Rory Sutherland

PLCs or companies on the NASDAQ or the stock exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.

It's short-term money off versus long-term value on.

By the way, my theory is the primary reason for the success of these private companies

The secondary reason is they look after their consumers better because they're effectively, unwittingly, they're practitioners in the customer value movement, not the shareholder value movement.

Actually, they do something, they look after their customers.

And there is an interesting exception to this probably, which is, for example, Costco.

Which actually Enterprise Rent-A-Car is family owned, isn't it?

Enterprise is family owned.

Yeah.

In the, and I've told everybody this, in the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards in the UK,

My argument is that with the exception of P&G, Diageo, Unilever, marketing-led companies, I don't think that PLCs, what do you call them in, you know, publicly traded corporations, I don't think they can actually do marketing very well because the requirement for short-term self-justification

and numbers effectively overrides the real purpose of marketing, which is investment in long-term customer value.

What is my legacy?

I mean, it's interesting, actually.

The German car industry, although they're public companies, a sort of family run, Aldi famously, which owns Trader Joe's, is basically owned by actually two German families.

They had a huge feud.

But something's going on there.

One of the things they do is they look after their staff better.

And I think when you look after your staff better, the customer notices.

Well, this is part of the Costco thing.