营销心理学：从马力单位到按效果付费的定价策略

There are two ways of making money. You can either make desirable things or you can make things desirable. And there's not much you can do about the laws of physics. Whereas the laws of psychology are magnificently malleable.

We know about you, but do you know what you're getting into at all?

Up to a point. I know of the podcast quite well.

I know that you're like recently a kind of a social media star. You even though you've been killing it for decades, I heard a story about how someone just started like uploading some of your talks and it went viral and then you said, "Maybe I should do this."

It happened I think accidentally and I've kind of reverse engineered what happened, which is that most marketing people talk about what they do and my argument is of necessity I started talking about how we think and consequently, you know, the willingness to accept the fact that surprisingly all arbitrary seeming trivial decisions may have a monumental effect on is actually necessary to have a proper understanding of living in a complex inter- you know, interconnected system.

You know, if you believe there are important strategic things and then there are trivial things which you delegate down to junior people and in which you have no interest whatsoever, fundamentally I think you're missing the point because the real world isn't like that. It's you know, it's full of butterfly effects, all of the bullets, you know, you know, small things. Alchemy I call my book because you can turn lead into gold.

You can literally take something which is seen as a product disadvantage and turn it into a strength.

I think you had a good example of that with uh Have you ever heard Sean the story of how horsepower kind of came to be?

No.

Can can tell that story?

So one of my one of my great contentions is that when we look at great entrepreneurs or great inventors, Jobs, you know, if you say Edison, Ford, Watt, Boulton, they tend to be written up as historians as inventors. And my argument is that an invention isn't an innovation until it changes behavior. I think it's Stewart Butterfield of Slack who said something very similar. You know, the only real measure of the effect of you're having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior.

And you can invent anything you like, but if you can't get anybody to adopt it, it's an invention, but it's not an innovation. And Watt was selling steam engines to mine owners. And the purpose of the steam engine was to replace the horses they used to walk round and round in circles draining the mine so that miners could go in and effectively mine coal, slate, coal, whatever without drowning. What he realized is that you could you as an engineer, you could talk around, you know, the calorific capacity of the boiler or the length of the piston stroke or whatever, and these people didn't want to know.

So, Watt and Boulton amongst themselves said, "Well, what do these people really want to know before they're prepared to buy a steam engine?" They said, "They want to know how many horses they no longer need to feed if they buy a steam engine. How many horses can I get rid of if I buy the steam engine?" So, Watt went out and invented a unit we still use today, which is called the horsepower. And the reason it's not named after a famous scientist like the ohm or the Newton or the coulomb or the Watt for that matter or Celsius or anything of that kind is because it's a marketing unit.

It was invented for marketing purposes because he could then go and say, "If you buy a 25 horsepower steam engine, you can actually get rid of 75 horses." Cuz I think the horses worked in shifts, so it does the work of 25 horses, but it does it 24 hours a day, so you can now get rid of of 75 horses. And these people would go scribble scribble scribble scribble scribble cost of horses cost of feeding horses cost of looking after horses and you know on the back of an envelope they could then go well I'll have two of those.

By the way we went even further than that. I mean the industrial revolution was a marketing revolution every bit as much as it was an industrial revolution because there was no point in being able to produce things in abundance if you couldn't create corresponding demand. So you know one of the things about the 18th and 19th century in England was it was an absolutely pioneering period in terms of how people marketed things.

And that included the steam engine where Watt and Boulton would go to a mine owner now let me get this right some people were already using Newcomen engines which were less efficient steam engines than the Watt engine. And Watt and Boulton would go along to the people who were already using these inefficient steam engines and this is how they priced their their own steam engine. They said we'll supply it for free you pay us a third of the money that you save on coal.

So it was literally hardware as a service. Bear in mind this was 1775. I mean years later Rolls-Royce started charging airlines for jet engines in the same way effectively. You pay us for every hour the engine is in service. Now what was ingenious about that was of course it aligned the interests of the people selling the steam engines and the people owning the mines because the people in the country where coal was most expensive most needed to make to save money on coal.

That was Cornwall. Would tip where those there were tin mines quite a long way away from any available coal fields so coal was more expensive there. And so the first Watt engines tended to be installed in places where coal was most expensive which meant the mine owners saved more money and Watt and Boulton made more money. So they were actually capturing the upside. Whereas if all you'd done is said yep it's 100 guineas for a steam engine you wouldn't been capturing any of the upside.

I mean, this was you know, I have to say this this was pretty smart stuff. I mean, what one of the worst mistakes you can make is thinking that people 500 years ago, 300 years ago, 200 years ago were thick. They were very, very clever. And probably they had less time staring at smartphones and more time to be clever, to be absolutely honest. But something I discovered the other day is the Orison straight in Denmark. The Danish crown wanted to charge effectively customs duty on any cargos passing through the straits of Denmark, and they had a kind of stranglehold over it.

And the original thing was they'd send people on board and say, uh, "We'll estimate the value of your cargo and we'll charge you 10%." And they thought this is a lot of bother. So, they said they said to the people passing through the Orison straight, "This isn't like 1350, okay? It was uh you tell us what your cargo's worth, okay? Uh, we'll charge you 10% on that. Oh, and by the way, every now and then we'll randomly buy your cargo at the price you quoted."

Dude, that's like how we pay taxes.

It's ingenious, [laughter] isn't it? Yeah. You you can do property valuation that way, you see? It simply says, "You tell us what your house is worth, and the only deal is we have the right to buy your house for that amount of money."

What's funny is, um, I think that in America, I think it's like I think 0.4%. I could be getting the numbers off. It could but it's like between 0.4 and like 2% of Americans get audited every year. And like if you do the math, it's like I don't know, man. It might be worth pushing it and just get audited once every, uh, 30 years.

actually right. Yeah. I mean, having said that, an IRS audit, from what I've heard, is a living nightmare, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not actually being serious. You know who needs the modern-day horsepower is all of the AI products. You know, if you if you if you have Claude and you have ChatGPT, essentially they're all making the same-looking product, right? It looks like a chat interface and then it you type something and then it gives you something

原文超出正文长度上限，此处截断——上游还有内容，完整版见上方「原文 ↗」。