Making trade-offs explicit so customers choose them in advance is far better than cutting costs and imposing the outcome on them without their knowledge.

Sutherland uses Flat White or Off coffee (pre-made flat whites, no customization, priced at £4, for high-volume train stations), Moxy hotels (tiny rooms, no room service, but great bar and Wi-Fi for short stays), and the Slate truck ($25,000 electric pickup with no frills) as examples of brands that explicitly state the trade-off up front. Customers are happy to accept less in one dimension when they choose it, rather than having it imposed. ✦ AI generated

Rory Sutherland · My First Million · 2026-07-27 · original ↗

The point about flat white or off is it's highquality coffee, not crappy filter coffee that you can produce at scale by simply reducing the customization level. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Henry Ford was a brilliant marketer. Why did he say you could have every any color as long as it's black? Because at the time, paint dried at differing speeds depending on the color. And therefore, if you had a variety of paint colors on the Ford production line, it completely messed up the flow of the production line because some cars would take longer to dry than others. And it turned out that black was the fastest drying color. So, they basically imposed black on the whole Ford fleet. So, it's absolutely fine not to give people something to ask people to make a tradeoff so long as you make them aware of the trade-off in advance. Okay, that's why it's called flat white or off. It doesn't you if you turned up at a branch of Starbucks and they said we we only serve flat whites, right? You go, 'What the hell are you talking about?' No, no, I want a Frappuccino with, you know, almond milk and blah blah blah. No, no. Okay. No, you can't have that. It's, you know, now the reason it's called flat white or off is it makes explicit the tradeoff before someone turns up. So you said if anybody the joke is if anybody turns up and asks for a cappuccino, you point at the logo and you say the answer's in the name. Right now there's an example of this which always fascinates me. Are you a fan of the Moxy hotel chain? ... So it's quite interesting because the rooms are tiny. There's no room service. There's no laundry. Okay. But the ground floor is kind of a bit like a well a solvent we work, right? Okay. And there's a 24-hour barista. There's a you there's a um uh usually there's someone making really quite good cocktails. You check in at the bar. You don't check in at the check-in desk. There isn't a concage. None of that bollocks. Okay? Don't go stay there on your honeymoon. Don't go stay there for a week. But if you've got one or two nights to stay in a place, it's exactly what you want. Okay? It's small room, very good TV, very good Wi-Fi. The other great advantage is after you've checked out in the morning and had breakfast, to be honest, you can hang out there for another 5 hours if you want to, you know, whereas if you tried doing that in a conventional hotel, you'd you'd feel a bit unwanted. It's a it's it's basically a brilliant brilliant explicit trade-off. And they always said when I spoke to them, they said basically 90% of our customers love this. And the reason they love us is either because they've stayed before, they understand the trade-off, and they buy into it. Or else they know about how the moxy works, and they get the deal, and they've decided in advance, that's the trade-off I want. 10% of their customers are expecting the Marriott, and they're pissed off as hell. And it's a classic example of actually, you know, expectation minus reality, you know, is the formula that matters. You can provide less of something so long as you don't actually disappoint.

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