“Useless and absurd things” are important, says Steven Bartlett

Steven Bartlett joined The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio this morning, to talk about his new book.

Among the things the Dragons’ Den star talked about, was the importance of doing “useless and absurd things”.

The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life comes out tomorrow, 31 August. It’s inspired by Steven’s own experience, rooted in psychology and behavioural science, and is drawn from the conversations he’s had on his hit podcast.

When speaking about how “the most useless, absurd thing about your brand will say the most about your brand, not the most practical and useful”, Steven recalled buying a rather expensive blue slide for his office.

“I was 21 years old, and we took a large investment into my company, and one of the first things I bought was a £13,000 large blue slide with a ball pool, before we had desks in the office,” he told Chris.

Although he described it as “absolute madness” he said that in hindsight, it was probably one of his best decisions.

He explained by saying: “The most absurd thing about your business or company or brand will say the most about your brand. And that blue slide, every single time we had a reporter… they focused on this big blue slide because the blue slide told you a story about who we were. We were young, we were disruptive, we thought differently.”

Steven gave an example of when his girlfriend joined a gym that had a 100-foot climbing wall and that’s the one thing she told him about it.

“The most absurd and useless thing about your business says the most about it. I’ve joined that gym. I’ve never seen anyone going to the climbing wall, but when I sell that gym to my friends, I mention the 100-foot climbing wall. And you’ll see the same thing with big brands today.”

He also told Chris that when building a brand, inefficiency and illogicality does a lot of work to tell the whole brand story.

“If you think about Richard [Branson]’s story, in order to promote the brand that is Virgin, he did useless and absurd things,” Steven explained. “He took these hot air balloons and drifted them across the ocean, and the story became even better when he nearly died.

“It fed into what Virgin meant. And it’s the same thing, that blue slide fed into what my company meant. And that’s what it is. It’s just a different frame to think through when you’re building your business, that the most absurd thing you do will say the most about you and do most of the marketing work.

“There is nothing that a marketing or CMO person at Virgin could have done that was more beneficial than Richard doing those extreme stunts,” he said.

He gave Red Bull as another example, saying that you won’t see their product on their Instagram.

“I challenge anyone to go on their Instagram and try to find their product. What you will see is them doing these absurd stunts,” he said. “In my view, they are in Richard Branson’s footsteps, in his wake. They’re copying his blueprint. And they’re a real strong, founder-led business. I believe they’re still owned by the family, and that’s how it’s possible, because they’re entrenched in the founding values.

He explained: “CFOs won’t typically let you do that. Because they will want a return on investment. And in the blue slide analogy, they’ll want to know how that £13,000 slide will make £14,000 in cash.

“Founders, who are so entrenched in the brand’s values, will do this this kind of thing fluidly, which is exactly what Richard did. He knew exactly what Virgin were. They were a disrupter. They were innovative. They thought differently. So he lived his life as a personification of that brand,” he added.

Listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio.