Rory Sutherland Quotes

A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.

the human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol

the uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating

It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.

Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.

Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense.

you are not thinking; you are merely being logical

people don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent,

The most dangerous people were the stupid and energetic people because they’ll always do things and because they’re stupid they’ll do stupid things.

when you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic

It’s important to remember that big data all comes from the same place – the past. A new campaigning style, a single rogue variable or a ‘black swan’ event can throw the most perfectly calibrated model into chaos.

Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works.

it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.

And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act:

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.

Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception

Ever since, in the U.K. they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again. And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.

Footballers, who may earn a few hundred thousand pounds a week, come home to their eager WAGs and a stable full of Bentleys and find the most enjoyable thing they can do is play Grand Theft Auto — something you can buy for £20.

Henry Ford’s reaction to a consultant who questioned why he paid $50,000 a year to someone who spent most of his time with his feet on his desk. “Because a few years ago that man came up with something that saved me $2,000,000,” he replied. “And when he had that idea his feet were exactly where they are now.

The advice I would give to anybody is to be good at two things, not one, know about two things rather than one, and if possible make the two things overlap a bit.

Andy Warhol about Coke: “The President of the United States can only get the same Coke as the bum in the street

I was once booked on a time management course and got the date wrong.

To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need?

a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”)

A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic.

all big data comes from the same place: the past. Yet a single change in context can change human behaviour significantly.

We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.

The number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used.

For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.

Evolution is like a brilliant uneducated craftsman: what it lacks in intellect it makes up for in experience.

As one creative (Chris Wilkins?) remarked to a planner:“You and I both drink from the same well of inspiration. The difference is that you get to piss in it first.

what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal

if you had retroactively applied the rules of scientific rationalism to all of the major scientific discoveries of the past 500 years you would have invalidated most of them. Perhaps most (penicillin, the X-Ray, the microwave, Aspirin, radio, Archimedes in the bath)  were the product of “inspired opportunism”. As he once put it: “a methodology was an ideology Galileo could not afford.

Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made.

Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures.

I think the first role of marketing is to make a decision easy to make. And that mean firstly clarity in terms of choice, and secondly it means lack of anxiety. So the first role of marketing is not actually getting preference, it’s not actually getting someone to prefer a Philips TV, it’s getting someone non-anxious about buying a Philips.

Take the economist ad —“‘I never read the economist’—Management Trainee aged 42”—it’s a very boring proposition.

As Bob Dylan says in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent.

Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.

Many pretend to despise and belittle that which is beyond their reach.

No living creature can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner.

All too often, what matters is not whether an idea is true or effective, but whether it fits with the preconceptions of a dominant cabal.

The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.

You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame.

There is an important lesson in evaluating human behaviour: never denigrate a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves.

Now, you know. I think there should be a Ministry that just gets rid of shit that’s really annoying, because actually we don’t have that much of a sense of proportion as human beings.

How do I know I’m right? Well I once got a room full of lefties to admit through clenched teeth that Karl Marx would have despised the organic movement, but would have loved McDonald’s.

I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business.

Ask people about their mobile phone, their Sky+, their broadband connection … goods which would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents … and within a minute or so you’ll be listening to morose complaints about the monthly bill.

People who are not skilled at mathematics tend to view the output of second-rate mathematicians with an high level of credulity, and attach almost mystical significance to their findings. Bad maths is the palmistry of the twenty-first century.

Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational. If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to march into the road, forcing the driverless car to stop suddenly, at great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be ‘angry’, and to occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins.

.”…On the way home, we were getting pissed at Bordeaux airport, and asked each other what could be the greatest gift you could give your children. Moray and I gave some kind of inane account man answer, “Ferrari” I suspect. Paul’s answer was “a sense of wonder.

Property porn: The unquestioned assumption, widely propagated in countless television programmes, that home improvement is the highest form of self improvement. If we never again see another programme in which some vapid idiots mince around redecorating a house, our lives will have gone up in value by over 30%

I call it the Louis XIV test: have a look around your house and imagine what Louis XIV would pay for everything you own. Your house? He wouldn’t keep a horse in it. Your furniture? Complete rubbish. Your car? He’d like your car. But he’d give you half of Burgundy in exchange for the small telly in your bedroom.

Rory’s Rules of Alchemy The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Dare to be trivial. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.

All that property porn, you know, about people buying a flat, doing it up and making thirty grand, it’ll just turn the whole bloody country into a nation of speculators, all the while making property completely unaffordable for anybody under 40. The average age of a first time buyer in the Thatcher era, about ‘84, was 25, it’s now 39.

Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5% of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion — it was because nobody liked them.

Holidays in far-flung places: In an effort to upstage each other, rich people were obliged to visit increasingly far-flung and dangerous parts of the world on holiday. Machu Picchu is, in truth, a collection of ruined buildings that would be fairly irritating to visit even if you weren’t forced to suffer altitude sickness in order to do it. As Dr Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.

Here’s Ogilvy’s contemporary, Bill Bernbach: ‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.

You know, at Cambridge I suppose my friends from college would have been a few modern linguists, a couple of historians, four mathematicians, a couple of architects, an anthropologist, etc. You know, a total mix of people who all hung out together. I think that’s hugely beneficial. I think actually that’s the best thing to take from British universities; the rest of the teachings you can take or leave but the college system is really smart, you know, it’s a really, really good idea to bundle people together.

Interestingly, one influence was doing both sides of something—both of which were useful—A-levels: classics and maths. Which is a bloody schizophrenic choice but actually looking back, are the two things I would say that everybody ought to be taught. I think everybody ought to learn a language —not necessarily Latin or Greek, but a language like German which has case endings, which teaches you the rudiments of grammar because the benefit of that is you can then sit down and write an English sentence and know whether or not it’s okay.

After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the great enduring fashion of the next century will be a coarse, uncomfortable fabric which fades unpleasantly and which takes ages to dry. To date, it has been largely popular with indigent labourers.’ (Jeans) ‘. . . and people will be forced to choose between three or four items.’ (McDonald’s) ‘And, best of all, the drink has a taste which consumers say they hate.’ (Red Bull) ‘. . . and just watch as perfectly sane people pay $5 for a drink they can make at home for a few pence.’ (Starbucks)*

Steven Landsburg * called Armchair Economist.

A £30 watch will answer your timekeeping needs perfectly — anything else is simply jewellery for men, and mostly of quite spectacular hideousness.

In many ways, expensive advertising and brands arise as a solution to a problem identified by George Akerlof in his 1970 paper ‘The Market for Lemons’ in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The problem is known as ‘information asymmetry’, whereby the seller knows more about what he is selling than the buyer knows about what he is buying. This lesson was learned the hard way in Eastern Bloc countries under communism; brands were considered un-Marxist, so bread was simply labelled ‘bread’. Customers had no idea who had made it or whom to blame if it arrived full of maggots, and couldn’t avoid that make in future if it did, because all bread packaging looked the same. Unhappy customers had no threat of sanction; happy customers had no prospect of rewarding producers through repeat custom. And so the bread was rubbish.

As the novelist Upton Sinclair once remarked, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.

Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.

One problem (of many) with Soviet-style command economies is that they can only work if people know what they want and need, and can define and express their wants adequately. But this is impossible, because not only do people not know what they want, they don’t even know why they like the things they buy. The only way you can discover what people really want (their ‘revealed preferences’, in economic parlance) is through seeing what they actually pay for under a variety of different conditions, in a variety of contexts. This requires trial and error – which requires competitive markets and marketing.

Never call a behaviour irrational until you really know what the person is trying to do.

To reach intelligent answers, you often need to ask really dumb questions.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

What is important is how you behave, not knowing why you do.

Evolved human instinct may be a much better at statistics than modern economists

Anyone can easily build a career on a single eccentric talent, if it is cunningly deployed. As I always advise young people, ‘Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them.’ Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.

It is an enormous mistake to assume that what the translator conveys is what the speaker intended, and it is equally foolish to assume that what you intended to say is what will be understood.

An approach seeking to minimise variance or minimise downsides often involves behaviour that seems nonsensical to those who don’t understand what the actor is trying to do.

We naturally assume that something that only does one thing is better than something that claims to do many things

All powerful messages must contain an element of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty or extravagance – because rational behaviour and talk, for all their strengths, convey no meaning.[...] Meaning is conveyed by the things we do that are not in our own short-term self-interest – by the costs that we incur and the risks we take.

It is harder to like something when you haven’t chosen it.

Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes.

asking the real why’.

I have a soft spot for the religious practice of saying grace before a meal, since paying attention to good things that one might easily take for granted seems a good approach to life – a pause to focus attention on a meal should add to its enjoyment.

For instance, the victorious Brexit campaign in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States have both been routinely blamed on the clueless and emotional behaviour of undereducated voters, but you could make equally strong cases that the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages. At one point we in Britain were even warned that ‘a vote to leave the EU might result in rising labour costs’ – by a highly astute businessman* who was so enraptured with models of economic efficiency that he was clearly unaware most voters would understand a ‘rise in labour costs’ as meaning a ‘pay rise’.

The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’* Trivers and Kurzban explained the evolutionary science behind that conundrum: we simply don’t have access to our genuine motivations, because it is not in our interest to know.

Strangely, as we have gained access to more information, data, processing power and better communications, we may also be losing the ability to see things in more than one way; the more data we have, the less room there is for things that can’t easily be used in computation. Far from reducing our problems, technology may have equipped us with a rational straitjacket that limits our freedom to solve them.

At its worst, neo-liberalism takes a dynamic system like free market capitalism, which is capable of spectacular creativity and ingenuity, and reduces it to a boring exercise in ‘how we can buy these widgets 10 per cent cheaper’. It has also propelled a narrow-minded technocratic caste into power, who achieve the appearance of expert certainty by ignoring large parts of what makes markets so interesting.

The first lens is market research or, to give it a simpler name, asking people. However, the problem with it is that, if we remember David Ogilvy’s words: ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’ People simply do not have introspective access to their motivations.

Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.

Logic requires that people find universal laws, but outside of scientific fields, there are fewer of these than we might expect.

Had Darwin waited a hundred and fifty years or so, he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble and seasickness in uncovering our primate ancestry by travelling from Down House to his (and my) local Sainsbury’s supermarket in Otford in Kent. There he could have learned from point-of-sale data that, over 30,000 items on the shelves, the single item most frequently purchased, as by all grocery shoppers in Britain, is . . . a banana.

The same is true of scientific progress. It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, and linear process, but that does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules.

However, in one respect it is a monstrous lie, because it completely misrepresents the process by which you progressed to the top. It pays an undue tribute to rational decision-making, optimisation and sequential logic – a tribute that really should be laid at the altar of trial and error, good instincts, and luck.*

We constantly rewrite the past to form a narrative which cuts out the non-critical points – and which replaces luck and random experimentation with conscious intent.

Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. By contrast, it is perfectly possible that conventional market research has, over the past fifty years, killed more good ideas than it has spawned, by obsessing with a false idea of representativeness.

The reason this inefficient process is necessary is because most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned and are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.

It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. Put simply, it’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality.

Heuristics look second-best to people who think all decisions should be optimal. In a world where satisficing is necessary, they are often not only the easiest option but the best.

There is hence an ever-present temptation to pretend things are more ‘logical’ than they really are.

The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.