two hours. It was always I think the point of one economist that actually in many ways the best customers, although marketers always chase the The best customers for a product are relatively uh older, relatively less price-sensitive, regular buyers with the. They're not gonna just change.

A ex an example of this was funnily enough a friend of mine who used to travel down to the Kent coast and regularly used to stop off to have lunch at a pub, and then the pub acquired a Michelin star. And effectively he could only get into the pub for lunch about one time in four, so he stopped going at all. I think a lot of people love a underdog story. Yeah. And so when they're watching the come up, they don't mind queuing for a little bit, but when it gets to the point where they're like

Well, you've clearly making a lot of money now so you could maybe get a bigger kitchen or you know apply yourself in in different ways. They're like, Oh, we're not really enjoying it as much. And actually you've got it exactly because I always say the best metric isn't actually sales growth, it's repeat purchase. If you have a really reliable level of repeat purchase, in other words your customers come back, that's the ultimate proof that you're onto something enduring.

Y selling to lots of people once may actually give you a wonderful sales curve. Actually you're heading for a clip. Really while you're at the Exactly. Private equity will flood in at that point. Because you're then forced to grow at a pace which actually destroys the Now my daughter this is not me, this is my daughter, but I don't think it's a bad observation. When she said that Five guys kind of works as a proposition. The burger.

The burger chain. If they're in London. Yeah, it it works if you're in Bristol, Manchester, it probably works if you're in Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells, Borderline. Cambridge. No no Cambridge is just about, I think, significant enough and a tourist venue as well. Very significant.

Then you Fenlanders can probably deserve your own five guys. When one opens in Seven Oaks, you've probably jumped the shark in terms of expansion. So one of the problems you can have is you get one of these exaggerated stock market valuations to justify that. Right. and you basically kill the golden goose. And that's why you get a cycle of yeah, businesses booming and busting.

Happened um before with a brand called Stussy. Yeah. So it was huge and then it was growing and growing and growing and then they started doing wholesale to everyone. People sort of turned around and was like, Oh, it's actually everywhere. It's diluted. And then they closed all wholesale, so stopped selling to everyone. And then started building it again and it just boomed.

But Catherine, I'm I'm amazed in this phenomenon of if you like manufactured cues. So this is nightclubs I guess are famous for holding people outside so that you see the cue. Sometimes it's totally fake and there's nobody inside. Talk me through that, Catherine,'cause I I think as a consumer I actually, if I'm honest, would rather not have to queue. And yet we see that people are happy to join a queue.

sort of depends on the circumstances a a little bit. So, you know, um queuing for a nightclub and queuing for a sandwich are two quite different things in all fairness. Whilst you know they m might find it fun to cue for a sandwich for a while, that will quite quickly wear off. But if the nightclub is seen as quite desirable and people think that is where all the trendy kind of perfect people go, then you want to be part of that. Securing just increases the anticipation of getting in.

So we know that a certain amount of waiting is good for people because it kind of makes them more excited, they makes them want it more. Instantaneous gratification can be quite a letter. So cues work quite well from that point of view. Interesting. And the fact that we're seeing other people standing there means we are not entirely on our own thinking we're back to the petrol pandemic scenario almost.

You know, we're not entirely on our own thinking this is desirable, we want to get in. So it confirms if there was no queue, we would probably think, well, hang on a minute, why should I stand and wait outside until me l they let me in if no one else is here? Clearly it's not a desirable place to go. But what we get out of all of this, Rory, is consumer complicity in the hype, isn't it? It is that the consumer

The consumer enjoys the hype. I mean you have to say they're not really being exploited or manipulated. You know, Ellis is not exploiting his consumers. He's creating this thing which they are enjoying being a part of the process in. I I mean I mean I would argue that female fashion is fascinating because it's a huge mixture of self expression, genuine enjoyment and obligation.

I mean it always strikes me as unfair to my daughters that you can't opt out of the rules around cosmetics and dress to the same extent that men can. And so it's i it's complicated, I think, in that sense. I think there's something innate about this, though to some extent, which is that if you think about it, both social proof, social copy In an evolutionary sense, is completely rapid.

If we had to learn everything from first principles rather than from copying other people, we'd always have to learn from our mistakes. And some of those mistakes would prove fatal. So I think a large part of this is kind of in our hardware and for good and ill, by the way. I'm I work in advertising but I'm completely happy to acknowledge that some of these things lead to, you know, effectively forms of collective insanity.

Well, I'm I'm not so sure I agree with Rory about men being able to opt out though. I think that was Women definitely I do agree with are under more pressure. But I think with younger generation of men we're seeing something slightly different happening. Just looking at twelve, thirteen, fourteen year olds. I mean virtually everybody I look at these days have an identical haircut. That is not Uh coincidence. Adapt into what's going on I think from a lot younger age.

I feel like there's also a big shift down social media and a lot of younger people now that they don't necessarily want hype and they want good product and somewhere that they can reside rather than it being chasing trends. That's interesting. Build relationships. You think maybe hype is less uh is is going out of fashion. Yeah.

quite a open person. I try to communicate with as many people that reach out to me as possible and a lot of people are asking me about how to build lasting relationships now rather than how to how do I sell out a product or how do I build this as quick as possible. They want something that feels good and something that can last and something that they can build with their friends and have a bit more of a legacy rather than a quick butt

It's fascinating. We need to draw a close to this conversation. Let me thank my guests. Ellis Gilbert, formerly of Soho Yacht Club, now at Talk Nice Studios, Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy UK, and Catherine Janssen Boyd from Anglia Ruskin University. You also heard from Sean Evans. at Chatsworth Bakehouse. Thanks to them. Thank you for listening, and please keep sending us your thoughts on the show and suggestions for future episodes. The email is bottom line at bbc.co.uk.

We'll be back next week. We'll be discussing burnout. Is it on the rise? How can it be avoided? Do join us then. The podcast was produced by Simon Tulet and Drew Heinmann. It was presented by me, Evan Davis, and is a BBC Longform audio production for Radio 4. If your podcast provider allows it, we'd be really grateful for a rating or a review. It really does help spread the word about the show. Can you just tell me who he is? No. Has he got any distinguishing features? He's anonymous.

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