443. The Birth of Consumer Choice w/ Jason Voiovich

Welcome to episode 443 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Jason Vojovic, author of Booze Babe and the Little Black Dress. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Jason Vojovic. In a career that Spans more than 25 years, Jason has launched hundreds of new products, everything from medical devices to virtual healthcare systems to non dairy consumer cheese to next generation alternatives to the dreaded cone of shame for pets to reproductive aids for cows.

He is a graduate of the University.

Of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota and has completed postgraduate studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. While he says that his formal training has been invaluable, he credits his success to growing up in a family of artists, immigrants and entrepreneurs. They taught him how to carefully observe the world, see patterns before others notice them, and use those insights to create new innovations. History is Jason's favorite way to observe the world, and he believes the people from the past have plenty to teach us about the challenges and opportunities we face today. That is so true and a great primer for our conversation today, which is all about Jason's book, Booze, Babe and the Little Black How Innovators of the Roaring Twenties Created the Consumer Revolution. The stories are fascinating and the lessons are absolutely invaluable as you consider your business, the history of consumer choice in the US and so much more. I love this book and conversation and I'm sure you will too. Really quickly, before we get into our chat, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Jason and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 443. Now let's jump right in. Jason Vojovic, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you very much. I can't wait to have this discussion. I think it's going to be really exciting.

Oh, agreed. I know. I've been just gushing about how excited I am about this book and conversation with you and behind the scenes with my husband. And everyone else about how fascinating the insights are from your new book. Before we jump into that though, can you share a little bit for everyone who doesn't yet know you about yourself and the work that you do?

Yeah, of course. I am a fractional chief Marketing Officer and Chief Innovation Officer. My job is to help organizations that can't afford a full time person come in and help them get new products, ideas and concepts to market. That's really my area of specialty. Rather than the kind of promotional side of marketing like social media and advertising. Although I was trained in that as well. I have focused my practice on getting new products out to market. That's where I find it's just, it's fascinating to me. It is extraordinarily difficult, yet everyone needs to do it right.

And so in this chicken egg world, I have to ask about of course, the interest in, you know, history of product launch and just general history awareness and, and marketing, you know, so have you always loved history and then you saw the tie into marketing or you know, how did this all. How did you become you?

That's a good question. I think for me I've always loved history. I've. I think it was more of a, a like most of us, right, we have a teacher in grade school or high school and I can remember a few in particular that got me interested in it. And you know, teachers out there who might be listening, you do have an impact on students, you know, there you can really inspire them. And I picked up history in the big long form history, the ones from Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The big thick books that have a third of the book in the back is all of the source notes and the bibliography. Those are just fascinating to me. I just loved them. And when I got into innovation, new product development, one thing I noticed was that innovation just by design is forward looking, right? You know, we think about what we are going to do in the future, what new things we're going to do. And it is very rare to have anyone in our field really take a careful look back at how those innovations came to be. Now you see that on occasion. But if you were to compare that to the amount that's written about World War II or that's written about the Civil War or politics, it's just a tiny fraction. And what was what I found is that I could use those same sort of skills and really my interest and love of history and apply all of that to the study of innovation and invention and consumer behavior and consumer choice. And that would give me a leg up instead of just knowing what I could possibly know. I could know what thousands of people have possibly known in the past. I get all of that benefit in my practice and for the, you know, for the, for my clients. That's, it's invaluable.

Absolutely. And I know that when we did our, you know, prep convo that we were talking about, the people are maybe having this thought in their mind of the, oh yes, those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. But you have a spin on this phrase, right?

Yeah, I just. History can be so negative sometimes. It's, you know, I think when people are positive, it's viewed as almost like childlike, like, oh, yeah, well, the real story was really negative, but you're kind of putting a spin on it. You're being a booster. I guess I don't see it that way. I think the more you read about history, the more complex it is. And I think those who study history have the opportunity to repeat it. There is so much positive that's happened that got us to the point where we are. And if we look at that and think, well, gosh, just think about the environment we're in, the technology we're using. Maybe you're listening to this in your car and maybe your car is self driving you and you're listening via Bluetooth and via a cell phone, via satellite gps, you know exactly where you are. Those things just didn't happen. You know, someone, and really a lot of someones over many years had to make that happen. This positive, wonderful series of events happened to get us to this great point. And I think we deserve to know about all the good stuff too. There's plenty of bad stuff. Let's learn about the good stuff.

Yeah, for sure. And as you were doing your research, so one and I know I told you I was going to ask about this being, you know, how do you find your sources? What is your process of finding? So in this book you're talking about all these insights, discoveries, these sort of untold stories of the 1920s. You know, how does one find an untold story from the 1920s?

I think it's what's interesting about any era is you kind of have to start with the right mindset. And part of it is, okay, there are certain eras of history that have a narrative, right? And what was the narrative of the 1920s? The 1920s was this great Gatsby kind of era with parties and flappers and prohibition. And then it was like this 10 year party. And then on October 1929, the party stopped and we had a 10 year hangover then that was called the Great Depression. And that's pretty much if you think about most history classes you've taken, that's sort of what the 1920s was all about. If it gets any attention at all, it's, it's very, very little. So really with an era like that, that is just not. Just look at the number of books you can find on the 1920s on Amazon. Do a search. Mine is one of maybe 15 or 16 books dedicated to that era. No joke. So really it's kind of thinking, well, there's fertile ground right there. Because you know that in 10 years in the United States, a lot of stuff happened and it's just a matter of, well, it started to. There were, there were things that happened that came out of different spots. And you can't look at just a history of the 1920s. So that's one thing. The mindset is critical. A couple of other great sources of just information about consumer behavior and about innovation in general. Look for those books on Amazon that don't have a lot of reviews. Look for dissertations, look for things. And sometimes you can find them with, okay, there's been a popular article written about something and the author of said book got to write a popular article about it that got published in Forbes or some someplace and they have to kind of stick to a 500 word kind of format. But if you go back and read their book, their book might only have 20 or 30 reviews on Amazon. It may not have sold that well, but it's full of data and it's full of all of the primary sources that they went to look at. And all over the place, all of these universities have kept all of these records and most of them you can access online. So for instance, when I'm doing research on Charles Drew, for instance, the inventor of Scotch tape, he'll feature prominently in my next book, the follow up to that one. Well, the library, the Minnesota History center, keeps digital records on all kinds of stuff for him. You can look at his original notes, you can look at his original advertisements. All of the research that 3M did in the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1930s, you can look at all of that stuff. All of this stuff is available. You just need to go find it, love it.

And definitely, as you were saying, you know, in the article, we look for the citations, right? And the citation. Citation and the citations, right. Like doing the archeology of research to go and find those source articles, right? Like taking the time to say, but what else? Like, yes, and you know, let's get to this deeper piece to start putting those stories together.

I think it's really important people think, well, that's kind of what academics do. Or that's not really important for me. I don't have the time for that. Here's why it's important. When you're thinking about behavioral economics, you're thinking about the root of why consumers make the choices they do, why do people do what they do, and how do you really understand it? The problem is it's kind of like playing it. This process in reverse is kind of like a game of telephone, right? The original source document gets simplified into a book, the book gets simplified into an article, the article gets simplified into a ChatGPT prompt. And by the time you're done, what you've realized is you have so little of the actual information left that. And what you might get at the end is just unrecognizable from what the actual source document said. Now, sometimes you get a pretty clear and accurate representation of what was going on, at least one piece of it, but the true story is so much more rich. And when we're trying to think about how do people make decisions, you know, either with financial or non financial, emotional or rational means, getting to the heart of the original data is critical. Otherwise we risk making very fundamental errors in, you know, in our assumptions. If we have bad assumptions, we'll make bad decisions. So it is just critical if there's a topic that's important to you, there is no excuse, there is no substitute for primary source documents, for sure.

Well, and I know in that way that, you know, survivorship bias is a big problem of the world of research, right? As we go through this and the who wrote the story, their hindsight bias of what they think happened or what should have been the case, or what they want to be the story. As you go to say what, what you believe probably happened versus like you were saying. I know you told me you look through the actual newspapers and not just for the main headlines, but like, what were the ads about, right? How were they talking about things? And when you start to see like, whoa, this, I'm seeing this ad over here, I'm seeing it over here, I'm seeing it again, like maybe then you start to see some trends and really be understanding these things worked, why did they work? And you know, let's see how that all kind of comes together for what we can learn for today's. Products and innovations.

I think it's interesting, one of the more of my favorite primary source documents is actually what you just mentioned. It's advertising. And one of the things I like about advertising is that because oftentimes you don't have sales data or actual opinion survey data from these. I mean, boy, you might not even have it from a year ago, much less 100 years ago. So what's interesting about advertising is that it's an, it's a natural experiment, right, that organizations advertise based on what they think will work, what will drive sales. If a particular advertisement works, meaning it drives sales, they keep doing it. If it doesn't, you don't see it again. So when you look at a history of advertising over the course of maybe five years and you see a little experimentation at first, and then all of a sudden you start to see advertising settle into a set of messages. You can, yeah, you can read whatever an author, you know, with an ax to grind has to say about that particular product decades later. But the reality is, if you want to know how people made a decision at that time, advertising is a great way to know what messages were working. And I see that all the time. In the early days of radio, the early car advertisements, we know exactly what messages were working and what customer, how customers were making their decisions because we saw how advertising changed over time. And you know, the very different ads from the early 1920s to ads at the end of the 1920s were fundamentally different and they helped us see a clear shift in how consumers thought about the choice making process.

Right. And this perfectly has a segue into the question I have for you now, which is, and I know you wrote an entire book answering this question, but what is it about the 1920s that made this the, you know, decade of consumer choice? Right, the. The beginning of consumer choice. Why is the 1920s so important in that?

I think that when people talk about consumer culture, they talk about it in terms of us buying stuff and kind of our decisions are commercial decisions. But in reality, when you think about, when you kind of scratch below that surface, you start to realize, well, what's underneath there is the choice making process. And really how we started to get to what I call mass choice. And why is that word important kind of mass choice? Well, it's related to three other concepts. Mass production, mass finance and mass marketing. Those are different. You know, mass production was part of the industrial revolution. We just had more stuff. Mass marketing was all about convincing us to buy that stuff. We had so much more capacity we could do so many more things. Well, the factories would, you know, wouldn't have a whole lot to do after everyone bought their first toaster, why would you ever want another one? You kind of had to convince people they wanted a new toaster. And if people couldn't afford it, we had to figure out how to give people the capital and the financial means in order to do that. Now that's taking a very kind of capitalist producer centric way to look at the world. Like we're going to put all these things in place. Ergo, the dumb monkeys on the other side of the equation will just do what we tell them to do. What none of them realized, except for a few. Alfred Sloan, the head of gm, was one of them who realized that the consumers really drove all three of those things and their choice making power. In the 1920s when all three of those things came together in one decade. We talk about the Roaring twenties. That's what was roaring about it, that all of us as American consumers got to make choices on everything in our lives for the first time. And we had to learn how to do it. And not just with the products we bought, with the information that we consumed and kind of our own identities, how we even saw ourselves. So it's a lot more than what we bought in the 1920s. It was a critical, pivotal decade in that our kind of modern concept of who we are was born. That 100 years ago and that story had not been told. And I felt like I had to tell it.

I love that. And I'm so glad that you brought up Sloan and gm. And I think there's a big reason, of course, why this is so early on in the book. When we think about automobile innovation so often, people talk about Henry Ford for good reason. Right. That was an important thing. He did a lot of great stuff with the Model T. But there's this other massive, amazing story that is so much about how we've gotten to the culture that we have from cars and beyond. And so can you please, please tell us a little bit about this story of all the amazing things that happened at GM in the 20s.

Yeah, a lot of idolizing Henry Ford is absolutely justified in driving down the price of the vehicle to the point where it became something that just wasn't a kind of a rich guy toy. Because that's what cars were before Henry Ford and the Model T. They were just. Only rich people could afford them. They were one off, one of a kind, and you couldn't maintain them. It was just a mess. So no bank would finance was there are very few cars anywhere. But you know, what Henry Ford did was drive down the cost. What most people don't know is every year the Model T was in service, the price dropped, which is crazy when you think about it, that inflation was happening in the 1920s just like it's happening today in some ways. Worse yet, the price went down all the time. So it was becoming kind of a big deal. And every other company looked at that they were under pressure to find a way to compete with Henry Ford. I mean, think about that for a second. This. The Model T was more than half of all cars in 1925. Half of all cars sold were a Model T. That is just crazy. That's like F150 today, right? Just like all cars are F150s. So what Alfred Sloan and GM realized is that once people had their first car, what, you know, what they, what Henry Ford was missing was he was taking a very mass production way to look at cars, just drive down the price. What Alfred Sloan was the, probably the first innovator to realize in the 1920s was that the culture was changing and that people were becoming choice makers and they wanted choice. And if GM could give them choice, they would fit with that kind of buyer behavior and they would fit with that zeitgeist. So what GM did was they operationalized choice in the manufacturing process. So what did that mean? A few things. Two in particular. One was the model year change. So every year that we, we take it for granted now that every year there's a new model of car coming out and we get excited about it and big things happen. The same thing happens in fashion. The same thing happens in your iPhone. The same thing happens all over the place. There's a new model here. Well, in 1925 that was like a technological impossibility. Alfred Sloan built the management system in order to deliver that. Not just with engineering, with manufacturing, with sales, with marketing, it all had to come together. And he had this kind of engineering policy committee that he developed inside of GM to be able to do that. Just this management innovation, that's his name, is still on the side of MIT Sloan School of of Management for darn good reason. He was the first person to figure that cooperative model out. This is not command and control scientific management. This is cooperative customer first, you know, management a hundred years before anyone coined those terms. So he had that so he could deliver a new car every year. But whoa, okay, well, that was nice. That was more frequently than the Model T came out. But still it didn't give people the real choice. The second thing that GM created was the product ladder. And what that meant was at. And you can see that today with the Chevrolet, the Buick and the Cadillac. And there used to be more model plates. Some of your older people will remember something called an Oldsmobile, something called a Pontiac. And there were even more back then. But let's just simplify it. The Chevrolet was kind of the cheaper model. Buick was middle of the line, and Cadillac was the top end. If you look at those cars under the hood, though, they're very similar. They share a lot of components. So what Sloan was able to do was able to give people a number of different choices based on their price points. So were they looking for economy or were they looking for luxury? He could give them kind of a ladder of different choices. And if you bought in at one point in the ladder and you became a GM person using air quotes, well, the next car, you could step up to the next one, and you'd already have some familiarity with it. So really, those two things, you know, the being able to do the model year change and being able to figure out how to give people real choice in there, were the two critical innovations. I would say two of the three. Three critical innovations. I'm sure you want to hear about the third one, because that's really all about behavioral economics, is the third one it is financing? Yes. And many of your folks will probably may have even gotten a loan through gmac. GMAC stands for the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, founded in the 1920s by Guess who. You know, it was Sloan and really Billy Durant who kind of came up with the original idea for it. But the whole idea was that you could finance a car before that point. There were installment payment plans before that time, let's be clear. But no one in their right mind would finance a car. It was just too big of a purchase. And remember, banks are looking at this like, hey, this is toys for rich guys. We're not financing toys for rich guys. And by the way, that Henry Ford guy down the street, he, you can get a car for 200 bucks from that guy. Why are we going to finance a 400 or 500 or $600 Cadillac when you could go get that one? What GMAC did, they said, listen, we will let you put down a certain amount of money and then have a monthly payment for a certain number. Stop me if you've heard this one. This is how they all work now. They created the auto installment plan, which did a couple of things. One from a Behavioral economics perspective, it changed the calculus of how people thought about the price of the car. Instead of it was a $500 car, now it was a $50 a month car. That's a very different way to think about things. You know, that it's part of your household budget versus this one big purchase. That's very different. The second thing, though, kind of the interesting thing, maybe some people say insidious thing, but the interesting thing is, let's say that you're looking at, you know, a car and There is a $300 car and a $350 car. Well, you think about those additional features. And if you think, well, the monthly payment is only a dollar or two more per month, I can afford that. You know what I really want? Those leather seats. I'm going to pony up the extra five bucks a month to get those or whatever it would cost, adjusted for inflation. So it really changed the buying psychology of the car. And the bottom line is that people think about Ford, and rightly so, is a real innovator. But what they don't realize is that by 1930, GM had completely surpassed Ford and would, would never look back. And for the next 60 years was the top selling vehicle in the world, by the way, and was something like 60% of all cars sold and the biggest company on the planet for decades. So it was, yes, it was Henry Ford that figured out how to make a cheap car. It was GM that figured out how to park one in every garage.

When we look at the, just the scale of this, right? So like you said, over half of all cars were Model T's. And then to have this pendulum swing to say over that very quickly, then over 60% of cars are GM in some capacity, right? Like some massive shift as we have all of this happening, financing being part of this. And Ford by the time they realized, oh, we should be changing out some models, oh, we should look at a different form of financing versus the not so appealing layaway type of version that they came up with, you know, so they, they tried to do some stuff, but it was too late. And by the time, I mean, obviously it's worked out okay for Ford, but it took a long time to catch up when they weren't considering consumer choice in the same way as the decisions that were made for that Model T.

I think that's really what it comes down to in terms of mindsets. And Henry Ford had what I would call kind of a 19th century mindset. Alfred Sloan had a 20th century mindset. And the 19th century mindset was production focused. It was pushed to the consumer because there was nothing there. I mean, he was the first one to deliver an affordable car that is completely reasonable. But once that Rubicon had been crossed, then it became kind of the. The balance of power shifted to the consumer and to the choice maker. And Alfred Sloan was really the first one who realized that he needed to think differently about that. Otherwise his company was never going to be able to compete with Ford. And it was just kind of that difference in perspective. It's not that GM didn't have to master mass production. In fact, there's an argument to say that being able to not only do a new model every year and retool a factory every year, Remember Henry Ford, to stop making the Model T and to make the Model A had to complete, completely shut down his factory. Alfred Sloan had to do no such thing. Like, they were flexible on the floor. They could respond to consumer demand a lot faster. Not only that, to also be able to have not just one model or a couple of variants on that model, but as many as 15 to 20 different models coming out of that factory was in many ways much more innovative than what Henry Ford was able to do during that time. So just an amazing kind of mindset shift that really drove that kind of innovation, for sure.

Well, and taking it. So as you were saying in this conversation, thinking about anchoring, understanding the context that people are in and what it is that they're dealing with day in and day out and the value proposition. So there's another story in the book that's looking at this for sewing machines and the financing for those. And so many home ownership, so many things that are talked about that all happened at the same time. It's amazing to see all of what happened in the 20s. I could see why you wanted to write a book about it, you know, but if you just think about as a consumer, you know, you go to, you know, go look at cars and say, okay, so this basic, basic thing is $200 I have to have right now that's available. I could get this other thing that's way nicer that I can just pay $50 for right now. And like, yeah, I have to do $50 tomorrow, $50 the. Or next month and the month after. But why would I do that? And actually, I don't even need the lowest model over here. I can afford to put, you know, $100 down from the. And save that $100 that I have already that's ready for me for next month and the month after. I'VE got those payments, like, why would I possibly buy this other thing? Right. When you look at it from that perspective, it's so clear why this happened and why context is always so important when you understand, you know, who you're selling to, what they want to buy, what they're dealing with. Now you just have to think about all of that when you go to translate this into modern innovation and products. Right?

I think so. That one thing that was interesting at the time that you still see, by the way, is a lot of hand wringing about, okay, well, people should be saving their money. And back then it was just this kind of moralistic kind of idea. And there are all these different kind of moralists who would talk about, well, you know, you know, the Model T is the, you know, you shouldn't need any more than that and that meets the needs. And it was this very utilitarian, moral kind of way to look at it. And the reality is it didn't work any better then than it does now, that, hey, if I can get something today for the low, low price of Klarna or whatever, you know, the situation is, I'm not going to listen to anybody who's telling me about how dangerous that might be ten years from now. That just isn't the way people think about it. And if, you know, if we just think, all right, how effective might our messaging be to, you know, to get people to think about that, telling them that they really shouldn't have this thing that other people get to have, they shouldn't, they should sacrifice because, you know, there will be some long term thing in the future is not a message that plays really well. And you can be, you know, positive about that, you can be negative about that, you can kind of wring your hands about it. But I think the first, if you see it as a problem, and many people do, the first step in solving the problem is seeing it how it is and not imagining people are. What was the phrase? I love the homo economist. You know, where people are rational beings, we know that they're not. And with the first thing we need to do is stop thinking that because it was the same back then, it is as it is now. Same issues.

Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, time discounting being one of the concepts you're really talking about there, which I call that I'll start Monday effect and knowing that there's, you know, in the same way that we can say if, you know, we don't learn from history, doomed to repeat it, versus we have the opportunity right there's light and dark to all of these concepts. We're not going to change those fundamentals of human behavior and decision making. But when we understand them and we can see how they played out when there was a boom of all these things happening at once, we can start to look around and see, well, what's happening now that I might be able to get ahead of. Right. Like what's, what's to come. So at that point, I. It's hard for me as I was listening to this and just talking about radio, right. And the emergence of radio, and I was of course thinking about, you know, the birth of podcasting, which has happened, and how that has changed a lot of the world as well, and starting to feel some, you know, similarities to the work that I do. But can you share a little bit about what radio, why was that even important as we looked at this choice culture and what happened in the 20s?

Radio is an interesting case study in choice making for a couple of reasons, I think. One is that, you know, with radio now, remember, we didn't have time delays, we didn't have recording. You couldn't listen to it later, okay. So you needed to make a choice based on what you were going to listen to in the moment. It was very immediate medium, it was live, it was there. So it provided people a way to experience something. I mean, imagine the difference between reading about a baseball game and listening to it live. There's just something different about it and there's, there's that kind of urgency and immediacy that if you are not listening right now, you are missing it. So this is absolutely fomo. It's fear of missing out. And that really messed with people in the 1920s. It really forced them to think about kind of this choice making process in what they, how they were going to spend their time and how they were going to kind of allocate, you know, the same 24 we've all got. You know, that is the one kind of level of equality that we all have is we have the same 24 hours. It just didn't matter of how we spend them. And podcasting is very much the same way that although we can time delay them and we can record, we can listen to them later. There's only so many you can listen to only in so much amount of time. Attention is the scarce resource. And in the 1920s, we really realized for the first time, and that's what radio taught us as a choice making society, is that the number one thing that all marketers are, if no matter what they tell you, what they are working on is attention management. Because it is so difficult to capture attention, to hold attention and to monetize attention. It is a critical thing. And radio was the first time that we really understood that in a very tangible way. And that happened during the 1920s. Of course, radio predates the 1920s, but commercial radio at a large scale, that is what we would recognize today as radio came about during that time with KDKA in Pittsburgh and WGN in Chicago and places like that. Those are the first ones where we'd really recognize it as radio that you'd actually listen to.

Absolutely. And just thinking about those who's listening and when. And I loved when you were talking about with, you know, how baseball. And of course, we have Babe Ruth, which is a key feature from the book, one of the pieces that make it into the title. But even to say, you know, so the reason that baseball is so fascinating being that it has so many games and you're able to then look at the different times of day and the different days of the week and who's listening. Right. So are you talking about how, you know, the person running the station, a woman, I believe. Right. That's doing this fantastic. Right. And that she says, hey, you know, during the week, you know, this is going to be moms listening with their children, and then they have something to talk about. And night games or, you know, something on the weekend is more likely that we want to be advertising products for men. And we want to be thinking about this idea of the family outing, of going to the baseball game and something that we can get together and talk about what happened. And maybe the kids are feeling dad in about the game when he gets back from work because he did miss it. And you have this opportunity to have this, you know, connected family moment at the root of this and knowing that the products that are advertised are changing based on the day part, the time part. Right. And that's just such an important thing that we're able to think about now. But we, you know, can be thankful to, you know, baseball and the, you know, 1920s.

I think it's what's interesting about all that is that most people kind of take for granted that if you open up a hunting and fishing magazine that you're going to see hunting and fishing stuff advertised in it. You know, it. It. But you got to understand that before then that just didn't exist. We did not have audience segmentation like that. We didn't really understand who was listening to what and when radio was the first media, because of its urgency and because of its time, boxing and day parting, was the first one that taught all media, not just radio, but it also taught newspapers and magazines. Oh, wait a second. We need to start getting really clear on who's listening and when and what sponsors are going to want to advertise at which day parts, at which games, at which types of things. And the very first measurement of okay, I'm going to do an a B test of I'm going to advertise on this program versus this program and I'm going to make the ad slightly different and I'm going to see how many people show up for this one versus how many people show up for that one. And this is the very first time you get that level of sophistication in understanding buyer behavior. And radio was what taught us as you know, it really, we had to learn from consumer choice. And that's really the theme is that all of these innovators, if they listened to consumers and respected consumer behavior and psychology, they succeeded. When they didn't, they failed. It's as simple as that. And radio is a great case study in really helping us understand that.

Absolutely. And while I have all the questions on all the things I want to talk about so many, I'm going to restrict myself in this moment and I feel as we are going to talk about one kind of last area that I think was so key, especially as we look at the behavioral economics perspective here is that identity piece and being able to go from having, you know, one set of clothes and to having many and looking at the way we think about our cars and how we dress and how we. The books that we have on the shelf. And it's not about actually reading them sometimes it's just showing that you have them right. Because of what it says about you as a person and understanding that, you know, getting that Book of the Month Club order delivered and having something to talk about with people that camaraderie, the hurting, the social proof and those social norms and identity I absolutely love. Can you share some more about all of what was happening there in 20s?

Yeah, it's funny, the. That is the origin, by the way, you mentioned that of the Book of the Month Club and. Yeah, yeah, it really, it was fascinating. It was an advertising person who figured out his. His first idea was to put the classics, you know, classics in a little leather library. That was kind of the idea.

I love this story, by the way, like just from listening to it. I'm so excited to talk about this so I'm going to let you go, I promise. But like, the framing of this for everybody listening, we've got our alliteration in it as we look at how they frame the pricing of it and the bundling. Love it. Continue.

Yeah, it was, it was fantastic. We wanted to get the. Basically the idea was the. The nineteen teens and nineteen hundreds. Nineteen teens. You just have to understand what happened during that time. The population of the United States exploded with new immigration. So you had this huge number of new people coming in who wanted desperately to not only fit into American culture, but wanted to be seen as successful and part of the middle class. One of the ways you did that at that time was you read the classics. You read Shakespeare, you read Melville, you read all of the top authors, and you read those classics. The Greeks, the Romans, all of that stuff. You wanted to have it, you wanted to read it. So what was important, though, is it wasn't as much that you read it, is that you had it. And this is, you know, when people think about consumer culture and they think about choice culture, they think it is about the acquisition of stuff. That's part of it, but it's also about what those, what those possessions say about us. And you mentioned social proof just to have that on your, your mantelpiece. Let's say you are a recent immigrant family from Ireland fleeing the potato famine, and you want to, you're making a name for yourself in, you know, in New York in Hell's Kitchen. And, you know, your, your dad was a cop and you want to, you know, you want to kind of get into the, you know, get into politics. Maybe your last name is Kennedy and you want to show that. You want to be able to show that you are cultured and sophisticated, not an immigrant kind of using the air quotes. You desperately wanted to show that you were higher class. Having that little leather library of classics on your bookshelf was an immediate signal to people coming over that you, you had it together. The problem, of course, was that there are only so many immigrant families, there are only so many people. So what we needed to do is someone needed to figure out, okay, how do you kind of get. Keep that going? And what, what the Book of the Month club figured out was that there were going to be new classics all the time. Books were a way to signal culture. They were virtue signaling 100 years before anyone talked about that. Virtue signaling is a really old thing, by the way. But this was driven by consumer choice, you know, so the book you had on your shelf was important things like, you know, you know, Hemingway's books or, you know, Upton Sinclair or whatever you had on your shelf communicated to people that you were in the know whether or not you read it. And the whole idea was that you signed up for this service that would deliver cultural status in a box every month. So it was the first box subscription service a hundred years before anyone figured that out. This was the very first one that you could. You signed up for this and you always had the newest thing. You always had the smart looking book. And if you were to go down to the store, you know, go down to the department store and pick out the latest stuff from Coco Chanel, you could also look like a million bucks and have your bookshelf look like a million bucks all at the same time. It really is the same sort of thing. The Book of the Month Club and Coco Chanel's Fashion were really the same thing. They are serving the same behavioral, psychological purpose. You don't need. You could just go to the library, read the book and drop it back off when you're done. You only need one set of clothes, really maybe two while you're washing the other one. You don't need all of that stuff. It's what it says about you that is important and that's what's so fascinating about the Book of the Month Club and what Chanel was able to accomplish. Just fascinating stuff.

Oh, yes. And I am remiss that we are going to have to close out now. We didn't even talk about, you know, prohibition and the mobsters and jazz and so many amazing things that are covered in the book, which everyone will be able to get their copy, of course, so that they can read and learn about it for themselves. For everyone who does want to connect with you and to learn more, you know, what's the best path for them to do so.

Well, I am pretty easy to find. It's the one thing about having a name like Jason Vojovic is I'm kind of like Tigger. I'm the only one. So you'll find me online, pretty easy. But if you're in the business world, connect with me on LinkedIn Jason Vojovic. You'll find me pretty easily if you'd like to kind of read and subscribe and not only catch what I'm working on, I write the Innovation History substack. So if you search for Innovation History on substack, you'll find me. You can subscribe there or obviously on Amazon to check out booze babe. And the little black dress is on Amazon as well as past books and very soon doing the pre order for the new one. That is the similar history of the Great Deployment Depression and consumer behavior in the Great Depression, which is a very different sort of topic. What did Warren Buffett say once you know, you only know who's swimming naked when the tide goes out. And. Or was that Munger? I can't remember. It was one of the two. They're both fantastic. God rest Munger's soul. What is interesting about the Great Depression is In the 1920s we had this abundance of choice. In the 1930s we had very little resources. What would we do when we had a tenth what we had before? What are the choices we still think are important to make then that, you know, that we couldn't, you know, that weren't a problem before. So it's another fascinating history and I think it will really change what people think about the Great Depression.

Oh, I love it. Can't wait for the the next one for that one. And we'll of course have links to the show notes to make it easy for everyone to find you in the book and and everything else. So thank you again, Jason for joining me. It was delightful to chat with you today.

Thank you very much. I. Oh it's wonderful. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you again to Jason Vojovic for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I was truly amazed by everything that happened in the 1920s to make choice culture possible. In many ways, this is a root of behavioral economics itself, a way to look back and see how brands were born and innovating to give customers what they want and how it shaped so many industries, cars, homes, books, financing, alcohol, jazz, sports, radio, advertising, clothing and so much more. It truly is amazing when you stop and take it all all in. And while we touched on a lot of these topics today, we barely scratched the surface on the insights in the book. If you are at all a fan of history, I highly recommend checking it out. And as we close out the show, don't forget about those show notes which include links to my top related past episodes and books of course, including Booze Babe and the Little Black Dress, ways to get in touch with Jason and myself and and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthebrainybusiness.com 443. And thank you again to Jason Vojovic for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks. Thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.