 All right, this is Gerd Leonhard, futurist in Switzerland. And I'm meeting today here virtually meeting with Rohit Bargava, who I've been following for years. And he used to be with Ogil, we'll talk about that in a second. He wrote a smashing book that I've quoted the book even before I was out with a really great title called Lyconomics, the economics of what it means to be liked and how you're gonna get liked as a company, as a person. So we're gonna talk about that today for a couple of minutes. And Rohit will also be helping us do some work with the Futures Agency and stuff in the future. So welcome, Rohit. And please explain to us real quick, what is Lyconomics? Yes, Lyconomics. Of course, Lyconomics is a pretty simple idea. It essentially says that we choose to do business and build relationships with the people that we like. And in a situation when we are making decisions every day about who to work with and who to trust, likability becomes the most important thing. And that's the premise of the book and that's really what a lot of the research and everything is focused on pointing out. Yeah, I mean, I've used the term Lyconomics when you first emailed me or somehow we connected, I used the term. A lot of my clients said, what in the world? It sounds like California pipe dream that you would like your bank or something like that. And now when I talk about it, and I use some of the graphics in my presentations, then the client is saying, this is why, we don't want people to like us, we want them to buy our stuff. How does one relate to the other? Yeah, I think a lot of people do kind of dismiss likability and it's easy to do because people equate it with being nice and they say, look, I don't want to be too nice. I want to actually be a hard business person and I want to sell real stuff. And I think what people underestimate a lot is how important that emotional side is to the decision maker. And I think there's a lot of material out there talking about how people in general are emotional decision makers. But I think that when it comes to the big companies and the banks especially, there's this bias towards the product or the service or the idea in a lot of cases, being the thing that people buy. If I just had a better idea, I just had a better product, if I just deliver better service, then everybody's going to come to me. And I think the world doesn't work like that and the reason why it doesn't work like that is because that alone is never enough because there's always somebody else around the corner who has a different product that's slightly better in a different way. Or somebody who's willing to do something else to provide service that you might not be. And so you have to stand out and build loyalty based on something other than just trying to have the best list of bullet points because that's not sustainable for any of these. It's an interesting angle. You have people like Rachel Bozeman talking about collaborative consumption and social capital and those kind of things. Now I think in America this concept of being open to more sort of the soft factors of business or of commerce is quite popular. In Europe and Asia this idea is pretty far fetched that a company would have social capital. You know, can you imagine Lufthansa having social capital or for enough reason for people to buy their stuff. But I think that this is becoming a crucial thing of what Kleiner Perkins has called the social local mobile world. You know, the Solomo idea of saying that social capital is the driving force there. And in your book you mentioned this several times. Yeah, I think social capital is the reason why it's such a driving factor is because it relates back to something that marketers and business people everywhere in the world all say is one of, if not the most important thing, but they don't actually behave as if it were. And that thing is word of mouth. So everybody in the world knows that referral based marketing, somebody saying to someone else, this is a great product, you have to buy it. There's nothing more powerful than that, nothing. And that's a universal quality. It's not like a US thing, it's everywhere. But if you look at the behavior of a lot of these marketing and communications people, they don't actually do all of what they could do to make that word of mouth happen. And so there's this disconnection in business, I think. And part of it does come down to understanding how people make decisions and why emotions matter. But I think it's also this idea that from a social capital point of view, yes, we want a great product. But it also, when we buy that product, it says something about us. And is it something positive or is it something negative? And is it something we'd want to share with the world? And if it were, then we'd proudly wear that brand on our sleeve, we'd wear the Adidas thing because we associate with that. And we say, that's my brand. Yeah, I think that that is something that because of the mobile internet and the social internet is becoming centerpiece now of everything. Like, which school do you attend? Not because it's the best professors or so, but for some reason, the brand is important. Which music do you listen to? ECM records has a brand. And even though people don't buy records anymore, they do buy ECM records and things like that. So it's crucial. And it starts at, I mean, we are training our next generation for this as well. I mean, my eight-year-old right now wants Under Armour. That's what he loves. And it's because he likes that logo and because all of his friends and the other kids are wearing it. And so at a very young age, we're seeing this brand at the level of consciousness, saying, yes, I like this brand and no, I don't like that brand. And ultimately, I mean, we talk about branding a lot, but branding is, the value of branding is very simple. It's you can charge more for the exact same thing. Is this kind of, you know? Better brand, you can charge more. There's a great topic that I run into a lot when I speak about economics, is that I tell people basically, what is happening is that because of this, we're looking at the end of lying. You know, this idea that you could sell something that wasn't entirely so or something that wasn't actually like you said it would be, which isn't exactly lying, it's like whitewashing, but everybody has done that in the past, right? And now all of a sudden because of economics, you can't lie anymore. Well, I think that, you know, the way I would position it is it's the end of viral lying. And viral lying is when you'd had advertising that said the movie was great and it would be a good week before people found out that it actually isn't great. But by then you kind of made your money back. And now, that was viral lying, it lasted for a while. Now you put the movie out and on Thursday night before it, you know, when it premieres, everybody tweets about it and says, do not go and see that. And opening weekend, nothing happened, you crash. You can't count on that anymore. And so I think that this idea that you can keep some sort of perception that you've built and people won't really find out the truth, that doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, this is one reason why people should read your book clearly. And it's interesting, you know, my previous, my last book called the future of content talks about how media companies are changing and how media is changing, how the buying of media changing. And I use this word in there already. This is three year old or so, but it's on Amazon if you want to get it, but it's basically talking about how being liked as an author is becoming the most important thing because you build a network of connections that becomes viral using viral networks. And it's interesting also to see that social networks are in a way becoming broadcasters because they're broadcast alike, right? And that is the same than having an ad on TV now. Yeah, I think that, you know, one of the central premises of the book is this idea of what I call the likeability gap. And essentially what that points to is this idea that customer satisfaction in some way isn't enough. Because a satisfied customer, if you think about a restaurant, a satisfied customer goes to the restaurant, they have a good meal, they're full, the service is good, they leave and they forget about it. That's a satisfied customer. The problem is that's not enough. You need the customer who has such an amazing meal that has a great conversation with the chef or with the owner or with the waiter that then goes home, writes a review online, tells 25 people that they have to go and try that restaurant and comes back five times. That's the customer you need. And the only way you can get that person is by doing something other than just having a good product. Yeah, I think that this is, of course, in each vertical it's completely different. Like, you know, in Italy, for example, where I used to go a lot on vacation or even in Spain, a lot of people don't write reviews because they don't want to share that it was good, right? Because it's sort of theirs, right? This will be one thing, but with cars, for example, or with consumer brands or electronics or so, this is clearly a huge driver because it's, you know, and there's also a cultural difference, a very big cultural difference as to who talks about what they've done and who doesn't, right? And this is quite different. Yeah, I think also there's this idea of, I think you're bringing up something very interesting, which is this idea, it really goes back to social capital if you think about that Italian example. You know, that person may know about that amazing restaurant, but they're not gonna share it with everybody. But they will share it with some people, very specific people, because that's their social capital. That's their restaurant they know about, the experience that they know about, that they'll tell very, very few people about. But they'll be very passionate about it when they do. Yeah, this is why I like the title, like economics, you know, because it really, there's an economic principle behind it that has always existed, right? But now, because of the social and mobile web, it's amplified, right? And so I think this is something that everybody should look at also in regards to their business model. I just saw this really great video the other day from Kraft Foods about how they had an a cappella band giving a thank you to all the people that have liked them. And it shows how important this is becoming for brandy. It becomes a lot more important than having an ad on television. I mean, not quite yet, but close. Yeah, I think that level of engagement, I mean, in humanity, right? And that's the big thing that we're all talking about is how do brands show more humanity to build that personal connection? I mean, there was an orchestra in Calgary in Canada that asked people on Twitter, because Calgary is quite a cold place, so they asked people tips to stay warm. And then the orchestra and the chorus sang those tweets and recorded it. So this is the level of engagement. I mean, even an orchestra singing tweets, right? This is happening all over the place. I think this is one of the big things that's happening in the general world of advertising and marketing is that there's so much talk about algorithms and big data and people becoming subject to filters and cloud and peer index, this machine thinking, right, basically, that I think it's so important not to have this machine thinking because brands, if brands are machines and we can't relate to them, right? It has to go beyond that. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, I mean, one of the big trends that I think is happening right now and one that I'm starting to write about is this idea that the brands that are able to have that human connection on an extreme level, not only are they being super successful, but they're turning their own model into a consulting service to help other brands. So you see Method doing that, you see Disney doing that, you see Zappos doing that, all over the place. These companies, Innocent Drinks is doing that. All of these companies that have done this amazing job of building human brands are now saying, hey, why don't we take those lessons and teach other businesses how to do that? Yeah, this goes back to what we discussed earlier. There were a few secrets left. I mean, if you watch what Innocent does with there or what Nike Women, with the Women Channel, these are completely out in the open and you can copy it, right? I mean, you can use their approach and it's visible. That's completely different than 10 years ago where it wasn't clear what your marketing strategy was. So anyway, tell people where they can get your book and what your Twitter handle is and so on. Yeah, absolutely. So you can get the book at anywhere online, Amazon or any of the online bookstores or you can download a free excerpt at likeonomics.com. So it's just like and then Onomics. Okay. And my Twitter handle is just my first name and that's also my personal website. So it's Rohit Bargava. I know it's a little hard to spell but I'm sure you'll have my name on there somewhere. Just Google for likeonomics, you'll see it, right? And I'm just following likeonomics and you'll just Google that or just Google my first name Rohit R-O-H-I-T and you should be able to find it too. Okay, great. So it was a pleasure to have you here and thanks everyone for tuning in. Hopefully this is good enough to actually publish but we'll see you down the road. Thanks very much. All right, thank you.