That's why mum's gone to Finland.

The first thing you learn when you have travelled a bit is that there is absolutely no correlation between how far you travel and how much you learn.

One of the reasons I slightly wince at the middle-class gap year habit is that it is a product of bourgeois distance snobbery. If you are asked at a dinner party "what's young Jolyon up to these days?" it's no good replying that he's working the drive-thru lane at the local Burger King - people will think he's a bit of a loser. But if you reply "Oh, he's travelling" this is automatically an acceptable answer  - even though the wretched Jolyon is at that very moment lying on the floor stoned with three English schoolfriends after a night-shift at a Hungry Joe's outside Cairns  - where he will learn no more than he would have done back home.

 Travel narrows the mind.

If you ever want a really interesting trip, don't bother with Asia. A couple of hours on a plane to Finland is all you need. And it's especially healthy for right-wing people like me because, rather to my discomfort, I find I absolutely love all the Nordic egalitarian paradises. I imagine my resulting confusion must be rather similar to that experienced by a lifelong socialist on finding he really likes Las Vegas).

I'll be writing about Finland more in coming months I hope. But for now let me leave you with just two interesting facts. 1) Traffic fines in Finland are calculated as a percentage of your annual salary. So it has been rumoured that Mikka Hakkinen was recently fined a few hundred thousand Euros for a minor road traffic infringement. 2) In Finland it is rather easy to calculate these fines because...... wait for it..... your salary is a matter of public record.

Yep, you got it. In fact it's even better than that. If you want to know a colleague's annual salary, there's no need to go along to the local post office and fill in a form. No, you just send a text to a short code containing the person's name and address and, a few minutes later, back comes their full annual salary. My Ogilvy colleague out there tells me this realy helps cut down on bullshitting at job interviews. "Now what did you say you were on at Leo Burnett, again.....?"

What is fascinating is the extent to which an idea of privacy varies so greatly from one society to another. Dutch people won't even install downstairs curtains in their homes - as "it seems somehow furtive." Whereas five miles across the border, Germans refuse to fill in census forms.

You can see how much this attitude to privacy varies here in an excellent report by IBM's Institute for Business Value. And it matters to all of us because of what you'll read here in a super Prospect article by the wonderful Peter Bazalgette, and also at the subsequent blog discussion, including a post by me.

In short, what Peter says is something we all know but have never realy fessed up to. Which is that much of the content on the internet is not really paid for in "attention dollars" but in "prrvacy dollars". The way we pay for our Youtube clips or our gmail or whatever is not only with our time, but in the information we (knowingly or not) allow to be collected about us. A country with a particularly paranoid populace (a majority of Germans browse with cookies turned off, for instance*) is therefore reducing the income that can be derived from online content in that market.

This issue may be one people simply choose to ignore. But the scandal aroused by Phorm (not always proportionate, I think) suggests it is one that won't go away.

I also suspect that there is an answer here in the shape of trusted infomediaries. One of the reasons the Finns are so relaxed about marketing data is that it is held by the (trusted) government, and the money generated by it benefits them in the shape of lower taxes. I have a hunch that some highly trusted brands (charities, the Post Office?) may be able to play a role here as guardians of personal data. The name for this kind of body - the infomediary - has been around for about ten years. But it is a concept strangely slow in becoming real.  

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 * German aversion to cookies may be a product of their obsession with privacy, or just as likely may be a by-product of their appetite for bizarre deviant pornography. I was once staying in Germany and saw a pornographic film (on a free-to-air channel, I add) which started with a bunch of middle-aged couples in walking clothes and stout boots climbing up a hill. This hill-walking went on for about twenty minutes, at which point they suddenly disrobed and engaged in bizarre sexual practices for about ten minutes more.  Goretex fetishism, I suppose. Truly the strangest thing I have ever seen.

Who makes the better planners - Part 2......

Following the superb IPA debate - "Who makes the better planners - planners or creatives?" between Dave Trott and David Golding, it occurs to me that there is a parallel debate you could host in the music industry.

It would be called "Who makes the better songwriters - singers or songwriters?"

Think about it. To any rational observer, the act of singing and the act of songwriting are two wholly distinct specialisms. Simple division of labour theory would suggest that the two functions would be best performed by entirely different people - you would have expert musicians writing the songs, and attractive, coordinated people with good voices to sing them.

And, indeed, quite often this is how it works. Classical music sometimes operated this way - although not always. Bach was a tip-top organist and Liszt a first-rate pianist, for example.

And quite often popular music works this way. Elvis didn't write all that much of his own material, for example; nor does Tom Jones. Nor do many manufactured bands such as Girls Aloud.

Yet (ABBA, the Beatles, Hank Williams, The Beach Boys, U2, Coldplay....add your own 100 names here) it is astonishing how often the greatest and most successful songwriters are singer-songwriters. Even when their qualifications as singers (the velvet voice of Bob Dylan, anyone?) are not all that evident.

One explanation for this comes in the recent book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, My reading of this suggests that creativity is not for the most part a specialism in itself, but is rather the product of frequent and repeated execution. In other words if you want to write a good song, don't start by taking a songwriting course - do a lot of singing instead.

Yet we still adhere to an agency process which attempts to separate these two things - to treat them as though they were sequential and independent, rather than being inextricably intertwined. A brief spends two weeks in the song-writing department before being handed over to some singers.

There is a precedent for this approach in the music business, of course. The genius founder of Motown, Berry Gordy (below, left), bizarrely the sixth cousin of Elvis Presley, was perhaps responsible for more musical creativity than anyone else in the last century, a feat he achieved by modelling his business on Detroit car production lines. As you would expect, bands, recording studions, compositions, were all deployed with spectacular efficiency according to Taylorist principles, division of labour and economies of scale. And it worked.

Clearly you can't dismiss process in creative industries quite as easily as all that.

But this adherenece to process did have its downside. Gordy wouldn't allow anyone to perform dual functions, insisting that songwriters wrote the songs and singers simply sang them. Which is why a frustrated young singer left the label in 1975 in protest at not being allowed to write his own material. 

Michael Jackson wrote Thriller in 1982.

Whose idea was this?

To aficionados of the shopping trolley, this type is apparently known as "the Japanese style" presumably because it originated in Japan. I suppose I should ring someone at WPP to check - even though technically Wire and Plastic Products only makes baskets, not trolleys.

The Japanese model can be distinguished from the vast full-depth trolley model popular with survivalists and Catholic families in that the deck is much higher up and there is a large area of wasted space beneath. Its capacity is perhaps a third that of a large trolley, but several times that of a basket.

Now to a purely rational man this kind of trolley serves little purpose. What is the point of something which takes up just as much floor-space as a larger trolley but which only offers a fraction of the load-carrying capacity?

I think the answer lies in an couple of anomalies of human behaviour.

For one thing, people entering supermarkets are probably prone to underestimate how much they will buy, or at least enter the store intending to buy very little, but end up tempted to buy more. When confronted with the choice of a basket and an insanely large trolley, many people may end up picking a basket only to find themselves overburdened with heavy shopping half-way round the store, hence buying much less than they might have done with a smaller trolley. The medium-sized trolley seems less disproportionate to moderate shoppers as they enter the store, and hence may discourage the use of baskets.

But the main reason is, I suspect, to do with what behaviourists call choice anchoring - the idea that the choices we make are often illogically distorted by the range on offer. One example of this is the following conversation supposedly overheard in an American restaurant.

"What entrees do you have?"

"We have fish or chicken."

"I'll have the fish"

"Oh, sir, and I forgot: we also have beef."

"In which case I'll have the chicken."

The point here is that, even though the beef was never an option, its presence on the menu served to make the chicken seem a relatively healthier option.

The medium-sized trolleys hence probably work in tandem with the large trolleys to implicitly discourage the use of baskets. (It would be wonderful to try a few experiments here - perhaps with outsized baskets.)

But my question here is really that at the top of my article. Who came up with this discovery? Behavioural insights such as this might well have been worth a few hundred million pounds to any retailer over the last ten years, and yet I have never heard of anyone much being briefed or paid to look for them.  

We spend almost all out time attempting to change behaviour through overt persuasion - while paying no attention to influencing the other, barely conscious ways in which people behave.

In the same way, far too little time is spent understanding and improving customer experience. Seventy-five percent of the US economy is now in services, and yet the focus of advertising has changed little from the time when it was used mostly to sell products.

One hope of mine is that a recession may bring new focus on these things - not least because they are sometimes fantastically cheap. You may find a few welcome suggestions here at www.customerfutures.com/downeconomypublication .

Always check your daughter's homework

This is a wonderful picture which I found here.

The wonderful irony of the girl's drawing is that her mother does not, as you may have reasonably assumed, work at Spearmint Rhino - but at B&Q. The picture is, in fact, a child's depiction of her mother selling an unfeasibly large shovel to a crowd of happy customers. Phew!

But there is a lesson to be learned here. A lesson which perhaps some retailers can learn from Spearmint Rhino. And which agencies can learn from both.

It's about the healthy questioning of what you might call pure P&L capitalism. The reductionist idea that the value created by any organisation can be best understood by ever-greater dissection of its balance sheet.

At the recent Media Festival in Manchester (of which more tomorrow) I was lucky enough to meet Will Page, Chief Economist at the MCPS-PRS Alliance and recent author of a fascinating article questioning some (if not all) of Chris Anderson's assumptions about The Long Tail. One of his earlier projects had been an enquiry into the Scottish Pole Dancing industry (and, whatever your ethical stance on the matter, you have to agree that Scottish Pole Dancing is a good deal more interesting than any other kind of Scottish Dancing).

The business model is apparently complicated. In earlier such businesses, massive drink mark-ups (eg £100 for a bottle of cider masquerading as Champagne) would pay for free naked girls. With the new pole-dancing model, I am told, the girls actually pay the proprietor for use of the pole - earning the cost back in, er, voluntary donations or heaven knows what else. This franchise model apparently produces a greater level of commitment than one involving payment by the hour.

But in both systems a large degree of cross-subsidy takes place. And money isn't necessarily made where value is created. For instance in the first model the bar made all the profits but the "free" women provided the value-add. In the second model you may actually subsidise the drinks to raise the hourly value of the pole.

Most businesses, in short, are ecosystems. There is much more going on than a simple one-off, one-way value exchange. When you go to a pub with a nice view, you pay more for the beer - you don't pay separately for the view.

Retailers generally understand this well. Certain items have far greater price elasticity than others. Some items are simply sold to drive footfall (selling newspapers is not all that profitable for newsagents, for instance, nor is selling petrol nearly as profitable for petrol stations as selling coffee). 

Occasionally, I suspect, some businesses lose sight of the interplay between items. Boots a few years ago became so preoccupied with seeling high-margin beauty products it somehow forgot it was a chemist. In 2001 in Tunbridge Wells they kept baby products upstairs, only reachable via a buggy-defying flight of steps - presumably so that more floorspace could be devoted to perfumes and other such fripperies. I stopped shopping there for five years. Woolworths, too, may have been led astray by an obsession with high margin categories - to a point where it sold 600 kinds of Bratz merchandise but not string. After a while, people forgot what it was for (and would not much miss its absence were it to vanish). Now M&S has an issue in that the success of its Simply Food concept means people use M&S to buy, er, simply food - for, as there now a diminishing need to go into its larger stores, you are rarely exposed to its clothes. And, according to a loyalty programme legend, one large supermarket hastily abandoned its decision to delist feta cheese: while selling the cheese itself made them no money, its few regular buyers were shown by loyalty-card data to be the top spenders in the shop.

Now advertising agencies are no less an ecosystem than is any other kind of "shop". Effectively, like any other kind of  shop, we do not always make most of our money where we add most of our value. Boots adds most value in Pharmacy and other essentials; it makes most margin in perfumes. An ad agency adds most value in creating ideas - something which may take a matter of minutes - but makes most money in the laborious and time-consuming business of execution. (Similarly an agency probably makes a small margin on its senior staff but a large one selling more junior staff.)

This is all fine - let's face it all businesses work that way. Or at least it's fine until you get exposed to the boneheaded people who refuse to acknowledge it. The more stupid procurement staff, say, or people with recent MBAs. They become obsessed with splitting the business into more and more watertight compartments, in order to facilitate the measurement of anything and to allow them to compile ever more elaborate spreadsheets. This is dumb. Every great business has interdependencies: it adds value in some places and makes money in others.

It's only a problem when people start treating a balance sheet as a substitute for judgement. There are too few creative people, proportionately in almost every agency in London. Why? Is it because they are less valuable? Or is it because they are harder to sell on retainer?

Follow the logic in this way and you have a bar selling cider for £100 a bottle but no girls. It's a high margin business, I grant you, but you don't get many customers.