[Podcast] Friction in Branding with Soon Yu

Friction isn’t something to be avoided. Successful brands not only understand the difference between good and bad friction but also know how to embrace a dose of good friction to create greater value.

Soon Yu, author of ‘Friction: ‘Adding Value By Making People Work for It‘ will show you how to leverage good friction to drive increased engagement, meaning, belonging, rapport, assurance, competence, and exclusivity, for more memorable brand experiences.

Soon Yu is an international speaker, award-winning author, and expert on innovation, branding, design, and entrepreneurship. He has worked with brands such as The North Face, Vans, Timberland, Nautica and Wrangler and is a former adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design, a guest lecturer at Stanford University and a Forbes contributor.

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Show Notes

• Soon Yu’s book

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Today, we have a special guest with us, an international speaker, award-winning author, and expert on innovation, branding, design, and entrepreneurship, Soon Yu. He’s worked with brands like The North Face, Vans, Timberland, Nautica, and Wrangler. He’s a former adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design, as well as a guest lecturer at Stanford University and a Forbes contributor.

So Soon is the co-author of the new book, Friction, Adding Value By Making People Work For It, which we will be exploring today. So welcome to the show, Soon.

Oh, thank you for having me. It’s fun being on with both of you. I kind of looked at your bios, of course.

And we share a lot in common. I think while we were talking as we’re setting up, I think Matt mentioned that you guys are geeks around branding.

I always introduce myself as a brand nerd. I mean, I’ve always been curious about the mystery of brands and how actually brands are kind of like people. You know, like we have relationships with people, we have relationships with brands.

And I’ve always been just fascinated by the concept that we actually have emotional relationships with these brands. And so, yeah, I’ve been so nerdy about it. And I know you guys, that’s all you talk about.

And I feel for your spouses or significant others or boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. I just feel for them because they probably get a lot of it, right, a lot of brand nerd stuff.

My wife, I’m banned from talking about brands.

This is tuned out.

Yeah, tune out, tune out. Welcome anyway, Soon, it’s going to be great. I’ve got a good feeling about this episode.

Really thrilled to have you on.

Thank you. Most definitely. So you’ve worked with a lot of different brands.

So I’m just curious to what your role was within these agencies, I assume, that you’re working at. Do you want to just give us a little bit of background on who is Soon?

I’m a conflicted soul. I started all the way back in high school. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a fashion designer or an engineer because I was actually pretty good at math and I like solving problems.

And I came from a very strict conservative Asian family that was not going to support my fashion design interests at the time. I don’t know why. And so I went into engineering, I was a double E, I was an electrical engineer, and I was doing it for many years.

I even took some time off between my junior and senior year and worked for a company called AMD. They’re like a competitor to Intel. They make microchips, whatever.

And I hated it, guys. I just realized this is not for me. I was interfacing with terminals and computers and spreadsheets and I was bored to death.

And so I basically interviewed with anybody that would take me when I was graduating as a senior in college and that was non-engineering. And I remember interviewing, I know you guys have an international crowd. Well, there’s this big grocery chain called Safeway.

Yeah, it’s in the UK, well, it was in the UK. I don’t know if it is anymore.

Okay, what’s their name here? And I even introduced for their produce training program. Yeah, yeah, I didn’t know anything about produce.

And so they asked me, hey, can you name some lettuces? And I’m like, iceberg, red leaf, maybe butter. And I said three.

I didn’t realize it was like a hundred, right? Anyway, so the guy said to me, you know, HP is next door. Why aren’t you interviewing with them?

I’m like, no, no, no, I really want to do something else. And somehow I ended up going into consulting. I worked at a big consulting from one of the big ones, Bain.

And I hated that even more, guys. Because you’re like, I don’t know, 21, 22 years old, and you’re telling a bunch of 40 or 50-year-olds how to run their business, and you don’t know Jack Diddley, right? And I just, boy, that’s when I first experienced the idea of imposter syndrome, okay?

Anyway, I spent most of my career trying to get back to what I love most, which is this idea of being a brand nerd. And so then I actually went to business school, and during business school, we were tempted by all these consulting offers and eye banking and all, you know, and no, I kind of wanted to manage a brand. And so I worked for Clorox.

You guys know Clorox? Big bleach company? Okay, at least take them, those are the biggest bleach company in the US, okay?

And they own lots of brands. They don’t just own bleach. So I got hired to manage one of the most sexy parts of the business.

I got to manage the toilet bowl cleaning business.

Nice, okay.

And in managing toilet bowl cleaners, what I quickly realized is actually I do love brands because it doesn’t matter how ugly your brand is or how dumb your brand is or how fat your brand is or whatever, it’s your brand. It’s kind of like having your kid. You’re gonna make sure that your kid is clothed, fed, educated, got the best opportunities possible.

And even in managing something as sexy as toilet bowl cleaners, I learned to fall in love with the idea of building a brand. Okay? And so, and then from there, I left Clorox and I was an entrepreneur for quite a few years.

And if you, you were very kind to me, Jacob, and that you didn’t look up my Wiki, because if you look up my Wiki, it actually says that I’m the poster child for web excess and stupidity.

And it had to do with, you know, I’ve probably done maybe seven startups in my life. Most of them have failed. A couple were successful.

And, you know, I’ve had a lot of track record of major failures in life. And so not only being a brand nerd, I actually had a strong curiosity of how are other people’s building brands much better than I could, you know? And that actually led me to a path of working not only in Clorox, but also at another company called Chiquita, you guys familiar with the bananas?

Chiquita bananas? Okay, a couple of head nods here, okay. And I worked there for a while, and then I worked at an apparel company.

I finally got back into fashion and was somewhat in design. It was an innovation for a company called VF. They have about 30 brands, North Face, Vans, Timberland, Supreme, back then it was Seven for Mankind, whole bunch.

And it’s so funny, I came full circle. By the way, when I was at Chiquita, this is how much I came full circle. I actually helped them launch their healthy salads business and we did packaged salads.

So I can name 50 lettuces now.

Congratulations.

So from only naming two or three, to now being able to name 50, and then full circle to finally, not being an engineer, but actually getting into fricking fashion and design and realizing how much I love that.

Before you just go on, I was just curious your role in these companies. Like what were you actually doing for these brands? You mentioned management, but what was your involvement?

Sure. So when I was at Clorox, I was a brand manager. So basically, I had the objective of, I was in charge of the P&L, I was in charge of the branding, the brand communication, the marketing.

And then my job was to work with all the other cross-functional groups, such as R&D products, supply chain sales, to execute a lot of the plans that we would create to build the brand. And so, yeah, we were in charge of the P&L, and so that’s what our performance was measured on and our pay was measured on. So that was brand management.

At Chiquita, I was in charge of new products and marketing. And then when I went to VF, it was innovation. But it was interesting, innovation, I would define it as helping sort of inspire new ideas into the organization.

A lot of those new ideas were about brand building. A lot of those new ideas were about new ways to commercialize the brands. Some of it was around supply chain and some of it was around new business models.

But a majority of my time was spent about how to actually use innovation to grow the brands, both from a marketing point of view and a distribution slash retail point of view. Does that help?

Yes, definitely. Yeah, it just gives them context.

Yeah. And by the way, I was just finishing how I became an author is I kind of just figured out, hey, I learned a lot of things from other people, not necessarily from myself. And I thought, you know, hey, it’d be great to just share that back.

And so that’s why I wrote my first book, which was Iconic Advantage. And now the second book, which is Friction.

Awesome, we’ll get into Friction. So now we have the background experience of, you know, where your mind comes from and how you came to, yeah, cross the board. But yeah, a true interest.

So, you know, how did you actually come to write the first book? And then we can get into the next one, right? So how did you come to write Iconic Advantage?

And then how did that flow into your new book, Friction?

So what inspired me to write Iconic Advantage is while I was at VF, one of the things I was also responsible for, and I think, Matt, you’re probably gonna have an appreciation of this, was how to elevate the design function, design capability at VF. And one of the things we quickly realized is, even though we were an apparel company and we designed our clothes, we didn’t have a centralized design function. We had really no one championing our designers.

And when we did an audit, we realized we actually had 700 designers in the organization. Yeah, 700 designers. And prior to me doing an audit, no one had any clue.

And it was usually at a function that was either buried under marketing or buried under product, but it never was sort of something that actually was called out on its own and it had a center of excellence around it. So in doing that, I researched about 50 different companies around how they were building great design, focused organizations and realizing great value from that. And in that sort of discovery and sort of researching these 50 companies, I also looked at companies that had iconic brands.

And there was a couple aha moments when I looked at it. A lot of these companies had a portfolio brands and inside of that portfolio, there were some brands that were so-so, but the ones that were really successful were all the ones that had reached iconic status. And when you looked at it empirically, all the iconic brands inside the portfolio or any companies that had iconic assets, those generally had almost like anywhere from 5X to 10X to sometimes 100X the profitability of all the other brands.

So in VF, when I look at our top 14 iconic brands and products out of 6,000 products, those 14 represented 35% of our revenue and 40% of our profit, just those 14, right? And we had what, 5,900 and blah, blah, blah, additional ones making up. So it was an incredible realization.

The other thing I realized when I researched these 50 companies is there’s actually an intentional strategy that people focus on in terms of building brands that stand the test of time for something that they’re known for. And with that longevity, they become the standard bearer for that point of distinction. And by being the standard bearer, they eventually become iconic.

And then what I did in the book was kind of reverse engineer from that strategy, what are the principles, and then the specific best practices and tactics related to bringing those principles to life in many different types of businesses, from the Amazons and Googles to the BMWs, Berberis and Nikes of the world. And so, yeah, that’s how the first book came about. And we asked a simple question, what makes an iconic brand iconic?

And these are things you guys talk about in like, all throughout your podcast, you guys are all over this. I should have just called you two and just said, can I write my book based on top of the YouTube, right? It would have been so much easier, trust me, than researching 50 companies, right?

But anyway, it’s three things, distinction. So there’s something they’re known for, something that helps them stand out versus the competition, something that they’re better at than other people, a point of distinction. Then whatever that point of distinction is, it’s highly, highly relevant to the audience, customers, consumers that they want to appeal to.

Now, the key about this relevance is what I was talking about earlier. It’s not just that it’s relevant at this moment. It was relevant before, and it’s gonna be relevant in the future.

So it’s this idea of creating timeless relevance that was one of the other key components of… So they had, for this distinction, timeless relevance. And the third thing they did on it was make sure that they got widely recognized for that distinctive relevance.

And by having that timelessness, they achieved longevity, become the standard bear, and thereby become iconic. So knowing that it’s distinction, relevance, and the idea of gaining your recognition, what can you do with that? So the book talks about, it’s a simple framework.

There’s three things that you wanna focus on. First is noticing power. Does your brand have any noticing power?

Does it stand up? Is there something that helps you distinguish this brand versus the competition? So I always ask brands, can people tell you apart?

Are you just like everybody else? And then whatever that point of distinction, is it important? Is it relevant?

Is it meaningful to your audience? And is it gonna be meaningful not only yesterday, today, but how are you gonna make sure that you maintain that sort of relevance? And then lastly, okay, so I talk about staying power.

So the second one is notice power, staying power. And the third one is, make sure there’s enough people know about it. Are we scaling that distinctive relevance?

So it’s scaling power. So those are the three things. And on the first one, on noticing power, what I realized is that great brands that are iconic tend to have what I call signature elements that help serve as reminders or shortcuts to what the brand is really cool or what that distinct relevance is.

So I’ll give you a couple of examples, simple on Nike, right? The Nike Air, it has that little bubble on its sole. And every time you see that, that’s one of its signature elements.

And it’s great because most trainers lose about 40% of their support in their lifetime. But a pocket of air never loses its balance. And so it kind of, you know, sort of signifies this idea of buoyancy and support.

Another simple one would be the lime in the neck of a Corona beer. Cause every time you see that, you’re immediately get the flashback that this is your vacation beer. This is you back at Cabo.

You could be in Sydney or in London or wherever. Well, you guys actually, those are pretty fun place. Okay, London in winter when it’s raining, okay?

It never happens, right? And you could put a lime in the neck of the beer. And I’ll say, you’ve got a memory back to when you were visiting a good old Jacob there in Sydney, right?

So, you know, cause it’s always warm there, right? Always. So anyway, as I was unpacking that, there was like all these different signature elements.

And one of the most important categories of signature elements is what I call signature experiences. And as we were helping clients both recognize the signature experiences that they already owned and create new ones, here’s the aha moment that came to us. The whole world had been, through digital, through retail, through whatever, had been really focused on making all the brand experiences as seamless as possible, as frictionless as possible, right?

Making everything like anticipating your thought and it’s already there. That type of stuff, right? And what we realize is that’s actually not a great way to create a good signature because people, you become forgettable.

And if the way you win people is by being the easiest, most convenient, and the old adage we were talking about earlier is this idea that how you acquire a customer is oftentimes how you will keep them. So if you acquire it by being the most frictionless and seamless, well, guess what? If somebody else comes up with a better mouse trap that’s even more seamless or frictionless, it’s just easy for the consumer to just swap because that’s all they care about, right?

So instead, you actually need to think about making experiences that make people laugh, cry, sweat, you know, consider you, think about you, linger on you, you know, fester, you know, percolate. And because you actually need to add friction back into the system. And so, a-ha came to us is that not all frictions created equal.

There is a lot of bad friction, stuff that’s irritable, stuff that’s redundant, stuff that, you know, creates uncertainty or risk, but there’s also a lot of good friction that’s really required to elicit dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins and adrenaline. I know you guys are chemical nerds too, in the right way, right?

Yeah, let’s just clarify that. My mom might be listening, right? No, I think that’s amazing.

Can I ask you a quick question here? How much do you think the concept of surprise is important to this idea?

Hey, anything that makes your heart skip a beat or jump or your pulse race, that’s good friction most of the time. Sometimes it’s not.

And sometimes you’re like, was it fear, right? But yeah, no, I think surprise is a huge element. I’ll give you a simple example.

And it’s less about surprise, but let me get this idea of drama, okay? You’re, Sidney, close enough to New Zealand, right? That’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings.

And we all know the goal of Lord of the Rings, right? It’s really simple. Destroy the fricking ring, right?

And it’s funny, you know, in the beginning of the movie, they needed to destroy the ring. So they understood that, at least they were aligned on the objective. And they had their silly offsite in Rivendell.

Remember that little offsite they had with a bunch of elves and all men, right? I mean, it was like three of us here, right? Lack of diversity, okay?

And let’s face it, they came up with a pretty, you know, half ass idea because they decided to say, hey, let’s give it to, okay, Frodo, maybe I get it, but he was still pretty suspect to the whims of the ring, you know, to the will of the ring. He wasn’t immune to it, right? And then, hey, let’s figure out a journey that’s gonna take 12 months.

And we’re gonna go over these big mountains with snow and wizards kind of like trying to create avalanches. And then we’re gonna go into caves with a bunch of orcs and that with that big Bollister guy. Remember that guy that took Gandalf down and then they had to go through orc-infested swamp, whatever, it was high, high degree of friction.

Yeah, three of us were in Rivendale. Okay, we would obviously be munching on the lambas bread, you know, and kicking back, right? But we’d also just say, look, hey, what is the middle earth equivalent of FedEx?

What could get us over to Mount Doom in two hours if we could actually fly there? Oh, the eagles, right? You know, I’m sure Jacob would have said, eagles, eagles, eagles, he’d be all over our butts, right, Matt?

I mean, I’m all over eagles, so if anyone knows football, right, I’m from South London, right, so I’m a Crystal Palace fan. They are the eagles, and so that would have definitely come to mind, right? That would have been automatic.

So we would have said, Ganoff, can you put the ring in a magic box that you can’t put a finger in? Okay, one, okay? Since you never put it on, let’s hang a necklace, put it on Mr. Eagle friend here, fly over to Mount Doom in an hour or two, drop it off, done.

But that’s seamless, frictionless, but honestly boring, right? It would have been so boring, and it would hold missed the drama of the hero’s journey, where, you know, you go from super excited to the valley of desperation and despair, but then the climb back up to the higher plateau, and the climb is all about, you know, you know, finding new determination and grit and then finding new friends to help you through it. And it’s that whole journey that made the story so much more interesting.

And that was all about friction.

Love it. Love it. It’s the same with them.

Something that comes to my mind is like fruit machines, right? The whole thing’s the spinny thing, and it’s like you could just press a button, bang, you be the one or not. But they create this kind of drama.

Not that I’m a gambling man, but you see it, and all these lights flash. I don’t quite understand all that stuff, but you kind of get the sense that no one quite knows if it’s gonna land on the right thing or not. So it’s friction, right?

It’s not an immediate answer, yes or no. How dull would that be? You just got to a fruit machine and you press the button, it goes, yes or no.

And then, you know, you just, how boring is that? What are you saying?

You’re saying a fruit machine. Is that like a, the Pokemon machine?

A slot machine.

A slot machine.

A family slot machine, you know, the one on the end.

It’s like the dustbin in a trash can, all over again.

Oh no, we’ve been talking about this before we came online. Before we came online, yeah. It’s maybe an English thing, maybe I’ve got it wrong.

Both of them could be correct. But yeah, so, yeah, so, you know, what do you call it, a slot machine where you put your money in?

It is a slot machine.

Tries to line up the little fruit. So I call it a fruit machine, but you know, no fruit comes out, I don’t think.

You know, to your point, Matt, it’s so interesting. So when you look at the old slot machines that were manual, you have independent wheels on all of them, right?

Yeah.

And it was this idea that one wheel has been a little faster than the other, and then you’d always wait to the very last wheel to spin, right, to see, and it would be like, it’s kind of like the Wheel of Fortune in the US, that TV show, that, you know, you could just press a button and it could be a randomizer, and they’ll say, oh, you’re yellow, you’re green, you’re 100, you know, but to your point, it is the idea that we just don’t know if it’s going to flip this way or flip that way. Anticipation. Anticipation, it’s dopamine, fricking dopamine.

It is, it is.

I would totally try to like create dopamine there. And even when they went fully digital, they did the same thing, the noise sounds the same, you know, even though it’s a digital screen, they make it feel like there’s wheels turning and then you’re not quite sure. But you know, the slot machines have gone fully digital, which is kind of, which is funny.

It’s more money.

So, yeah, that’s what the book is primarily about. I’ll share with you guys a real simple example of good and bad friction, is that okay?

I was going to ask that anyway, so thanks for leading. We’ll just let you talk for the next hour. I think we’ll be good.

So let’s think about, okay, we have a big box store that sells a lot of electronics called Best Buy here in the US right? And you guys might have something similar where you’re at, whatever, one of those big box stores. Imagine going to one of those and buying a USB flash drive.

Generally speaking, they’re over-packaged, right? They come in all this, like, it’s just a little USB, but it comes in this big plastic thing and it’s like clam-shelled, and so to open it, you not only have to take your Fiskr orange-handled scissors and cut it open, right? You remember that?

Then you have to actually pry open that plastic and it’s a painful process to just get the little USB stick. You know, over-packaged, takes you five minutes to open the damn package and you sometimes break a nail or quite frankly, you know, scratch yourself doing it. All right, so that’s bad friction.

Well, here’s another company that actually takes 15 to 20 minutes to actually unveil their product. So it actually takes almost four times as long. Have you ever bought an Apple anything?

iPhone? Have you kept the package? Whenever I ask this in the audience, I go, how many people have bought an Apple product and everybody’s hand?

How many of you kept at least one package? No hand ever comes down. I’m like, why?

Do you still use it again? No, no, no, no. I’ve asked them, okay, how many have kept?

Okay, three, four, five. The most I’ve had is somebody’s kept 18 Apple packages, okay? But that’s an example of good Friction where they decided to treat their product like a treasure and their package like a treasure chest.

And so there’s multiple layers. And then sometimes in each layer, there’s actually a separate set of instructions for this and you have to read it. And then you have to do a bunch of inputs and put your name in here and do a password there.

And by the time you’re done, it’s like my son took 20 minutes setting up his, what is it, the Apple Watch. It was as fun as 20 minutes he had at Christmas, right? It was the 20 minutes that he remembers the most.

And to me, that’s an example of a signature for Apple, which is the unveiling of the product and an example of using good friction to elevate it.

Yeah, you often talk about these signature experiences. So that’s kind of one signature experience. I’m not sure if we go into more examples or if we talk about how we could apply this to our own brands or brands that we’re working for.

So I work with a lot of clients. And when we’re thinking about this idea of, how do you create a signature experience? And I learned a lot of this from BMW actually.

So what they often do is, which you two are experts at, they look at a product and then they think about the journey of the experience, the journey of the product. And they work with their customers to map out a very simple sequential set of what I call the journey map, right? You guys are familiar with the customer journey maps, right?

And what they taught me was that not every moment in that journey is the same. They are really key or keen at identifying the most pivotal moments in the journey that drive the maximum amount of brand love, brand hate, brand consideration. And they have a very, very, what I call, thorough process in doing that.

I’m not that sophisticated. So basically all I do is I work with clients and we do a very simple journey map. Sometimes we bring in their customers or sometimes they just do it themselves because they’ve been their customers, right?

And we get it all mapped out. And what we do is I just say, go into that little map. And I learned this when I went to London actually, when I was at Heathrow and at the end of the security checkpoint, they have a place where they have a smiley face, a frowny face and kind of an in-between face and you can push the button or whether it’s green, yellow or red for writing their service.

I go, hey, why don’t we just use that? So basically, all I ask people to do is on that journey map, go in there and put happy faces for the moments where you actually had a positive experience or emotion, put sad faces where it was really frustrating and I added one other which is put sweaty faces, a little sweat for places where you are either confused or frustrated and if you have like four or five of your consumers or customers do that, take a look at where you have the most amount of faces. Guess what?

Those are probably the areas in your customer journey that have the highest leverage to impact the brand consideration, brand love, brand heat, brand hate, whatever it is and so that’s first. That’s how you identify pivotal moments in a customer journey. Really simple using the little tool I learned at Heathrow Airport, okay?

Then what you wanna do because those matters, those moments matter more than other moments because they have high emotional quotient in them. Pick one of them and think about how might we, to your point earlier, Matt, when you said this, how might we create an element of surprise? How might we overshoot people’s expectations?

Like, whoa, I didn’t think you’d do it this way, okay? And then use it as a way to, and then the other thing I asked him to marry it to is, can we also then use whatever that signature experience is to reinforce what is the most important, your key point of difference about your brand, okay? And if we can create the intersection of finding a pivotal moment with something that also helps communicate what’s so cool about your brand, then voila, you’re gonna create a really cool signature experience.

And you know, Disney actually did this. They did the whole mapping, and they kind of figured out one of their most crappy pivotal moments is waiting in queues. This was about 10 or 15 years ago.

Queue waiting was the worst. I mean, you go to Disney World or whatever, and you know, sometimes like the Matterhorn or was it the… Anyway, some of them you’d be waiting an hour or two, okay?

And they realized that’s a bad pivotal moment. So they said, well, how do we flip it? And they worked with Frog Design, and they thought about, well, how might we make this not just something where it’s not a bad moment, actually it becomes a good moment.

And that’s how they actually developed the Magic Band. The Magic Band now becomes something where they said, well, it’s not just a band that gets you, you know, to your favorite ride as quickly as possible. When you enter the gates, they know who you are.

They know when your birthday is, they know what your tenor area is. They can say, hello, Matt, hello, Jacob, you know, and your son, whatever, blah, blah, your daughter, blah, blah, blah. I know it’s their birthday.

Guess what? Tomorrow we have a cake waiting for them in the town hall. And imagine your kid coming in, that’s the first thing they’re greeted with, right?

And then what’s so cool is they actually have this restaurant called Be Our Guest. And it’s kind of mirrored after the, what’s that one with the Beauty and the Beast, right? And basically, because they know the Magic Band, where you are at any point in the park, they know if you’re going to be late an hour, they know if you’re going to be late 15 minutes, and they’re guaranteed, no matter when you show up, no matter how early you are, how late you are, it’s guaranteed that your food will be on the table in five minutes of when you arrive to the restaurant.

You know, I mean, talk about elevating an experience using that Magic Band. Magic Band is then used for everything throughout the park. And it even begins really early on after you buy your tickets, they send you this whole welcome kit, and then you get to customize with your kids, each individual’s Magic Band, what color they want, what character they want, they put the name on it.

And, you know, so it’s all this friction that’s created because of this little band that was mainly done to minimize queues.

Amazing. Love it.

That’s brilliant. Thank you for sharing that. So do you have a process that you run through?

I know you have the voting system, but do you have a process that you run through to, you know, is there a system that can actually help create a signature experience to create some friction to elevate that, I guess, or the magic, if you will?

We have a framework. So as I said earlier, the first step is journey mapping. The second step is let’s find this pivotal moments, identify them.

Then within that, identify one or two moments. You can’t have 10. Okay, pick one or two that you’re gonna, let’s say, double down on, okay?

And invest time and energy, not only to reduce the bad friction, but then once you’ve reduced the bad friction, I think of it as sort of a blank canvas. How do you paint in all the good friction? And the framework we then use to think about painting in good friction is we have a simple mnemonic called embrace, okay?

So think about opportunities to create engagement, right? Is there ways where, you know what? There’s a little more back and forth.

Okay, all right, that’s interesting. There’s a little more storytelling, okay? There’s a little more gamification.

I’ll give you an example of this idea of engagement. At the North Face in Korea, these guys were so creative. Basically, they had this store.

You walk in and they wait till there’s only one customer in there. The employees bolt, okay? They turn on a switch and then automatically, the door closes, you can’t get out, the floor starts descending on you, okay?

And it just so happens that there’s one wall that has the rock climbing, grab onto those things. And then once the floor is fully out, okay? Actually, the floor does this.

It comes out from underneath you, okay? And they look down and go, oh my God, I’m gonna fall like 10 feet, okay? And then all of a sudden, there’s a screen that comes on and it says, 15 seconds, the jacket is yours.

Grab it, okay? And so then they have to, then the timer goes off, right? Okay, bam, bam.

And they have to basically rock climb their way up to the top. There’s a brand new jacket that had come down with the top of the line, $2,000 North Face jacket, right? You have to jump and grab it.

And underneath you can tell there’s the cushioning, right? But it’s a pretty significant drop, right? And I mean, talk about dopamine, talk about engagement, talk about like making you sweat, right?

And oh my God.

I’m feeling stressed right now.

But you might walk out with the $2,000 jackets for free too, right?

That’s a fair point.

So that’s like true gamification. So is there a way to create some interaction, some point of stress and consideration? And so that’s one, that’s part of the first seed.

Meaning, that’s the second one. People love meaning. So can you story tell, can you give a little more backstory?

Can you actually have them customize it a bit? Because anytime you customize it and there’s personal touches that you put into the co-creation of whatever it is, it means something more to you, right? So meaning, the next one is belonging, this idea of are there opportunities to have you not only create engagement and meaning, but create either community or interaction with other people with shared values, shared love of the brand, shared experiences.

And all of a sudden it’s like, hey, I’m not in this by myself. I’m in it with other people. So the sense of like, hey, we have a shared experience now.

The next one, EMBR, rapport. Rapport is a really interesting one. I think of rapport as, and here’s a good example.

Benjamin Franklin had this one rival who basically hated him, but they actually shared something in common in that they both loved the books. So Benjamin Franklin thought, you know, the best way, here’s an opportunity to get to know this person and here’s how I’m going to do it. I’m not going to talk about books.

I’m going to ask him if I can borrow his most precious book. I’m just going to go out right now and say, hey, I know this is, can I borrow that book from you? And it’s like, this is my precious book.

And the guy thought of it and goes, wow, okay. And he lent it to Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin read it and said, oh, I love this.

Thank you so much. And it’s interesting. A one way to build rapport isn’t just to do a favor for somebody, but it’s actually to ask a favor from me.

Because the minute you ask something from somebody, they’re vested in you, right? You know, you ever thought about that? It’s like, huh.

And now all of a sudden, you know, they’ve had to think about you. They actually had to sweat a little bit to say, yeah, I’m going to actually have to put some effort in to do something for this person who I don’t necessarily really like. But now you have a shared experience or something shared in common.

And so that same thing applies in terms of building rapport. Assurance. Sometimes actually to create assurance, you know, we’ve all done the double verification emails, right?

That’s high friction, like, I got to put in another code. You know, inconveniences actually add to the experience. Do you guys remember back in the 80s, maybe you guys are both too young for that, but in the 80s, Thailand all had a big scare.

They had cyanide laced in a lot of the bottles and a bunch of people died from it. And Thailand all had to pull off all of their bottles, okay? And that’s what created, which is now of course standard, the triple, what I call the triple assurance packaging.

So not only is the outside package, the paper package, you know, sealed a certain way, you get the child-resistant cap and then you got to seal, even once you take it off the cap on top of that. Before Tylenol used to be something that you could just, you know, open the package, the paper package and open it up and put in Sinai. But now if we don’t have those inconveniences, we would feel very insecure about buying a product that didn’t have a whole bunch of inconveniences, let’s say, okay?

And then the last two are competence. You know, people like to be able to demonstrate that they’re good at something. In order to do that, to gain mastery, give them tests, give them challenges, give them things that help demonstrate or improve their skill sets.

If it comes too easy, you don’t appreciate it as much. And the last one is exclusivity. You know, if you can make something hard to get, or at least seemingly hard to get, people value it a lot more.

So those are all the things that we, you know, take people through different opportunities. And there’s techniques in each one of them, but we ask them to think about embrace in order to get adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. I love that.

And I guess there’s a bit of a cortisol in there as well, a bit of danger, like what if they don’t get it, you know? So there’s kind of like alert, like your brain’s like, ching, what’s the danger? What’s the situation here?

But I love that, the dopamine at the end, the oxytocin when everyone breathes a sigh of relief and hugs and cheers. Brilliant, like love it. I think those categories are so strong.

From a brand perspective, then, you run teams through this. You say, look, let’s walk through each of these stages. And then you mentioned there’s different techniques, but I guess the aim of it is to intentionally design an experience which is friction-full in that sense, but in a good way.

Do you ever think, Soon, that there’s friction that’s negative, that’s poorly executed, that’s bad? Just kind of wanted to flip this on its head. Any thoughts on bad friction?

Sure, so going back to the Disney example, part of the original design of the magic band, the impetus of that was around reducing cues. And what they originally designed is bands that would pee on people’s wrists and that they could basically map out the man’s supply. Like, okay, all right, there is the weight line in Paris of the Caribbean seems pretty low, and we have to have a little profile on Matt and Jacob.

And Jacob likes Paris of the Caribbean. You like the teacups, right?

Cup of tea for the British.

And so I said, oh, well, guess what? Jacob is near Paris of the Caribbean. We’re gonna send him, because the magic band is connected to your mobile phone, we’re gonna send him a quick text letting him know the wait time is only two minutes, okay?

All right, and so all of a sudden, it was a way to actually direct traffic to match what people’s preferences were with what was available to them with the shortest amount of time. And so they could better distribute supply and demand than throughout the, what happens a lot with these cues is that just everybody goes to the most common thing all at the same time, right? And the most popular thing all at the same time, right?

And so what they did is, you both may like the safari ride, but they figured out a way where maybe you go in the afternoon, Jacob, and Matt, you go in the morning. And then instead, for the morning, you’ll be doing parts of Caribbean and you’ll be doing Dumbo later.

I like that we’re separated. That’s great by me. I’m with you.

It makes sense. So, but what does that have to do with negative? Why?

That was actually the reason. So when you do the pivotal moments and you know, the first thing you have to look at is, okay, if there’s a bunch of frowny faces or sad faces and sweaty faces, you have to solve that first. You have to get rid of that.

You can’t add happy moments when there’s still a bunch of frowny faces there. So the first thing we do in our exercises, how do we get rid of the irritants, the frustrations, the redundancies, the uncertainty or the risk? And so the first half of the exercise is all about reduction of the bad friction.

First identifying what is that bad friction? And then how do we eliminate, reduce it, or get it to what I call point of parity so it doesn’t rise to a level where it’s like so bad that it just stands out. Once we’ve done that, then we’ll turn our attention to say, okay, now, once we’ve created sort of a blank canvas of friction, how do we add either, how do we keep whatever good friction is there, retain it, enhance it, or add new good friction in?

But we don’t ever go to the good friction until we’ve done the exercise of reducing the bad friction. Bad friction, here’s another aha moment. If you try to add good friction on a situation that has bad friction, it actually becomes more bad friction.

If you’re already in a bad mood and you’re trying to add more consequences, I’m just gonna be more pissed off at you.

Yeah, because you’re like, oh, just stop trying to put a plaster over this. This is horrific.

You’re game of time, my anger and frustration. What the hell are you thinking?

So I’ve got a thought on this, right, because I recently been thinking about problem framing, right? I just wonder if you’ve heard of this. Have you heard of the elevator problem?

Have you heard of this concept?

No, please, I wanna know.

So let’s just imagine, for example, you own an apartment, right? And you keep getting complaints from the tenants in your apartment block that the elevator is too slow, right? They’re furious.

They’re just, people are threatening to quit, leave your apartment, right? Not great. So you could do two things.

The first thing you could do is say, take that as red. The problem is the elevator is too slow. And then you could explore an expensive solution, for example, upgrading the elevator mechanism, et cetera.

So that’s what most you naturally, your brain naturally goes to, because you’re being told that that’s the problem. But the interesting question is, have we framed the problem correctly, right? So what if we frame the problem just slightly differently, which after talking to tenants, and we found that actually when we asked, why is it too slow, et cetera, that the real problem was that they were frustrated waiting.

So the problem goes from the elevator being too small, too slow to people being angry because the waiting experience is horrible. So then you could begin to explore, I mean, you still may have to fix the elevator and make it quicker, right? I don’t know, how slow is this elevator?

Who knows? But at least if you could reframe it, you might then want to explore other solutions, like what could we put into the waiting experience to make that less painful or more useful to people? For example, if we put some mirrors up outside the lifts, we could put hand sanitizer units outside, we could play some nice music, we could change the experience, I don’t know, for them.

And so, in that way, it’s possible that we could not necessarily have to spend a huge amount to change the elevator, and they may be less inclined to complain if their waiting experience was different. So that’s the elevator problem. There’s probably those of other people listening to this podcast that’ll be like, Matt, you’ve not explained that right.

But that’s in my simple head, the way that’s a good way to explain problem framing and working through that. Do you ever do that? Do you ever think like, okay, they’re frustrated here.

Let’s explore why they’re frustrated. Let’s see what options are there. Just wanted to, have you ever heard of that?

And what are your thoughts on the elevator problem?

I love the elevator problem. I guess I’ve never framed it as the elevator problem, but I love the way you’re framing it. It’s great.

I’ve learned something, thank you. What we have done though, is we’ve asked the question to your point, how might you take something that on the surface seems frustrating, pull apart that frustration and try to pinpoint and sort of isolate why it’s frustrating. Yes.

And intentionally, instead of just saying it’s long elevators, it’s just the waiting, right? Or slow elevators, right? But then how might you turn a bad friction into a good friction?

And to your point, you know, there was a hot pot chain in China called, I don’t know what it is in English, but they called it Haidi Lao, okay? And they were so popular that the queues were often two hours, okay? And, you know, I know Japanese culture, which is if there’s a queue, that means that’s, you know, they love the wait, they love the, the dopamine for eating your 10-minute ramen after waiting two hours, that payout somehow is really meaningful to the Japanese culture.

For me, I can’t handle it, but that’s okay. Out of my way in some way. And what they decided to do is exactly the elevator problem.

They said, okay, let’s make these two hours entertainment for people. And so now they have manicurists, pedicurists. They had a lot of their prep was now, instead of doing it before they opened, they actually did it in front of people.

So they actually have people spinning the yeast to make it into noodles, okay? So they actually did it in front of you, right? It was really cool.

And then they decided to open up parts of the kitchen so that they were all glass, so that you actually saw what they were making and you’re like, oh, I can’t wait to order that or I can’t wait to order that. And they only made the sexy part of it, you know, visible, not the like, I gotta pull out the dots and all that, right?

Put that behind the scenes, put that behind there.

And then they had magic shows. And so all of a sudden it became this, well, yeah, we wanna eat, but everyone planned ahead that we’re gonna show up two hours early because we wanna be entertained. We wanna be engaged.

We wanna, you know, hey, there’s a menu of things we could do. And it became like a carnival. And so that’s exactly what they did, is they said, all right, well, how might we take a bad frustration and instead make it a good frustration?

Or not frustrated, but a good friction.

Love it.

Love it. I think, was there anything else from your book that is, would be useful to add to this conversation?

Please buy it.

But no. Well, on that, where will people basically be able to get hold of it soon when, you know.

Like everybody else, we’re in Amazon, you know. So you can get the book, the audio book, the hard or paperback copies. The other thing I’d probably just say is this, you know, when you’re thinking about design of brands, think about this idea of how you might make the brand experience stand out more, and how might that brand experience that stands out more really reflect your brand DNA and your key points of difference and the key benefits that you deliver.

And when you’re doing that, just go through the process that we talked about in terms of thinking about embracing. And, you know, we have a simple mnemonic. It’s Embrace A-Dose of Good Friction.

Embrace stands for engagement, meaning, belonging, rapport, assurance, competence, and exclusivity, okay? A-Dose basically is adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphin, okay? So as you go about it, think about how you generate those happy chemicals by focusing on those seven virtues of good friction.

And that will get you a long way in terms of designing brand experiences that aren’t forgettable. They’re actually very memorable because consumers are spending more time with you, laughing more, crying more, sweating a lot more. And to your point, you know, anticipating all the potential consequences for being engaged with you.

And I think the, you know, I think that was a great ad, Matt, was the idea of we’re adding consequences, but in a good way.

I love it. Yeah. Hey, I have one other question for you, right?

This bit of a practical question as we sort of draw things, you know, to a close. So, you know, when you go into businesses, who are you working with? Because what I find is businesses are complex or, you know, they’re complex and they’re difficult, right?

And you can have the world’s most amazing experiential idea, but executing and getting a business to orientate around that idea can be very challenging. So I just wondered if we could sort of last sort of question is to wind up around, how do you get businesses to see it and then deliver on it? Particularly if there’s like cross-functional requirements needed to deliver against that.

Do you have any thoughts on that and what do you do to make sure businesses actually do this stuff?

Yeah, somebody shared with me that when you think about customer engagement, you have to think about three audiences and, you know, ideally it’s the same person, oftentimes it’s not, right? So the first party is the one that actually has the need, okay? Whatever you’re doing, they actually have a need, right?

The second one, unfortunately, may not be the same person, which is who has the approval for it, okay? So oftentimes you may be talking to a manager or a senior manager, but, you know, they need to get a director or VP to kind of approve it. So as you are trying to sell an engagement, you need to think about who has the need, that’s the first person you need to talk to, because if you don’t talk to that person, forget it, it doesn’t matter.

The second person you have to think about, who actually has the approval, okay? And what is their mindset as a stakeholder? And do they have the same either frame of mind, needs, or are they actually have different considerations and you need to speak in a different language to them in order to get the approval.

The third one, it may not, and again, it may not be the same person here, who has the budget. Because sometimes the approval still doesn’t have the budget, right? Because, oh, it might be, I approve, but you know, we have no money for it, sorry, or whatever.

And that could be a whole separate group. That might be two or three people to get the budget. So oftentimes selling in business can be difficult because you have to think about those three things.

And ideally you want to find one stakeholder that actually has both the budget, the need, and has the authority to go ahead and green light you. In larger organizations, I’m not gonna name them my big clients, but there’s a ton of them, right? It’s not that simple sometimes.

And to your point, when you talk about the need, sometimes the need is very clear, but the solution requires cross-functionality, right? Okay, well, the need is clear from one part of the organization. Well, then you have to help that part become a champion and be able to sell to the other parts of the ecosystem that creates the solution.

Love it. As a sole proprietor, you have to think about all those things when you go in and you meet with somebody and understand that if you really wanna get from, I’m interested to your approved, you have to think on those terms from, I get your need, I totally have the answer for you and I’m gonna be awesome for you, to how do I help you make sure that you win over the people that you need to be successful to get approval and to get money.

Love that. So yeah, get in there. You gotta think a bit bigger than just the solution, haven’t you?

You’ve gotta think about those other business side of things. And I think that’s a really great way to sort of end and to kind of hopefully allow it to become a practical end to some of the great thinking that we’ve heard. So thanks, thanks Soon.

It’s been fantastic having you on. My mind’s been blown a few times.

Mine too, by the way, guys.

It’s been good fun. Jacob, any last words?

I guess where people can find you if they want to connect with you. Obviously, Book Friction by Soon Yu is what you can look up, but where can someone connect with you?

Yeah, I mean, just you can find me on my website. It’s very simple, S-O-O-N, Soon, and then Yu is yu.com. So, you know, that, and if you just search up my name, that should come up.

There’s not a lot of Soon Yu’s.

No, it’s a great name, isn’t it? It’s a great name. So, sadly, there’s a few Matt Davies’ around, but there’s only one with a beard that’s real.

Well, you came up first when I went into LinkedIn, so that was good.

Oh, happy days, happy days.

So it’s great, so it’s great, yeah. Well, I have to wrestle with a fictional wrestler with my name, Jacob Cass. It’s part of a group.

Is that right? A fictional wrestler? One guy has a, there is a Matt Davies, who is quite a famous cartoonist here in the UK.

Yeah, it’s quite frustrating. So, you know, he’s brilliant as well, which makes him a beard.

He’s not here to get any hourly rates, who cares?

Yeah, he does not have a beard. So, you know, Matt Davies with a beard, you’ll get me. Soon, thanks so much for coming on.

It’s been really good fun. Really enjoyed that. Thank you so much.

Thank you guys, have a good one.