Why You Need to Understand What Motivates Your Customer with Anant Sharma

Mike Lander (00:15.189)
Annant, thanks ever so much for joining me on the Higgle B2B Sales Club podcast. It's great to see you again.

Anant (00:43.722)
Mike, it's always a joy to converse with you.

Mike Lander (00:46.169)
Thank you. For people that are listening, we go back a long way. I mean, a long, long way. Over 10 years, it must be, must be.

Anant (00:55.09)
We met at this sort of supper club about 15 years ago in a basement somewhere. And now you advise us.

Mike Lander (00:58.145)
We did. In a basement somewhere. In a hotel.

Mike Lander (01:05.853)
Exactly, yeah. And we've become friends as well, which is just amazing. So I'm delighted to have you in my life, to be honest. You always bring a very different perspective to my thinking and my world.

Anant (01:14.67)
as am I.

Mike Lander (01:20.757)
So for those of people that don't know you, which is people that are listening, just a bit about yourself, and I know you work for what you do.

Anant (01:28.142)
Sure, so my name is Anant Sharma and I am the CEO and founder of a design consultancy called Matter of Form. And it hasn't always been that easy to describe or position what we do to just say we're a design consultancy because we've had many lives over the last 14 years. And...

Really when we started we were in the business of innovation and digital product development and As we matured as a company and started working with bigger clients. We went from doing stuff that was You know an inverted commerce innovative to doing stuff that was less innovative but for bigger brands We went from innovation to digital transformation and a lot of that involved the plumbing if I'm to be honest It's probably the unhappiest middle stage of my career running this business and

I think the last third we decided to pivot into being a brand led consultancy. So a lot of the work we now do starts with brand, but because we have this pedigree in digital that acts as a loss leader into all sorts of different digital work streams, content work streams, and most importantly, back to our roots.

advising on innovation, how can companies think about their products and services in a way that feels like a natural extension of their brand and sets them up for the future in a way that feels credible and evergreen.

Mike Lander (02:45.241)
And what just a couple of examples of the kind of work that you do, just kind of clients you can talk about or kind of things that you can talk about, what kinds of things do you get involved in?

Anant (02:54.594)
Like I said, most of our work starts with brand. So we will work with large organizations in hospitality, retail, and luxury more broadly, and help them revisit their founding spirit and bring that perspective to.

the current world in which they operate in. So some examples of that. We work with the likes of Belmond, we work with LVMH, we work with D'Agio, we work with developers like DLF in India, and we work with Neon in the Middle East. And we've helped them figure out.

what their positioning is for their, well, everything from cities through to hotels. We help them reorganize their portfolios. So, you know, how can they segment their offerings in a way that makes sense for increasingly niche audiences. And then we design and develop digital experiences and brand experiences. And our focus is really on ensuring that every interaction feels really connected.

And there's a focus of craft on even the most nuanced parts of how that customer experience plays out. We always talk about the choreography of the customer, what's the dance? How do we help enact an experience that just feels really joyful, where even the smallest details and the smallest moments really matter.

Mike Lander (03:58.389)
Mm.

Mike Lander (04:14.521)
So talk about dances. Negotiation was, someone said to me, negotiations like a dance. And someone said negotiations like jazz, where it's improvisation, whereby you have a structure, but it's quite fluid. So just kind of given your experience over the last 10, 15, 20 years of negotiating all kinds of deals, given the kind of journey you've been on.

You talked to me about people make demands in negotiations quite often, so they'll want a certain price or they'll want a discount or they'll want certain terms. But what's important is what's going on behind that, the motivations, what's actually driving someone to say something. Have you got any thoughts on that about how you uncover motivations rather than respond to demands?

Anant (05:08.462)
To answer that question, I'm just going to take a broad, I'm going to drive a bit of perspective actually on how I feel about my own competence as a negotiator. I think I started off as quite a good negotiator. And I think as I grew personally, and as I grew the company, I became far worse. And the root, I think that the,

Mike Lander (05:31.866)
Ah, why's that?

Anant (05:37.602)
This is perspective actually developing as I speak. So let's see what comes out. But the more you know, the more of a technocrat you become and the more you start focusing on the technical problem you're trying to solve. The more naive you are, the more able you are to see the big picture in a funny kind of way, the less encumbered you become by your own.

Mike Lander (05:40.417)
Hmm. Yeah.

Mike Lander (05:58.952)
Mm-hmm.

Anant (06:04.03)
understanding of the issues and problems, the very specific issues and problems that you're actually trying to solve for the client and actually you get quite wood from trees in doing that. So I think taking a step back and really figuring out what the impact of the brief is rather than necessarily what the ask of the brief is, is the first place to start. I always say to my team that

Mike Lander (06:06.36)
Yes.

Mike Lander (06:23.24)
Mm-hmm.

Anant (06:26.798)
you know, I encourage them to sort of, I have a presentation that I do to them, I encourage them to sort of think like a doctor, right? You know, if you're diagnosing someone, they might need for a headache, a neuro-phenol, they might need chemotherapy. I mean, it's a slightly drastic example, but it delivers a simple point really, which is you don't know what the solution for a headache is. Did you really go into the root cause of what's causing that headache? And then you might further that example by asking,

Mike Lander (06:42.008)
Yes.

Mike Lander (06:53.497)
Correct.

Anant (06:56.682)
What that headache is preventing the individual in doing is that headache stopping you making it to a drinks party that evening, one of many drinks parties over the course of your week or month, or is it stopping you making it to your own marriage? And the value of that nirafen is very different in those two contexts.

Mike Lander (07:15.25)
Absolutely.

Anant (07:18.854)
So taking a step back, broadening your aperture on the wider business context in which you're solving a problem and then marrying that solution with impact and risk I think is really important.

Mike Lander (07:33.529)
I mean, I think this, the analogy about being a doctor, I was talking to, or with Blair Enns a while ago, and we were talking about the same thing, about basically he was saying, look, you need to be able to diagnose the problem before you start administering solutions of any kind. And in diagnosing the problem, if the problem's complex enough, that shouldn't be done for free. Doing free diagnostic work, free consultancy.

to help a client unpick a complex problem commercially doesn't make sense.

Anant (08:08.334)
Quite, quite. But there is a level of consultancy that has to happen as a part of the sales process, which I think is important, but it's about knowing where your line in the sand is and providing helpful, valuable perspectives on someone's problem and helping them see the big picture in which that problem exists.

Mike Lander (08:15.341)
Correct. Definitely.

Yes.

Mike Lander (08:28.651)
Exactly.

Anant (08:29.302)
but also understanding your own value, right? And understanding the importance of defining ultimately what the brief is and stopping your clients spending money in the wrong place. And the value of that is priceless.

Mike Lander (08:33.282)
Yep.

Mike Lander (08:44.233)
It is. And we, wow, about 25 years ago, I was taught a phrase by, I was at KPMG at the time in consulting, and we were selling large complex strategy programs. And as a sales technique and ethical sales technique, one of the things that they taught us was

If I was consulting with you and we were getting to know each other and I was talking about your business, one of the things that they taught us to do was say, what we find in your industry and in your sector are the common challenges that organizations face are something like these. And there are normally five kind of key challenges. And the reason that I was taught to do that was because if I tell you what your problems are

the chances are A, I've got them wrong, and B, you'll psychologically reject me because I have no right to tell you what your problems are at all. But if I tell you what other people like you in your sector, what kind of problems they're facing and what kind of challenges over the short, medium and long term they face, and then say, do you do any of these resonate, psychologically you're far more likely to say, yeah.

Out of those five, two of them seem pretty relevant. And then we go to the next level about, well, let's talk about those two.

Anant (10:12.938)
There's a lot to be said there just in how you phrase questions. Asking people to walk you through in a current situation. Open-ended questions that don't jump to solutions. Starting a conversation with, as you rightly said a moment ago, you know typically one might see in situations like this these sort of ailments within a business. You know that

Mike Lander (10:20.856)
Yes.

Mike Lander (10:25.814)
Yes.

Anant (10:40.482)
completely psychologically changes how the conversation is interpreted by the person at the other side of the table. And, you know, like all of this stuff, Mike, you know, people say they want change, but most people when it really comes to it, are terrified by change, especially the more senior they are. You run the risk of exposing...

Mike Lander (10:59.641)
Correct. Yes.

Anant (11:05.834)
yourself and you run the risk of creating a burden and overhead, things you need to learn in order to understand the change that is happening, and you run the risk of undermining your credibility and experience. And that's particularly true when you're selling innovation or design or things where it's hard to express yourself and you're entering a big hairy unknown domain. And

disarming people, being by their side and truly understanding root causes of problems and then simplifying the path forwards, but quantifying every step that needs to be made in terms of risk and value. And risk is risk and value. You know, it's something that I talk about a lot with our team to help them see what exists outside of the remit that we're engaged for.

Anant (12:01.946)
You know we could say we sell You know

deliverables which might include websites or content strategy or user experience or brand positioning but these are all assets ultimately that allow you to access new markets or grow free from risk or Find a new audience without alienating your existing audience or please shareholders or Create additional value in the business that already exists or perhaps open up new revenue streams if you've saturated existing ones or

frankly, in our case, find a more discerning audience who are willing to pay a premium because you can't necessarily scale infinitely and without compromising the quality of your product. So growth comes from increased margin on the same inventory.

Mike Lander (12:41.003)
Yes.

Mike Lander (12:54.797)
So what you're kind of describing in many ways is a discussion you're having with a CEO, a CMO, a CIO. When they're spending half a million dollars plus, the kind of the status quo is very compelling. So that's an anchor that drags us towards, well, let's just keep doing what we've been doing. Let's make some minor incremental changes. To get people away from that,

you have to become the trusted advisor. And to be the trusted advisor, you have to, and it was a book written years ago by a guy called Meister. And he talked about along with his colleagues, you know, trust is made up of several different components. So trust is a, I'm an engineer by training, so I like equations. Trust is equal to credibility, multiplied by, in my case, I would always say,

or plus reliability. So the ability to keep showing up in the same way consistently. Plus your professional intimacy, your ability to build a relationship divided by risk. The ability to reduce the risk for the person making the decision. And I think when we're talking about selling big solutions and big ideas, you've got to leverage all four.

the credibility, the reliability, the professional intimacy, and the risk. You've got to leverage all of those to move a client away from the status quo towards a better future.

Anant (14:34.466)
And I think there's something in there that is very straightforward, that's often overlooked, which is just really understanding what people's job is. What is your job as a CEO and what are the challenges you face? And it sounds a bit cliched, me even saying that, but what I mean by that is, a CEO, no business is an autocracy. Let me start by saying that.

And the CEO, just because they want something, also still struggles to make it happen. They still need to take people on a journey. They need to take people across many different departments who have varying levels of risk appetize on a journey. They need to make every step a small step in the right direction, and they need to make sure all of those steps together add up to some great change or some great vision. And I think, you know...

What I think has come quite naturally to us as a business, perhaps our values of the people we hire or perhaps just the type of fit we have with our clients and hence the areas we've naturally grown in, is just really understanding some of the human challenges people face when they're making change happen and empathizing with that, understanding complex stakeholder environments and marrying blue sky thinking with a really pragmatic sense of implementation and what that journey looks like and what all the steps in that journey look like.

Mike Lander (16:02.537)
And that in itself is a negotiation. You're negotiating with a client. How much change? How quickly? What scale? How would you measure the benefits? What value do we create? I mean, the big thing in negotiation that I talk to a lot of people about is when we're negotiating anything, if you provide a fee, half million dollars,

but a client can't see five to $10 million of value because you haven't articulated that in a meaningful way. Well, don't be surprised if they start to put you under pressure for discounts because you fail to articulate the value creation. So what's your experience of, in your complex world of brand development, how do you start to show the roadmap to where the value is gonna come from?

so they can start to compare the ROI.

Anant (17:04.013)
I mean, it varies a lot from one business to the next. You know, businesses that are already in a strong position, their value and their ability to demand a premium price point and not end up in a race to the bottom comes from brand.

that their ability to marry, obviously, a great product and a great service with something people feel they can empathize with that makes them feel a certain way about themselves, that allows them to express themselves as well, their end customer. Now, of course, if you're...

you know, in a defensive position as an organization, and you are caught in a race to the bottom and you're struggling to differentiate a product that perhaps is more homogeneous, you know, then the conversation is one perhaps more centered around the risk that you need to mitigate, the risk of becoming obsolete or the risk of ending up in a price competition and ultimately being meaningless, being a utility. So it really varies.

Mike Lander (17:44.535)
Hmm.

Anant (18:05.006)
We tend to deal with the higher end of the market, so those who are finding ways to express themselves. And the challenge that we often come up against is we deal with technocrats. We deal with people who are purists or craft-orientated. They can't see wood from trees about what's special about their product or service. And often they think things are special that aren't that special, and they become table stakes in the market. The market's caught up.

Mike Lander (18:07.146)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (18:28.798)
Yeah, yeah.

Anant (18:30.25)
So it's just helping them sift through that and figure out what's really important and what's not, and what are the things that you can truly be the best at, and what does that then mean for the array of products and services that you do have, and how do you create a compelling message that doesn't try and incorporate every aspect of what's great about your business.

Mike Lander (18:49.453)
Exactly. So that point about differentiation, again, within the context of negotiating a deal, whenever I'm talking to agencies, you know, I do a lot of work with agencies, is about that point of differentiation. If a client sees you as being one of many, one of five that can do this work, then unsurprisingly, it becomes a bit of a race to the bottom. Whereas,

If when they talk to you, and I know some of your clients, a number of your clients are in this position, when they talk to you, they find something really different, really truly unique in the way that you think, the way that you deliver solutions, the way that you act, your culture, the value you create. That becomes impossible to compare. And what we're all striving for in business is the ability for a client basically to say, you're the only one.

to help me solve this problem. And if that problem is a big problem and the outcome on the other side is highly valuable, then they will pay a premium for that, providing you can show them a risk reduced route to get there.

Anant (20:06.478)
I mean, I think a lot of that comes from working to incorporate your IP into a more productized process. You know, I think people feel many ways about, you know, the process with a TM at the end of it. And a lot of it is nonsense and ad agencies and all sorts of consultancies have been doing this for a long time.

Mike Lander (20:29.742)
They have.

Anant (20:30.39)
you know, people like to be naysayers about it. But what it does when you give your processor name is it becomes a living, breathing thing that your team understand and your team can feedback critical feedback into, and your team can also incorporate IP that's generated from working with your clients and your marketing and your market perspective and bake it all into one thing that allows you to consistently deliver a process that's, you know.

Yes, you can build a process to be distinct for each client, but it's largely productized and homogenous. Now, I think it's a great fallacy that clients want a unique process for every brief or for every outcome. They want a consistent process that delivers unique outcomes. Now they definitely don't.

Mike Lander (21:13.433)
They do. Yes. But they want it tailored. I mean, I would say that they don't want you to, well, they don't have to squeeze their problem into your standard methodology, but they also don't expect you to have a unique methodology for every single problem that they want to solve. They want some kind of tailoring as you would with a suit in some ways.

Anant (21:32.302)
quite.

Anant (21:37.478)
Exactly. And it's a matter of form, we take the process design component really seriously. You know, we're working at the moment to create, to modularize, is that a word, to turn into modules every component part of our process and encourage the project managers to think less like project managers, but more as process designers. And so we're actually printing.

Mike Lander (21:43.745)
Yeah, I know you do.

Mike Lander (21:59.884)
Right.

Anant (22:03.634)
all of the component parts of our process into playing card style cards, where we gather around a table and we discuss each of the component parts of the process, not in terms of what the deliverable is, but rather in terms of what the big question that process answers is, and what disciplines are then grouped around each of those component parts. So we can design the leanest possible process for our client.

Mike Lander (22:07.989)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Lander (22:21.762)
Yes.

Anant (22:30.022)
and frame it in the context of risk and value. So what is the least amount of things required to make sure that we defend against existential threat, but also set up our practising team to deliver great value? So in answer to your question, it's a balance. You can't just have a boilerplate process for everything, but what you can do is break your process down into

Mike Lander (22:35.702)
Absolutely.

Mike Lander (22:46.665)
Yeah. And that, yeah.

Anant (22:58.178)
component parts that you then reassemble appropriately for each of the tasks at hand. And I do think that's really important as an agency. It's it's you know, what is it that turns us from being a bunch of individuals in a room into a company that consistently learns from its mistakes and is bound together under common culture? Now, that, of course, is values, but it's also past experience. It's also replicability of how we deliver and how we approach, you know.

Mike Lander (23:03.977)
Exactly right. Yeah.

Anant (23:26.818)
complex problems and those problems, people come to us with those problems because they recognize that we've solved similar problems for other people. It's not a great product of total chance and coincidence. It's born of expertise that often promotes the message of your business in ways that you often don't see. It's every failed pitch as much as it is every successful outcome.

Mike Lander (23:35.149)
Correct.

Mike Lander (23:52.521)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's that rare combination of process with amazing people combined with deep understanding of kind of the industry and the problem type. And when you bring that together, it can create a really compelling differentiated offer.

Anant (24:13.87)
Exactly. It's like what fascinates me about agencies and consultancies and service businesses more broadly is it's sort of the subtle cues as a leader or as a leadership team or you know in your work with clients or every time you do a project and then you do the next one slightly differently. It's all the subtle things people pick up on that slowly start changing their own behaviors and bringing them you know into one sort of common direction and all the

Mike Lander (24:38.294)
Yes.

Anant (24:42.954)
the subtle learnings rather than the big headline learnings that ultimately start creating this unique company way of doing things rather than this combination of individuals doing things.

Mike Lander (24:53.513)
Exactly. So you've just like prompted a thought, a question, which is what's the, what if any do you see as the difference between a consultancy and what you do? Are you a consultancy? Are you a service provider? Are you a digital agency? What's the difference then?

Anant (25:15.746)
We're a design consultancy and we call ourselves a design consultancy because, you know, a lot of our work is helping clients define what needs to be done.

You know, five years ago when we had briefs where clients evidently didn't quite know what they needed, you know, there would be a collective eye roll in the business. And now they present our greatest opportunity to make meaningful impact and to help our clients figure out from very, very broad briefs that are two pages rather than very functional briefs that are 15.

Mike Lander (25:55.18)
Yep.

Anant (25:55.766)
They help us define how we can link the work we do and assemble to gather the right suite of skills within the organization and tools and processes to deliver business outcomes. You know, I'm of the real belief that two technical problems might seem the same, but no two business problems are ever the same.

Mike Lander (26:16.641)
Correct.

Anant (26:17.842)
And I think that's really the key difference between being an agency where you have a brief that you enact versus a consultancy where you recognize that you're working from the business problem backwards, all the business opportunity backwards, rather than engaging in a, you know, perhaps well-specified, perhaps less well-specified technical issue. And when I say technical, you know, that...

Mike Lander (26:39.691)
Yeah, yeah.

Anant (26:42.678)
goes as much for design and creative services as it does for what you might think when I say that, which is engineering.

Mike Lander (26:45.6)
Mm.

Mike Lander (26:49.609)
And it takes quite a rare individual to be able to think from the business problem back into, well, what are the options and what are the risks of each option and what's the benefit of each option and how do we configure this to solve your business problem? Not everyone can do that.

Anant (27:06.914)
Exactly. No, it also takes a lot to not just hide behind process and to re-template one project plan because that's how it worked for someone who on the outside seemed like they exist in a similar industry and with a similar problem. I really think no two business problems are the same ever.

Mike Lander (27:15.926)
Yes.

Mike Lander (27:31.785)
Yeah, yeah, completely agree.

Anant (27:34.042)
So, and that's really fun. That's really, it's really, it's a really enjoyable conversation to have with our, with our clients. And, um, you know, it never gets samey. And.

Mike Lander (27:48.441)
So how do you stay ahead of the curve, Anant? How do you stay ahead of your clients that are in the luxury market to see things they can't see?

Anant (28:00.554)
We don't try and be the smartest people in the room. I think our clients engage our services not because they want us to bowl them over with magical thinking. They engage our services because they want to do two things. The first is they want to buy their own headspace and the headspace of their team because by investing with us, they're also investing in themselves.

Mike Lander (28:12.375)
Right.

Anant (28:24.638)
And also because they want to engage in a broader perspective on the market, and they want an outside-in perspective on their business. And the value of those things, I've only slowly realized, is I've grown my business and seen how sometimes I want others to tell me some things I already do know and other things that aren't magic, but they are born of an understanding of the market. And I think, and that's not to say there's not magic produced.

Mike Lander (28:37.675)
Mm.

Mike Lander (28:48.277)
Yes.

Anant (28:54.094)
nor that you do garner very deep insights into the customer and sectors that you work on. But I think it's healthy to go in with that attitude. And, you know, it's very easy to forget that as an agency, we have lots of exposure to things that are new. We have exposure to the C-suite of lots of different businesses that exist within a sector.

we have brilliant exposure to young people who, if they weren't working here, might well be running their own startups or being entrepreneurial themselves. And so being able to apply that entrepreneurial mindset and that broad market perspective to our clients' business, that's actually enough and the magic emerges in the 20%. But when you lead with this expectation that you have to come in with the next provocative trends report, I do think, you know, or provocative consultancy deck.

you know, that has, you know, the sort of LinkedIn-esque power statements about how everything is, how everything is, everything is bad and this is the only way or, or this is great and everything that was terrible, then I think you set yourself up to deliver bad work that doesn't understand this context and doesn't understand that great brand experiences are born of a symphony of touch points working flawlessly together in the world we exist in. Well look, like, let me put it this way actually.

Mike Lander (30:00.397)
Exactly.

Anant (30:21.186)
The world of advertising, which is not the world we're in, but the world of advertising and marketing used to be about pummeling people with increasingly louder and louder messages in the hope that they would buy. And that was obviously very effective when we had four television channels. And perhaps people's attention span was a little bit longer than it is now. But.

Mike Lander (30:38.39)
Yes.

Anant (30:46.918)
I think customers have changed and they qualify out things that aren't trustworthy based on nuances that are actually quite subtle. So most of the work we do is about engaging our clients' customers. In fact, hang on, there's... Have you ever heard of the Benjamin Franklin effect?

Mike Lander (31:09.934)
uh, the other day, but I can't remember what it meant. Explain.

Anant (31:13.806)
There's Benjamin Franklin once famously said, if you want someone to love you, get them to do you a favor. Because if they do you the favor, they'll post rationalize that they must quite like you to have done the favor. And it's what cognitive behavior therapy is based on, right? If you get people to take action.

Mike Lander (31:22.39)
Yes.

Mike Lander (31:27.485)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (31:34.21)
Yes.

Anant (31:34.506)
or a series of small actions, they'll post rationalize that actually they've made those decisions because they believe that those decisions are the right ones, right? So it's you know, you engage in small actions and influences thought with advertising and marketing have traditionally been based on the notion that if you influence thought, you can encourage behaviors. And so I've gone off a bit of a bit of a piece, especially with this example, but

Mike Lander (31:42.274)
That's right.

Mike Lander (31:57.145)
That's okay. Ha ha ha.

Anant (31:59.266)
What I'm really trying to say is, you know, great brand experiences when all of the interactions and all of the touch points work really harmoniously encourage a series of small steps in the right direction or a series of small steps that encourage a level of engagement. And so we're all about those nuanced and quite subtle steps in the right direction for our clients' customers.

Mike Lander (32:19.181)
So we hadn't scripted, in fact, most of this we hadn't scripted. And that was the beauty of what we said we'd do, is that we'd have a discussion. In the last couple of minutes, I just want to ask you a question, something that you've mentioned to me before that I'd like you to kind of like expand on, which is we were having a discussion about friction and about how a lot of brands want to move towards a frictionless consumer experience so that it's easy to purchase or...

easy to find things or whatever it might be. And I remember you saying something, I think this is right, tension can be a good thing. You know, you don't always want it to be frictionless. What did you mean about that?

Anant (33:08.35)
look, I think there are two things going on in life and the world more broadly. There is the removal of friction to create, you know, better utility, like things that we just need to do happening more easily. And then there's, you know, the world of...

you know, the things that you buy into to make you feel something about yourself. And that never happens in an entirely friction free way, right? Without a level of tension, there is no triumph to nod to the hero's journey. You need you need you need you need a level of active engagement, a level of participation in something to feel that you have a level of ownership over the outcome. And I think by removing friction in every aspect of life.

Mike Lander (33:37.869)
Correct.

Anant (34:00.43)
you create a level of anxiety actually. You make things too easy and there's actually this concept called buyer's remorse. And if you convert too quickly, you have basically a come down when you receive the product. And so I think what I say to our clients is they need to be unafraid of putting content between their customer and conversion.

Mike Lander (34:07.909)
There is indeed. Yes.

Mike Lander (34:17.357)
Correct.

Anant (34:29.934)
things that make people feel something about themselves. You know, it's very basic, but if we make up, you know, tech, we work in the world of luxury a lot. I actually hate the term luxury, but we're going to that right now. Luxury is about great comfort and convenience by definition. But the world of tech has actually taken the place of what luxury might have meant previously, you know, we've Uberized everything in life. You can, you can.

Mike Lander (34:39.961)
I know you do.

Mike Lander (34:56.418)
Yes.

Anant (34:59.718)
We're not only not hunting for our food, we're Ubering it into our home. And so I think we're seeking ways of connecting with each other and expressing ourselves. And I think brands can play the conduit to that. So yeah, I think you have to, I only think you wanna make things difficult for your customers at the end of the day, but you just need to.

Mike Lander (35:03.225)
Correct. Yeah. To our detriment, I think. Yes.

Anant (35:24.69)
know when you want to jar people into attention and then in other parts of your customer journey you also want to make things easy for people. But if you optimize everything endlessly, you optimize the joy out of your brand. And a lot of what we do is UX and we come up against a lot of UX agencies sometimes.

Mike Lander (35:27.19)
Yeah.

Mike Lander (35:39.747)
You too.

Anant (35:48.31)
But obviously our perspective is very different because we're brand led UX and we resource projects with a brand strategist and user experience designer. We have that healthy tension between branding but also conversion and removing friction. The UX agencies will be there with recommendations that are, you know, there's nothing left of the brand there. So you're creating a race to the bottom with your product. I mean it's obviously not as simple as I've just made it out but...

Mike Lander (36:15.606)
No, no.

Anant (36:16.662)
I think it's important.

Mike Lander (36:19.513)
creating the ability to stop and make me think or stop and make me feel is how I remain connected. It might just be where I am in my life at the moment, over many years in business and obviously personally. But I'm finding increasingly now it's important to remain connected with friends.

not necessarily in person, but just having a connection of some kind and asking the awkward question or the emotional question to keep it fresh and to keep it bluntly very real. Otherwise it becomes too vanilla.

Anant (37:04.782)
Exactly. Yeah.

Mike Lander (37:06.773)
And I'm hoping that technology doesn't remove that altogether from society. I think that would be horrific. I fear for our children's future if that happens. Anyway, Annant, it's been fantastic. It is what we said it was, which is it will be a void of discovery. We had some prompts. I'm not sure we covered the prompts, which is good. I'm a big believer in if you do the thinking in advance and you prepare your mind, then whatever happens as you move into a conversation...

will become much more natural and free form, which is what this has been.

Anant (37:40.314)
I hate, I mean, I do a podcast as well, Mike, and I'm ashamed to say I never prepare for any of them because it just, I think it's just important to have free-form conversation and just see where things go. And, you know, often that leads to one or two interesting nuggets. And that's, if you take that out of a podcast, I think that makes 30 minutes work well.

Mike Lander (37:54.318)
Correct.

Mike Lander (38:02.549)
Every time I listen to What The Luxe, there's always one thing I take away. And it's great or something new I've learned. And that's what I think podcasting is about, about having a connection, having a discussion, having a bit of structure, but keeping it relatively free flowing. And that's been great. Thank you. Where can people find out more about you?

Anant (38:09.911)
Thank you.

Anant (38:21.726)
Um, it's a good question. Um, uh, perhaps linkedin and antshama or you can have a Google of what the likes, which is our podcast where we cover all sorts of different topics. Um, yeah, do you get in touch?

Mike Lander (38:34.381)
You should definitely, if you're listening to this, definitely listen to What the Luxe. There's some fantastic, fantastic episodes on there about stuff I knew nothing about, which I now know a little bit about. Alan, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Anant (38:46.606)
Kind of you. Thanks Mike.