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People doing laundry want the detergent to help get their clothes not just clean, but very clean. Soap brands attempt to differentiate how they got your white whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince customers that one additive was more effective than another. Protein, said one brand. Colour enhancers, said another. No one asked customers why they wanted their clothes clean. That little nugget wasn’t revealed until many years later, when a group of anthropologists hired by one of the packaged goods companies, revealed that all those additives weren’t in fact driving behaviour. They observed that when people took washing out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white it was or compared it to newer items to see how bright it was. The first thing people did when they put the laundry out of the dryer was to smell it. This was an amazing discovery. Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean. There was a presumption that all detergents get your clothes clean. That’s what a detergent is supposed to do. But having their clothes smell fresh and clean mattered much more than the nuanced difference between which detergents actually made clothes measurably cleaner.

Excerpted from ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek