Other highlights (33)
““What’s most relevant to me? Talent, Talent, Talent. It’s the bedrock of this agency. It doesn’t matter that talented people are difficult, petulant, opinionated. Without their incandescence we might as well shut the doors and all go home.” Source: Paul Smith, ogilvy.com”
“People have different heuristics, in behavioural economics language. Some people will want to get there as fast as possible, some people will want it as comfortable as possible. Because people have these different heuristics, I always think allowing someone else to book your travel is a terrible mistake because they may have totally different heuristics to you.”
“What the spreadsheet has done is to create in organisations and governments an over-reliance on numbers (by no means always meaningful or even accurate) with the result that often spurious numerical targets, metrics or values invariably override any conflicting human judgment. This has given rise to what a colleague of mine, Anthony Tasgal, calls “The Arithmocracy”: a powerful left-brained administrative caste which attaches importance only to things which can be expressed in numerical terms or on a chart. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not making a trite “price of everything but value of nothing” point, nor am I attacking genuine science. I object to the spreadsheet precisely because of the pseudo-science involved, and the way numbers create a semblance of mathematical rigour which lends some measures or extrapolations an influence they don’t deserve.”
“In path dependency terms your channel choice may precede your brand choice.”
“Steven Landsburg * called Armchair Economist.”
“We worry endlessly about how technology might give rein to our baser urges but give no thought at all to the dangers of excessive logic. Yet the Holocaust and the Soviet famine were both the product of meticulous government officials in dutiful pursuit of numerical targets. Italians, by and large, don’t go in for atrocities. It’s not mass hysteria that really frightens me, it’s mass rationality.”
“They’ll say “I don’t understand, why are people paying all this money for Armani clothes — they don’t seem any better than what I can get at BHS,” and they genuinely don’t really understand all that social mediation of one-upmanship. As a result, there’s an argument, which this fantastic guy … who’s name I have now completely forgotten and I’ll remember shortly * … his point is that we ought to research those people because there is something that is instinctive in 98% of humans which isn’t shared here.”
“Perhaps we need the occasional recession to reassure ourselves that nemesis is still at work. As Warren Buffett unforgettably put it, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.””
“They say that necessity is the mother of invention. It’s also true to say that, you know, a degree of idleness is the mother of invention.”
“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.”
“Everybody says they obviously want to find the best television they can within their price bracket. They’d answer all these questions as if they were hyper-logical, they’d say that obviously if this thing costs less than the iPad, and it’s better, then they’ll buy it. Then reality comes into it, and actually, the reason they buy the iPad is that they know that every time they get out the Samsung, all their friends will say: “why did you get that, why didn’t you buy the iPad?” and that this will bring with it a little burst of anxiety and a little burst of effort. Never, never underestimate the importance of that. If you buy a Ford or you buy a BMW or a Volkswagen and it breaks down a lot, it’s Ford’s fault, and you and all your friends will go: “golly you’re really unlucky you bought that new Ford and the clutch plate’s gone, bloody hell, I do feel sorry for you”, and you will get a degree of sympathy from your friends, okay? If you go and buy an Alfa Romeo and the clutch plate goes, deep down all your friends are thinking: “what does he expect, he goes and buys an Alfa Romeo, what the hell does he expect?” If you’re going to buy this flash, weird Italian car, it’s going to break down.”
“If I were competing with McDonald’s, I’d say that actually what McDonald’s does well is the level of cleanliness and the design of the restaurants. They’re really, really clean. Even when you’re in a slightly grubby part of town the McDonald’s is a fantastically well kitted out thing. Secondly, the imagery that McDonald’s has employed and the new colourways they’ve employed have done a lot to take it away from its industrial associations. A lot of advertising people would say: “yeah but that’s not an idea”, but the effect it had by taking away the predominance of yellow and creating a thing that’s yellow on a dark brown background with some green furniture is … there are basic heuristics within the restaurant scene and this suggests that they have been to a farm, that they know what a chicken looks like, etc. Once you understand what the heuristics are in design, that can make me choose a shampoo.”
“Einstein posted a sign in his office at Princeton which read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.””
“When we first met Rory he managed to set fire to himself by putting a lit pipe in his jacket pocket while reviewing our portfolio. Emma DeLaFosse and Charlie Wilson”
“You know, whereas if I buy a home all that’s going to happen is I’m going to spend my two weeks holiday in France trying to work out what the French is for: “my septic tank has exploded” or working out stupid repairs and bits of crap like that. But instinctively we like owning things and we’ve actually got to teach ourselves not to.”
“Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.””
“Paul Feldwick * says that there are two separate parts of marketing which are saleability and sales and before you can actually sell something you have to give it basic saleability. A perfect example of that is Skoda, which has done a huge heap of advertising — whether they are now successfully selling Skodas is debatable, but over the past eight years what they’ve undoubtedly done is they’ve returned Skoda to basic saleability.”
““There are two different occasions upon which we examine our own conduct, and endeavour to view it in the light in which the impartial spectator would view it: first, when we are about to act; and secondly, after we have acted. Our views are apt to be very partial in both cases; but they are apt to be most partial when it is of most importance that they should be otherwise.” Source: Extract from The Theory of Moral Sentiments”
“So actually understanding the way in which people make decisions seems to me the fundamental discipline at the heart of everything we do. How do people choose? How can we make it easier for them to choose? Because maybe we would be better off if they chose our competitor rather than choosing no one in our category, which is a really interesting debate which no one has ever had and I don’t know the answer to that.”
“The reason people with anoraks are called anoraks is that they wear anoraks because quite logically, if you’re not bothered about the social associations, an anorak is a really sensible thing to wear. Now, as a crazy director of an ad agency, if you came into work in an anorak — unless it was absolutely the right kind of anorak — you’d practically lose your job. The fact is that it’s a really practical thing if you’re watching trains on a railway station platform, it’s a really sensible thing to wear, you see.”
“- Under the Frog and The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer - Born Liars by Ian Leslie - The complete Sherlock Holmes - P G Wodehouse (all) - How I escaped my certain fate, by Stewart Lee - The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen - Foundation Cities TED Talk by Paul Romer”
“There are two dangerous assumptions in this: “We’re just paid to focus on the brand” approach. First the whole “brand-led” approach is based on the dangerous assumption that behavioral change is the product of attitudinal change: in reality it happens more often the other way round. Or, as St Bob puts it in Brownsville Girl: “People don’t do what they say they believe, they just do what’s convenient and then they repent.” The second assumption is just as dangerous: it is the dangerously linear assumption that the best way to build a brand is to set out to build a brand. I really don’t believe this. 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.”
“* Bayes’ theorem links a conditional probability to its inverse. Its simple form is: P (A | B) = P (B | A) P (A) / P(B) Where P (A | B) denotes the conditional probability of A given B. Source: Wikipedia”
“People with mild autism are blind to the associations of what they do because there’s something about the condition which means that they don’t understand them. There’s another argument that the people with Asperger’s are really good social scientists because they actually have to work it all out for themselves.”
“It’s why, to avoid lapsing into the shared-language and shared-thinking of bankers, Warren Buffett writes Berkshire Hathaway annual reports as though addressing his sister Bertie.”
“I think our job is very simple — it’s the job of anyone in marketing is to turn human understanding into business advantage or social advantage, okay?”
“There’s the mode of human behaviour which …to make a gross generalisation—if you’re preparing a wedding or a wedding anniversary and you’re choosing a restaurant, you’re probably much closer to maximising: what’s the best, most memorable, remarkable place you can take people to? Alternatively, when you’re just on the road and you’re stuck in Sheffield City Centre and you’re bloody hungry, you get a McDonald’s, and that’s satisficing. Right. It’s probably not the best experience you could possibly have but actually it’s far from being the worst experience you’ve had. The worst experience you could have is being mugged or getting food poisoning, and so on that scale of absolutely brilliant to shite, McDonald’s is still at a 7 or an 8. The reason it does well is because when you’re satisficing, your question isn’t really what’s the best meal you can possibly have, it’s also actually, “how can I avoid having a crap meal.””
“Particularly in England, where people are incredibly oblique and indirect, you have to use humour as a way of actually saying what you want to say to some extent, because you can’t say anything directly.”
“How involved are you at Ogilvy in the creative process … or the decision making process when working for brands? I like to think of myself as being involved within the indecision making process. What I’m saying is my first job, or the first way to add value is to say: “don’t assume it’s like this, it might be like that.” In other words, that business of satisficing or maximising is a really, really important thing. Saying to people: “okay you’ve been taught as advertising people, tell people to buy this thing because it’s brilliant”, might miss the mark. I would ask what the shit thing is that’s stopping them buying it at the moment. Of course, it may not be that no one’s told them that it’s brilliant, it may be that there’s one fundamental flaw in terms of the whole purchase or decision making process that people find really, really off-putting.”
“Herbert Simon * at Carnegie Mellon, I think, who was perhaps one of the founding fathers. * Simon was among the founding fathers of several of today’s important scientific domains, including artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing, and was the first to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.”
“I’ll give you an example of this. You probably prefer Pizza Express to Domino’s, okay? But then sometimes you’re sitting at home and you decide “I’m not going to go out for a pizza, I’m not going to collect a pizza, I want one delivered,” and then when you make the delivery decision, your whole brand repertoire changes, and actually Pizza Express don’t deliver. Don’t you think someone should start a business where they collect from Pizza Express and take it to your house? Like Ocado? Yeah, like Ocado. Anyway, what will happen is your frame of reference will go to Domino’s. If I was going out for a pizza or going to collect a pizza, Domino’s may not even feature, but once you switch mode then actually your whole repertoire completely changes.”
“Well “satisfice” comes from two words — funnily enough it is actually a Northumberland word which means satisfy, but is also made from two words, suffice and satisfy. When we satisfice we look for something that’s good enough.”
“My concern is that if we have incomplete knowledge of human decision making, then our decision making lacks predictive value. That is incredibly dangerous because it means that one, a lot of advertising money is misspent, and two, an awful lot of R&D which relies on logic and research and not on behavioural economics will actually be wrong.”
