One day I plan to publish a competitor to the Guide Michelin called the Guide Sutherland. It is designed to be a superlative guide to food - as we really like to eat it.
Rather than endlessly obsessing about the kind of trivial factors French people mistakenly believe to be important (such as high quality ingredients and subtle flavours) it will instead answer the really important questions about a restaurant. Questions such as "does it do take-aways?" and "is there a drive-thru lane?".
You think I am joking? In which case answer these two questions. 1) What is the best restaurant you have ever been to in your life? 2) How often have you eaten there?
My guess is your answer to Q2 is no more than 10 times. In which case ask yourself why, if this restaurant is so damn good, you have not eaten there more often than at, say, Wagamama or McDonald's.
My contention is that the ease and choice of delivery mechanism makes more difference to us (and quality of product far less difference) than we ever care to admit.
The Guide Sutherland will follow a star system similar to the Guide Michelin. One star will be awarded for the restaurant being possessed of adequate car-parking; another will be awarded if the restaurant offers a take-out or delivery service, or has a drive-thru lane. A third star will be awarded if it is open and serving food uninterruptedly between lunch and dinner (any restaurant which informs you that the chef has gone home at 2pm will be excluded automatically). Finally a bonus (fourth) star will be awarded if the food is pleasant to eat.
The system works very well. Many branches of Wagamama score four stars; my favourite Indian restaurant, with its fine food and ample parking, scores three. Club Gascon scores two stars, being next to a large NCP. Most restaurants in France score very badly.
You probably think I am being whimsical or perverse. Absolutely not. For my experience of France is simply that, while the food there tends to be extraordinarily good, the inflexible approach to delivery makes eating it a massive pain in the arse. You have to turn up at very specific times, and the rigmarole is tiresome in the extreme. After a few days on holiday there, I usually end up going to McDonalds, Quick, flunch or Buffalo Grill, partly for the convenience, and also because that's where real French people eat out anyway, so it's more authentic. The reason the French so eagerly adopt American concepts such as Starbucks or KFC is not because of the quality of the food but the flexibility of the delivery. If you doubt this, try going into a "classic" French cafe and asking for a coffee to go.
Okay, enough of this. Where am I going here? Quite simply I am repeatedly discovering something which will come as a surprise to conventional marketers, and comes as quite a surprise to me. It's this. In determining the size, breadth, nature and reaction of your target audience, the medium of engagement is often far more important that what might conventionally be called the "core product offering".
I first noticed this in my very early days as a direct marketer - where we learned that allowing people to respond to a letter by telephone or by post, rather than inisisting on one or the other, massively increased response to any mailing. Logically this seems strange: either you want an American Express card or you don't - surely the option to request one by telephone should not make much difference. And yet it does.
I noticed it the other day at McDonald's - you will have seen the same thing yourself - where there was a massive queue at the drive-thru lane while the restaurant itself is almost empty. You would think the people at the back of the in-car queue would park and go inside and yet, either for reasons of channel-choice or sheer immobility, they don't.
Let's look at a few other surprises. How many McKinseyites routinely go to flea-markets or car-boot sales? Very few, I think it's fair to assert. And yet the employees of large consulting firms are massive users of eBay. Once again, the medium is the product.
A similar encroachment into up-market territory happened as soon as low-cost airlines pioneered online booking. They did this to reduce costs, not to increase the customer base; to their surprise the online offer massively destigmatised low-cost travel for high-earning people. There was nothing inherently downmarket about low-cost travel - it was the business of hanging on a telephone for hours which was the problem.
We found a similar thing with charitable donations. "Young people don't give to charity" was the conventional wisdom. And they don't - by post. They do by text.
First Direct is yet another case of a great success being pioneered on the back of the mode of delivery, rather than the intrinsic merits of the product. DirectLine is another. Argos is a fabulous pioneer of multi-channel delivery; my 77-year-old father is a great devotee of "Ring & Reserve" and "Click & Collect".
I have no beef with Royal Mail whatoever. Despite constant whinges from the press, the actual product offer is really quite good. What is atrocious is not Royal Mail but the Post Office, who are woefully inflexible (indeed almost French) in the limited means they offer of sending a package. If just a few vending machines sold postal items or accepted items for delivery, or if just a few Post Offices were open on Saturday afternoons, I would be content. (In their defence, you can now pay and print your postage online, which would be a start, had the local receiving office not shut at noon.)
Many state-run businesses are the same. Endlessly agonising about the supposed product while being woefully inflexible about how it it delivered. You can get a pizza to your home at 11pm when you're well, but try getting a doctor when you're ill. I am amazed that suspicions concerning Dr Harold Shipman were not aroused several years earlier, when it became apparent he was the only GP in Britain still prepared to make house-calls.
The railways are similar in this respect. Once you're on a train, they're really quite good. But the barriers (literal and figurative) you must negotiate in order to get on that train are truly awful.
But we can, for once, point to a few notable successes here. Illogically I have come to accept the congestion charge largely because - by text message - it is at least easy to pay. I was actively impressed by the ease of rewewing my tax-discs online, and of confirming my presence on the electoral roll. I was marginally less grumpy about my tax demand when I found I could pay it online. I am also a noticeably less fervent avoider of public transport since the introduction of Oyster Pay as you Go.
It always reminds me of the comments of a colleague in Singapore, describing some spectacular example of government efficiency. "When they're this good," she said, "You almost don't mind that you don't get to vote for them."
So my tip for the day is this. Spend just as much time working on how you can reduce consumer transaction costs as you do trying to reduce manufacturing costs.
Could you get young people to save for a pension - if they could choose the monthly amount by SMS? Could you get people to travel more by train if it were possible to reserve a parking space?
Maybe you only need the Hard Sell because your product isn't easy to buy. People love easy more than they love cheap. As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl, "People don't do what they say they believe, they do what's convenient and then they repent."
