From childhood epiphanies to intentional plate placement, we explore how the way you do one thing becomes the way you do everything—and why that matters more than you might think.
Will Guidara’s journey from awestruck 12-year-old at the Four Seasons to creating one of the world’s best restaurants reveals what “unreasonable hospitality” truly means. Disney’s insistence on breathing animatronic birds teaches us why perfection in unseen details creates experiences customers can feel.
Steve confesses how a questionable radio crossfade between Deep Purple and Smokie’s Oh Carol sparked an 18-year broadcasting career, while David shares how a teacher’s inspired intervention led him to discover his guiding principle: “how you do anything is how you do everything.”
All this, plus a practical solution to website bottlenecks and a healthy skepticism about whether traditional pricing psychology still applies in our cashless world.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
01:15 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
Those Childhood Moments That Define Our Future Selves
Nothing shapes a career path quite like those lightning bolt moments from childhood. Will Guidara, in his brilliant book Unreasonable Hospitality, recounts how his entire professional trajectory was set at age 12 when a Four Seasons server called him “sir” after dropping his napkin. That dignified treatment, the refusal to make a child feel small in a sophisticated space, ignited his passion for hospitality.
Steve and David explore how these formative experiences shape our professional identities, with Steve confessing his own watershed moment came at precisely the same age—albeit sparked by something considerably less profound: a jarring radio crossfade between Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water and Smokie’s Oh Carol that had him thinking, “That looks easy—and you’d get all the girls.” Despite its dubious inspiration, that moment launched an 18-year broadcasting career that no careers counsellor could talk him out of.
David’s path proved distinctly different, with uncertainty rather than clarity defining his early professional thoughts. His transformative moment came through a teacher who, recognising his analytical mind (and argumentative tendencies), arranged legal work experience that taught him a crucial lesson: “how you do anything is how you do everything”—a principle that would resurface throughout the episode.
09:30 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Disney Birds Must Breathe: The Power of Unreasonable Precision
Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality offers a masterclass in intentionality that has Steve and David unpacking its transformative implications for every aspect of business.
Guidara’s approach at Eleven Madison Park—requiring staff to position plates so manufacturer stamps would face right-side up if a guest flipped them over—exemplifies what Walt Disney understood decades earlier: “People can feel perfection.” When Disney’s Imagineers protested that no one would notice whether their animatronic birds appeared to breathe in the Enchanted Tiki Room, Disney insisted they add the feature, understanding that details create an emotional response even when not consciously registered.
The hosts explore how this meticulous attention applies beyond hospitality—it’s about creating an environment where precision becomes second nature. David connects this to his experiences in Special Operations training, where he witnessed firsthand how an entire culture of exactitude made everyone’s work smoother and more effective.
This precision extends to the mundane: putting staplers back exactly where they belong and refilling paper before it runs out. Steve introduces his emerging household philosophy of considering “the next person”—leaving things right for whoever follows, even if that person is your future self. David traces this mindset back to his Hungarian grandmother, who instinctively prepared everything for its next use before walking away.
In both hospitality and life, the way you do one thing truly becomes the way you do everything.
18:00 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Unblocking the Website Bottleneck
What keeps projects stalled in the “too hard” basket? Steve and David examine how their new “Website in a Week” offering tackles three common bottlenecks that plague small business websites.
First, there’s the blank page problem—small business owners facing writer’s block when asked to create their own content. Steve’s solution: “Give me 30 minutes of your time. I’ll interview you and take content creation completely off your plate.”
Then there’s the deadline dilemma. Without clear timeframes, projects languish indefinitely. The “in a week” commitment creates urgency and clarity for everyone involved.
Finally, they address the perfection trap—that paralysing fear of launching something that isn’t 100% perfect. Their response channels Seth Godin’s “minimum viable product” philosophy while adding a crucial qualifier: websites are never truly finished but should be “fit for purpose at an absolute minimum.” Just ship it.
The hosts reflect on how we’re hardwired to avoid embarrassment, making us hesitant to put our work out for public scrutiny. Drawing from Will Storr’s insights, David notes that every business proposal gets filtered through two questions: “How will this affect my identity?” and “How will this affect my status in the group?” The key is designing solutions that enhance both.
25:15 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
Do Bundles Still Need Easy Maths?
Has consumer behaviour fundamentally changed in our digital age? Steve and David explore an observation from marketing professional Sarah Levenger that people are 45% more likely to buy bundles when the mental maths is easy (like six shirts for $24 rather than six for $27).
In an era where shoppers rarely calculate prices mentally—let alone with pencil and paper—our hosts question whether this principle still applies. The more effective approach might simply be transparent communication: “$4 per shirt if you buy six.”
This leads to a reflection on the price denomination effect—the theory that consumers are more likely to purchase when prices align with currency note values. But as David notes, “I know a lot of people who haven’t handled bank notes since Covid,” suggesting these traditional pricing psychology principles may be losing relevance in our cashless world.
The verdict? Focus less on mathematical pricing tricks and more on clear value communication.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S06E04
[00:00:00] Caitlin Davis: Talking about marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders. Produced by my dad, Steve Davis and his colleague talked about marketing David Olney, in which they explore marketing through the lens of their own four Ps person, principles, problems, and pers. Yes, you heard that correctly. Apart from their love of words, they really love helping people.
[00:00:31] So they hope this podcast will become a trusted companion on your journey in business.
[00:00:40] Steve Davis: David, yes. You are just too good to be true. I, I can’t take my eyes off of you, and you’d be like heaven to touch. I wanna hold you. This is actually going a bit weird, isn’t it? I’m trying not to giggle hysterically. Uh, this will make sense sooner. Hope
[00:01:07] Caitlin Davis: our four Ps. Number one person, the aim of life is self-development to realize one’s nature perfectly. That is what each of us is here for. Oscar Wilde
[00:01:24] Steve Davis: David in the person segment. I want to start at the Four Seasons and you’ll be thankful not with the song. I’m okay with the song as long as you’re over there. Um, and it is in, in response to reading an amazing book. Uh, in fact, what’s the book called? Unreasonable Hospitality. Thank you. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guara.
[00:01:47] That’s how I’m pronouncing this name. Have you heard it pronounced any differently? No. That’s as good as I can manage to. Yeah. So Will is, uh, well he’s a force within the hospitality world. Uh, they had 11 Madison Place, really famous restaurant was, uh, dubbed the best restaurant in the world. Among other things, but before we get into that, into the principle segment, ’cause there’s so much that we can learn from him, uh, we want to actually learn from his story.
[00:02:15] And David, I think it really touched you, you remembered it fondly, this story of something that happened when he was 12 years old at the four season restaurant. In New York, do you wanna paint a picture for us?
[00:02:27] David Olney: Absolutely. I’ll go back a little bit earlier. So, Will’s dad is a, a successful chef who got into restaurant management and his mom was an, an airline stewardess in the era they were called stewardesses.
[00:02:41] So we can tell this is the seventies. Yep. And Will’s mom, um, had some health crises resulting in surgery, resulting in becoming quadriplegic. So Will’s childhood was not the easiest thing in the world. He was trying to be helpful and step up, but for his 12th birthday, his dad took him to the Four Seasons, one of the best restaurants in America at that point.
[00:03:07] You know, a very good restaurant, maybe not perhaps one of the best restaurants in the world. And his dad had got him a, a beautiful blue blazer and a crisp shirt, so he looked right in the environment and Will was utterly blown away that here he wasn’t a 12-year-old child here, he was a guest being treated.
[00:03:28] You know, like every other guest, like someone who mattered. And at one point during the dinner, he dropped his napkin and he was about to dive off his chair and grab it. And the server said, sir, don’t worry about it. And just got him a new one, gave him the new one, and then picked up the one that fell on the floor.
[00:03:45] It was no big deal. He wasn’t made to feel like a 12-year-old who’d done something stupid in an amazing environment and Will makes the point in the book. That is when he realized he wanted to, you know, work in own, be a part of a restaurant like the Four Seasons that provided. Amazing hospitality. And he, from that moment onwards, he was inspired to get there.
[00:04:12] You know, he was excited about the idea from watching his dad work, but he got a whole new sense of his future when he went to the Four Seasons for his birthday.
[00:04:22] Steve Davis: And the, the reason that we are sharing this in the person segment is that. That story of that moment, that aha moment of now I know what it is that I must do, is something that many of the business people we mix with have had.
[00:04:37] Not everyone, um, but I think the lucky ones in a way. ’cause they have this inner, uh, sense of energy that seasoned through all sorts of things. And as we were planning this, David, it reminded me that I had that moment for my initial career in radio. When I was 12, oh, which I just realized the same age as Will in that book, I was at home on my bed listening to Five AD and they, it was a Saturday afternoon from memory, there was a cross fade from, uh, deep purple smoke on the water into Smokie’s Oh Carol.
[00:05:19] And just think about that for a moment. That’s one of the world’s worst cross fades you’ll ever hear in your life. And I thought to myself, wow, that would be an easy job and you’d get the girls. That’s what I want to be. So it’s not profound like wheels, but gee, it stuck and no one. Teachers who thought I could fly to the moon, none of them could talk me out of this idea.
[00:05:46] I had so much so that in, I think it was year 11, he had to put down three careers so the career counselor could talk to you. And I said, I only wanna do a radio answer. They said, no, you gotta write on three. I said I only want to be, they write down three. So I wrote president of the USA, NASA Astronaut Radio announcer.
[00:06:06] Um, so I, and, and of course then I got into radio. That was my first career. Had 18 beautiful years. Uh, doing that full on, it was excellent. So that. Is a beautiful thing that comes from having that knowledge. Have you had that similar sort of thing?
[00:06:23] David Olney: I had a very different experience. I remember sitting in social studies class being taught by a wonderful human being called Bruce Ormond at age 15 and being told we had to pick where to do our first lot of work experience and sitting there as the only blind kid in the class, in the school thinking, I don’t even know what I can do.
[00:06:46] I don’t even know what anyone will let me do. I simply don’t know if I have a go, what I can succeed at. Oh dear, this is bad. And after Bruce had talked about, we all had to pick, you know, something to do. He’s like, you know, Mr. Olney, what do you wanna do? And I quietly went and talked to him and said, I’ve got no clue.
[00:07:12] Come back to class. The next class, probably the next day or the day after. Can’t remember anymore. And Bruce goes, I’ve sorted out your work experience. I’m like, what? He’s like, yeah, I’ve gone and talked to a law firm in Port Adelaide. You’re doing your work experience there today. Oh, okay. Why? Well, you’re very smart.
[00:07:35] You can argue anything and you’re impossible. You know, when you decide you’re going to basically win at something, so seems appropriate. I’m like, oh, okay. So in my case, I went along, did my work experience, found it to be a, a great experience. Really wasn’t sure I wanted to be, you know, a lawyer from that experience, but what it did teach me was something that also stuck and that was.
[00:08:03] Hang on to be a lawyer, I would need to get good marks at the end of high school. Well, I probably need to get good marks to do lots of things I haven’t thought of yet, because I never would’ve thought a lawyer if Mr. Orman hadn’t thought a lawyer. So the thing I took away was, ah, I dunno what I’m gonna do.
[00:08:23] I dunno what I’m gonna be. But I better make sure that anything I do, I do well enough, they invite me back, and that I do it well enough that it’s persuasive enough to let you know, to get people to let me do other things. So I sort of learn the lesson of how you do anything is how you do everything, and just kept applying it with whatever option seemed like the best one in front of me.
[00:08:47] Steve Davis: So hold that thought ’cause that’s gonna come back as a theme in the next segment. I guess to round off the person segment, the reason we wanted to share this is we’d both kind of forgotten these stories and I think it’s really nice to dust them off and retell them to someone who cares because they can just rekindle that.
[00:09:05] That inner spark, that inner ball of fire, of, of energy that can propel us. If you don’t have a story like that, that’s, that’s, that’s fine. You’ve found a different pathway here. But if you have, and you haven’t dusted it off and given it a run a little while, take this segment as your permission to go and do that.
[00:09:30] Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two principles. You can never be overdressed or over educated. Oscar Wilde
[00:09:44] Steve Davis: will guara. One of the things that he makes very clear in his whole journey of running uh, 11 Madison Place is intentionality in service. He sees there’s great power that comes from not just serving people, but doing it with great intentionality. And in fact, I want to just start this scene by having a listen to him tell it.
[00:10:10] He said he tells it so well.
[00:10:15] Will Guidara: We needed to be operating in a high level of precision all the time to get the staff tuned into the correct frequency. We asked them to start thinking that way as soon as they walked in the door. We trained the people setting the dining room to place every plate so that if a guest flipped it over to see who had made it, the limo stamp would be facing them right side up.
[00:10:39] That’s ridiculous, right? Utterly unreasonable. Maybe one or two guests would flip that plate in a month. Most nights nobody did. Even if they did, would they guess that the placement had been intentional? Some people probably turned over the plate in a way we didn’t anticipate, so that the manufacturer’s stamp wasn’t face up at all.
[00:11:02] That was okay because whether someone flipped it or not, that perfectly placed plate had already done what it needed to do. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and we found over and over that precision in the smallest of details translated to precision in bigger ones. By asking the person, setting the dining room to place each plate with total concentration of focus.
[00:11:27] We were asking them to set the tone for how they’d do everything over the course of the service, how they’d greet our guests, walk through the dining room, communicate with their colleagues, pour the champagne to begin a meal, and the cup of coffee to end it. There’s a story about Walt Disney challenging his imagineers when they were creating the first animatronics for the enchanted tiki room.
[00:11:51] The imagineers were convinced they had produced the most lifelike, detailed, animatronic bird possible, but Disney wasn’t satisfied. Real birds breathed. He pointed out the chest expanded and contracted. This bird wasn’t breathing. Frustrated. The imagineers reminded him there would be hundreds of distracting elements in the tiki room, including waterfalls, light smoke, totem poles, and singing flowers.
[00:12:19] Nobody was going to notice a single bird, whether it was breathing or not, to which Disney responded. People can feel perfection. Maybe people don’t notice every single individual detail, but in aggregate, they’re powerful. In any great business, most of the details you closely attend to are ones that only a tiny, tiny percentage of people will notice.
[00:12:45] But if I could institute a system that demanded that the entire team think carefully about even the most rudimentary of tasks, I was creating a world in which intention was the standard and our guests could feel it.
[00:13:03] Steve Davis: Wow, there, there is a lot there, but. Do you concur, David, with his rationale that making sure the plates were put there in a way that if a guest picked them up, that the logo would be the right way depending on how they picked them up, et cetera, and whether or not they did there was still value in adhering to that.
[00:13:24] Does, does that resonate with you?
[00:13:25] David Olney: Absolutely. Like this is something I worked out for myself, as I said in the previous segment, but for me. The first time I really saw this in an absolute all of an environment was when I started training sp, you know, training people within Special Operations command where everyone did everything properly.
[00:13:47] You know, I’d be living in an office’s mess for a week, training very capable people for a week in a world where everything was done precisely because by doing it precisely, it made everyone else’s day easier and better. And being in that bubble, you know, realizing it’s not just a bubble you can have on your own, that it’s a bubble you can have with hundreds of other people.
[00:14:11] I can see why it’s so intoxicating when you’re in a culture that works in that way.
[00:14:18] Steve Davis: There’s a couple of layers to this. ’cause initially I came to this from the perspective of us all reflecting on our. Uh, customers, our clients, but the, the, the other part of this, the nuance is internal, um, reduction of friction in the way that we run the entity we’re working in.
[00:14:41] If you are doing everything right, and I love that saying it’s sticking with me so much. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. It. It just means that you don’t just put the stapler back roughly where it was. You put it back exactly where it was you. If you happen to see the paper and the printer get to a certain level, you top it up and it marries with something that’s been on my mind and they’re wanting to chat with my daughters about.
[00:15:09] And how we run our household is this concept. It’s come out of my subconscious. I might’ve read it somewhere of the next person. What will this place be like for the next person, which might be you or might be someone else, but if you use the last sheet of toilet paper, you use the last squirt of, uh, de detergent, you, you, the last I know, free lolly that you give your clients.
[00:15:38] And so the next one, oh, it’s gonna be embarrassing if you take responsibility of leaving things right for the next person. I think that all goes well for your, your experience together as well as to the public to be smooth and positive.
[00:15:55] David Olney: I absolutely agree, and I think I probably learned that next person concept from my Hungarian grandmother.
[00:16:03] She did everything with that mindset for as long as I can remember. Yeah, everything about the farm, everything about her kitchen, everything about everything she did was if something wouldn’t work well the next time or everything necessary wasn’t there. She sorted that out before she walked away. And as the oldest grandchild, I was sort of expected to be the one who, who followed that logic.
[00:16:29] So that’s probably why when Bruce Orman arranged my work experience for me, I kind of put two and two together and went, ah. Something I’ve never really thought about from grand is now being made very deliberate. So again, the, the word we’ll use is intentionality. Yeah. The minute you realize something you are doing accidentally can be done intentionally.
[00:16:51] And the once you do it intentionally, you can see the positive benefits, like intentionality is great. It doesn’t make you work harder, it makes you so much happier when you see the impact you’re having in the world.
[00:17:04] Steve Davis: Hmm. So the main thing for this segment and reflecting on Will’s book, and I think we’re gonna have to bring Will’s book back for another episode ’cause there’s a whole lot we haven’t got into here that I think bears telling.
[00:17:15] But for now, it’s the challenge of reflecting on how you do things internally. Uh, because I know, I think it was last episode, David, I was. Frantically trying to find notes that I put aside, and I had three different ways that I might have done it, and that’s where I went, oh, David, the way you do one thing, the way you do everything, I think I’ve failed and made my life harder here by not adhering to one thing, and yet today when I was looking up things, I could find them straight away.
[00:17:44] Everything was where you wanted it because you had your little reminder. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
[00:17:55] Caitlin Davis: R four Ps number three problems. I asked the question for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity. Oscar Wilde,
[00:18:09] Steve Davis: something slightly different in the problem segment this week, and it’s, it’s the problem of. Jobs or projects that stall for some reason, they get into some proverbial two hard basket. And I just want to, to reflect briefly on our website in a week, uh, offer that we have at the moment in which we pledge that we will turn your website around in a week.
[00:18:33] It’ll be done beautifully and, and thoughtfully and thoroughly with, uh, unique writing. And it will all be delivered in one week. And. I don’t use, we don’t use this, um, podcast to flog something, and that’s not the reason we are bringing it up here. We are bringing it up because. I came up with that and, and chatted with David in the process of developing it because I’ve been reflecting on different bottlenecks that happen from time to time in website projects.
[00:19:03] Not the the bigger ones, but often the smaller projects I. And I wanted to eradicate them. And I think it’s, it’s an osmosis effect from everything we’ve been talking about, David over the last few seasons. Gradually working its way through. And so where my brain is at the moment is, hmm, if we see something that’s getting stuck, how can I unstuck it?
[00:19:26] This is just, I can’t even pick which writer this is from. This is an amalgam of lots of them.
[00:19:31] David Olney: Yeah, too many things have come together now in a way where we’re starting to struggle to remember which book an idea was in. We remember the idea, and we’ve linked it to three other ideas, but where it came from anymore is now we’re gonna have to start listening to earlier episodes.
[00:19:46] Steve Davis: So the, the thing about the website in a week. Uh, offer is the blank page problem was one of the things I was trying to deal with, and that’s where to keep costs down for people. Um, with these websites, I would often have said to people, look, we can make sure we can build it properly. We can put your content in, and you are welcome to craft your own content.
[00:20:08] You know your story, you know your business, and that way you don’t have to pay for us to write it. Stupid in a way, David, because writing is one of the things we do, but it was a competing set of values in me. One of them was help the client save money. And the other one, of course is, let me loose. I wanna write.
[00:20:31] It’s, it’s a wrestling. If you’d met me years ago, you would’ve slapped my face a few times, wouldn’t you?
[00:20:37] David Olney: No. Your first time we met for podcasting, you said, I love the sound of my own voice. I just love talking to a microphone. You made it very clear very quickly that it’s just your happy place, and it’s not love of the sound of your own voice, it’s love of words, and communicating and making people smile.
[00:20:56] You know, you love to write, not so you go, wow, look how clever I’m, it’s, wow, look at the alliteration. Look at the impact.
[00:21:05] Steve Davis: Well, what I ended up doing was letting people suffer through paralysis because they’d sit at their blank sheet and then I’d wonder why I hadn’t heard from them for many weeks. And so that one, that’s one of the aspects of a website in a week is to say, you know what?
[00:21:22] Don’t worry about that. I will interview you. Give me 30 minutes of your time. I’ll interview you. I’ll get everything I need to to to make that happen. Take it off your plate. The other one was a deadline dilemma, where I also didn’t want to be that obnoxious human bearing down on people cracking the whip to meet a deadline.
[00:21:45] And that’s bitten me in the backside because what happens is. It gets get, keeps getting put off and put off and put off again. David, I needed your face slap.
[00:21:55] David Olney: Well, we needed to read books like Donald Miller and Blair Ends and go, we are the expert and we have to provide the simple three to five point plan.
[00:22:05] So we did. Hmm, we did, but we
[00:22:08] Steve Davis: should have also put a deadline in it as well.
[00:22:11] David Olney: Hmm. That’s again, that’s a work in progress.
[00:22:14] Steve Davis: Yeah. But that’s one of the things that this is designed to deal with, is we all agree upfront that this is going to happen. Don’t take your time. We’re gonna make sure it is done. And the other one is, we might have actually got everything done.
[00:22:28] But we still need the client, and this hasn’t changed. The client has to give approval that this is ready to go live, and then we hit the perfection trap. Oh, I’m not sure if it’s a hundred percent yet, or I’ve just seen a competitor try this and I’m wondering if we should try that. And this is a different flavor of something that can impact some people and hold them back.
[00:22:50] For a myriad other reasons, and probably internally that is self-doubt, all those sorts. Imposter syndrome, oh, I can’t look that good, blah, blah. And that’s something else we’re trying to do away with is I. Impressing on people that every website is always a work in progress. There is no such thing as a finished website.
[00:23:10] They’re malleable. They’re, they’re, they’re flexible, they’re digital for crying out loud. They are to be generated. What we need to do is, as I think Seth Godin loves this, the, the minimum viable, uh, product. Not that it’s quite, that it’s a bit better than that. Yeah. It’s fit for purpose at an absolute minimum.
[00:23:27] Yes. And just get it out there. Do the Steve Jobs, just ship it. And ultimately I think, and this is where you would have probably a few thoughts on this, David, but um, my research was telling me that a lot of scientists believe we are hardwired to avoid embarrassment. And if you think about it, you put what you’re gonna do out there on the world for, on the world stage, we’ll able to see.
[00:23:51] You just open yourself up for people to critique and critical you in, in some people’s minds. And that’s enough to make people hesitant. Uh, do you agree that we are hardwired that way?
[00:24:03] David Olney: Absolutely. I think the best simple explanation this I, I’ve read of this lately, is will store in his most recent book, you know, a story is a deal.
[00:24:11] He makes the point. Anytime you’re talking to someone, whatever you are suggesting is going through two filters. The person is thinking, how is this gonna affect my identity, my sense of self, and how is whatever we’re talking about gonna affect my status in the group? So make sure whatever you’re pitching is gonna make them feel good about themselves and improve their status.
[00:24:33] So website, in a week where we use our expertise, we give you something. That’s good enough to get you going and will only get better over time. That fits well with identity, happy, status, improved,
[00:24:48] Steve Davis: and in sharing that in the problem segment. I hope maybe it’s a model for you reflecting on different things that could be different bottlenecks in your business with your customers and clients.
[00:24:59] That just took me a few months of reflection to break it down, reverse engineer and come to market with. A solution that deals with those issues. The journey continues
[00:25:17] Caitlin Davis: our four P’s. Number four per sy. The one duty we OTA history is to rewrite it. Oscar Wild.
[00:25:31] Steve Davis: Our regular contributor to talking about marketing. Bell Baker has given us another one. David. Yeah, bill always sends in the best things she does. She found, um, something, uh, by, I think it’s pronounced Sarah Levenger or Lger Levenger, who had commented I. I’m not sure where, uh, somewhere on social media, 15 years as a marketer, and I had no idea this was a thing, people are 45% more likely to buy bundles if the mental math is easy.
[00:26:05] That is, customers can easily divide the price by the number of items in the bundle like this. Six certs for $24, not this six certs for 27. I reflected on that for just a moment because my intuition was that people are less and less doing mental mathematics these days because the digital devices we’ve got do them for us, and so I’m not sure how relevant that would be in this age.
[00:26:43] What do you think, David?
[00:26:45] David Olney: I think. Any person who whips out a piece of paper and a pencil and does the maths to work out, oh, it’s this value, this price. Oh, that’s a good deal. Can probably do the maths in their head, and anyone else is gonna decide whether they like the shirts or not. I think, you know, we’re in an era where the technology means we are not gonna work it out ourselves, but maybe if inflation keeps being an issue and scarcity keeps becoming an issue.
[00:27:14] It would be in our interest to say, you know, $4 per shirt if you buy the bundle of six. So it’s up to us to be better communicators either way.
[00:27:24] Steve Davis: Yeah. And not actually ob making it obfuscated, not making it harder for people. Mm-hmm. Um, just tell ’em they’re $4 each. Yeah. Uh, or do what? Um, the Woolies and the big, uh, supermarkets do.
[00:27:37] They’re $4 each or buy six for 27. Yeah. And suck people in that way. Uh, so that’s one aspect and I, so I feel like that might have been a thing, but I think it’s less of a thing as we outsource the use of our brain to electrical devices. But it did remind me, uh, when Bell sent this in. Of something else. I remember in my early days of marketing the price denomination effect, which basically means if you think of all the, the notes, the different denominations of notes we had, um, like in the old days, one and two, but now $5 note, $10 note, 20, 50, a hundred.
[00:28:17] The theory within marketing is if the price of your product sits just up, but, but within one of those notes denominations, you get away with it. People are much more likely if they were gonna buy to go ahead and purchase your product if it’s gone over $21 50 and it just causes a little bit of, um, concern.
[00:28:42] David, we’re not using as much cash money these days. Do we also spell, and this is the per per cassity segment where we look at things, how things stand, the test of time. Do you think the days are numbered or gone for the price denomination effect?
[00:28:57] David Olney: Certainly numbered. I think the big issue people focus on now is not necessarily that price point, is it above any of those denominations?
[00:29:06] ’cause I know a lot of people who haven’t handled bank notes since Covid. So some people are now five years into not handling money. I think the big issue is now going, what’s the surcharge for using my credit card or using my phone to pay for this? Are you gonna charge me another? How many percent? So I think that’s more interesting to people than does it cross some, you know, barrier of a physical denominator.
[00:29:33] Steve Davis: So there you go. I think we’ve made the, um. The decision, haven’t we David, but the past, the judgment that those math-based and note denomination based theories have probably had their day just communicate better. Alright, now I suppose you want change for that day
[00:29:51] David Olney: probably, but not rat coins. ’cause they’ve got nowhere to put ’em anymore.