Rory Sutherland

Because, you know, a small town or a, you know, would have been to a large extent a prestige economy.

and therefore dealing with the posh local estate agent rather than some guy who claims to be cheap is not irrational.

The commission may be higher, whatever it may be, but in terms of reputational skin in the game as insurance against being treated appallingly,

And, you know, I think there's a kind of weird thing going on, which is that, you know, the job of the real estate agent is to some extent to be the person who stays behind in the place where the house is sold to suffer the reputational consequences of, you know, of anything outrageous.

Because the vendor of the house isn't really reputationally vulnerable if they're moving 300 miles away.

And so, you know, some of the role of these intermediaries is just highly complicated.

Right.

But when I say that, you know, we fundamentally seem to attach very, very high weighting

to, for example, a call center experience versus website design.

I'm not suggesting for a second website design isn't really important.

There's a really interesting organization.

I can't remember what they're called online.

They call this a brand quake.

A brand quake is where you do something.

It could be resolving a problem really well.

That would be a very good opportunity for a brand quake.

The person has a problem.

You put quite a lot of effort and intelligence into solving it very effectively for them.

and then you ring them back to check that the problem has indeed been solved.

Now, that would be an example of something.