Rory Sutherland

I'll give you the perfect story of this.

My father, who is, you know, half Scottish and without stereotyping anybody, you know, was great.

quite parsimonious with what he bought, generally.

I mean, I'm not saying it's genetic, by the way.

Just culturally, he was descended from long lines of Highland Scots who didn't get where they were today by, you know, splashing out.

And he had, I think, three, when he died, he had three or four Dyson devices, which he'd bought from you in his home.

He had one on each floor to save him carrying them upstairs.

Now, these are, by any objective measure, pretty expensive vacuum cleaners.

One of the reasons he was so fanatically loyal was that Dyson, now, interestingly, I'm going to make a point here, which is a privately owned company.

And do not underestimate the importance of this.

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,