korrents

Rory Sutherland

@rory-sutherland · 16 positions · 0 changes of mind

Rory Sutherland is vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, where he helped found the agency's behavioural science practice. He wrote Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business and Life, and writes a column for The Spectator.

Everything they publish, on ppll ↗

Rory Sutherland did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

  1. Our reading

    People cannot choose without comparison, so an AI that hands over one perfect answer will not satisfy them.

    Their wordspeople don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:01:50 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 1st of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  3. Our reading

    Pursuing efficiency pushes attention onto measurable factors and away from the psychological ones where the larger gains are available.

    Their wordsBut when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:03:56 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 2nd of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  5. Our reading

    Cutting a job defined by its narrowest function destroys the tacit value that job was quietly creating.

    Their wordsthe dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:05:30 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 3rd of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  7. Our reading

    Companies would often be better off moving a tenth to a fifth of their marketing budget into paying call centre staff properly.

    Their wordsprobably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:09:05 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 4th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  9. Our reading

    People judge an organisation by the humans they deal with, because judging other people is the task evolution equipped them for.

    Their wordsWe don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:09:46 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 5th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  11. Our reading

    Publicly traded companies are incentivised to behave like psychopaths, because they are optimised for short-term transactions rather than long-term relationships.

    Their wordsPLC's or um uh or or companies on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:28:30 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 6th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  13. Our reading

    The shareholder value movement is incoherent, because it never says which shareholder or which time frame it is optimising for.

    Their wordsthe shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder is what are you optimizing for? It's a completely incoherent nonsense which is very very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:39:50 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 7th of 16 in this recording

    stock market

    Interesting

  15. Our reading

    Giving technologists and management consultants power over decisions optimises a business for something far from what its customers care about.

    Their wordsWhen you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:42:29 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 8th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  17. Our reading

    The marketing metrics finance departments trust are the ones that sell technology, not the ones that build customer value over time.

    Their wordsthe marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:43:45 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 9th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  19. Our reading

    Large numbers of people are employed to care more about following approved procedure than about the quality of the outcome.

    Their wordsAnd there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:52:12 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 10th of 16 in this recording

    government

    Interesting

  21. Our reading

    Reason is only one of several evolved mental faculties, and treating it as the gold standard misdescribes how people decide.

    Their wordsWe have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:57:00 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 11th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  23. Our reading

    Marketing returns are fat-tailed, so paying for marketing by the hour misprices work whose value comes from a small fraction of it.

    Their wordsthe reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid my argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed so is innovation R&D pharmaceutical research science okay in other words 5 to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps 110% of the value
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:59:20 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 12th of 16 in this recording

    innovation

    Interesting

  25. Our reading

    Entrepreneurship resembles gambling rather than chess, because the large payoffs cannot be identified in advance.

    Their wordsyou don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs. You find entrepreneurs in casinos. They're playing poker. They're playing bat gam. You know, they're playing games of chance with an occasional very high payoff. And a lot of life is exactly like that, but you don't know where the huge payoff's going to come in advance.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:02:36 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 13th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting

  27. Our reading

    Competition that removes differentiation makes everyone worse off, because it assumes people already know what they want.

    Their wordseconomists have this fantasy of the world of companies in direct competition driving down price and increasing efficiency while supplying the same thing which is based on a false premise that people know what they want to begin with. Now I would argue when you don't create differentiation, everybody suffers.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:12:10 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 14th of 16 in this recording

    economists

    Interesting

  29. Our reading

    A gift's perceived price is part of what it does, so a drink known to be cheap fails at its job however good it tastes.

    Their wordsit doesn't matter how good the drink is if people think you've bought it for $8.95 it's not doing the job it's supposed to do which is to signal generosity to signal hospitality or to mark a special occasion
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:33:34 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 15th of 16 in this recording

    taste

    Interesting

  31. Our reading

    An objective meant to serve people should be defined with psychology included, because changing the psychology is often cheaper than changing the technology.

    Their wordsdo not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors because you might be able to solve your problem very very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology not by changing the technology
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:59:07 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherlandyoutube.com 16th of 16 in this recording

    Interesting