Rory Sutherland

"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."

"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."

"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."

"“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"

"That is actually a major force — avoiding social embarrassment and general ridicule and the feeling of people being slightly sarky about what we’ve done. You’ve got to be pretty socially brave not to be affected by that stuff, I’d say probably 5—10% of people are immune."

"If you want to understand human behaviour, logic can tell you a certain amount. For example, if you put the price down people would probably buy more of what you are selling. If you’re running a pub and it smells of piss, people probably won’t go there. That’s something you don’t need to research, you know that by and large logic will say that it’s not a good idea, okay? Then there’s the information market research can tell you, you know, asking people whether they’d prefer your pub to smell of urine or not? Those are questions which people will answer fairly honestly, you know, they’d rather buy this than that because they think it looks nicer. Research is not all total rubbish, I mean, you know, people do have some access to their thoughts and feelings and they can occasionally describe their behaviour with a degree of accuracy. But then there’s this other thing which is what I call the missing third. It’s probably more like the missing half in terms of human behaviour in truth, it’s the influences on behaviour that logic won’t tell you and research won’t tell you. I’ll give you an example of that. Take Red Bull. My theory asks how can they charge £1.50 for a can of Red Bull, when Coke only costs 50p? In a way they succeeded because they made the can smaller … people recognise that it’s not a Coke can, it’s a small can, therefore this must be a different kind of drink from Coke so maybe there’s a reason why it charges £1.50 rather than 50p. Now the interesting thing is logic’s not going to tell you that. No one’s going to suggest that in order to be able to charge £1.50 for this you have to make the can smaller. No consumer research group is going to say: “I’m not paying £1.50 for that mate, but I would if you gave me less of it.” No one’s ever going to say that. But the truth of the matter is that that’s how the brain works sometimes."

"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."

"- 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"

"They ranked officers in four ways; clever and energetic, stupid and energetic, stupid and lazy and … clever and lazy? Clever and lazy, yeah. 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. They actually ranked the clever and lazy people quite highly because they tended to think before doing something, you know, “is there an easier way of doing this”."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One of the things I’ve learnt from him is the most interesting shit that’s happening in any field is not in any field, it’s actually in the interplay between different fields."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"* 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"

"To use a phrase popularised in a famous FT article: great brands are often built obliquely. They are generally a by-product of something (ideals, vision, focus) and not a product of anything. Saying that you build a brand by setting out to build a brand is a little like saying that you can end poverty by giving poor people money. It doesn’t work like that. So in building a brand, don’t necessarily start by looking at the brand. Instead ask a broader marketing question: how can I turn human understanding into business advantage? This may mean that you start with the transaction and work back. It may mean you look at changing behaviour first and let perception follow. It may mean you have good business ideas and then brand them (Tesco have been masters of this)."

"Even really intelligent doctors, who can often think quite critically, totally, totally fuck it up. If you have, for example, an AIDS test which has a 99% accuracy rate but a 9% rate of false positives, and the incidence of AIDS in the population is 1% and someone comes in and has a random test without any reasons to believe that he may have AIDS— you know, he’s not an intravenous drug user or similar—if the test comes up positive, given that the test is 99% reliable, a 9% rate of false positives and a 1% incidence of AIDS in the general population, what are the odds that that chap has AIDS, from his positive test showing? And the actual answer is 1 in 10. Wow! If you have 100 people, 99 of them won’t have AIDS but 9 of those people will throw up a false positive. You’ll have one person who has AIDS where the tests will 99% of the time reveal correctly that he does but actually the 10 people who get a positive test, only one of them actually has AIDS."

"“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"

"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."

"One interpretation of this is that, while an action based on self-interest that has bad effects is (unsurprisingly) seen as a bad thing, an action based on self-interest which has good effects is NOT seen as a particularly good thing. This reveals an essential asymmetry in human perception."

"As with music, so with gadgets: once you pass 40, as your natural inquisitiveness flags, you need to try harder to like things you instinctively hate."

"We all know the phrase: that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. But can apparently good advertising also kill or wound a good product?"

"the vast bulk of the money in any market at any time is in the hands of satisficers. People who want to meld with a peer group, not to outdo it, and people who are more eager to avoid social embarrassment or regret-inducing purchase mistakes than they are to display dominance. Regret is a huge emotion, and people will pay huge sums to avoid it. You just need to watch Deal or No Deal to see this."

"The point is simple. If you look at all the really important breakthroughs made in any field, what you will find is that the unplanned, unintended or fortuitous connection plays just as great a role as the planned, the processed and the organised. This is why, fairly early on, Microsoft placed whiteboards along the corridors on the Redmond campus; for they found that the accidental meetings which took place in hallways were in fact more productive than the scheduled ones which happened in meeting rooms."

"the Paul Arden* question: “How can people more fully appreciate the magic and wonder they already have around them?”"

"I suggest it is by far the more valuable economic role that brands play: not to be a promise of ultimate superiority but a cast iron assurance of pretty dependable non-shitness. The Fina ad is one good example. Even better is that great CDP ad for Smirnoff: “why waste money on real lemons”, which I can’t find, or the Volkswagen promise of reliability. But overall this proposition of “loss avoidance” is rare — most ads seek to boast a lot more than they reassure. Yet when you are handing over £1,000 to buy that flat screen TV, how much of your brain is worried about whether it is the best TV you can buy for £1,000, versus the part of the brain thinking “I hope this TV isn’t a crock of shite?” I’d put the ratio at about 1:2."

"Most people, in most fields of consumption, most of the time are NOT maximisers at all. They are something completely different. They are satisficers (bit.ly/tEL7). What they are doing is not using insane amounts of mental energy to attempt to optimise every decision. They are instead simply trying to avoid making a decision that is actually bad or which might cause them to look or feel foolish. For those people, good enough generally is.  Most important of all, they are not using their brand choices to compete with their fellow man, or to draw distinctions between them and their peer group. They are using them to fit in. To conform, not to outdo. You go to the films your friends like, you read the books your friends like, you listen to the music your friends like. It’s safe, after all. And you drive the car your friends drive. Because what you are driven by is not the idea of choice optimisation, but (in behavioural terms) the much more powerful idea of risk aversion."

"do still believe there is a Platonic archetype for press advertising. In short, I still feel the full English breakfast of a press ad involves a big piccie at the top, a headline (and even a subhead) underneath, with two or three hundred words of intelligent, characterful chit-chat leading smoothly towards a logo or coupon at the end."

"“Marketers still use simplistic models of human nature that remain uninformed by the past twenty years of research into human nature — research by evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists … as a result, they don’t have access to a good map of the human mind, or of the brave new semiotic world in which it dwells. What marketers need is Darwin.”"

"Here’s plan b: keep your planning function, but don’t attach your advertising to a conventional strategy but to a higher purpose. What we at Ogilvy call a “big ideal”. Dirt is Good. Campaign for Real Beauty. Just Do It."

"A 1980s cartoon from Private Eye shows a teenage boy, dressed in animal skins, staring intently into the dancing flames of a small fire. Behind him, bearded and leaning on a club, stands his scowling Neanderthal father, horrified: “When I was a boy we had to make our own entertainment.”"

"The brutal question underlying all this is simple. For all the talk about “value not price”, do people have any genuine appreciation of value at all? Or is our only conception of wealth and fortune not absolute but merely relative (do we inhabit a world where, as one economist famously observed: “a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”)"

"When even magnificent strategies manifested in such lines as “The Fourth Emergency Service”, “You’re amazing, we want you to stay that way”, “Have a break, have a KitKat”, “Membership has its privileges”, seem to be killed off with barely a thought, what hope is there for yours?"

"As Andy Warhol said of Coca Cola: “The great thing about Coke is that the president of the US drinks the same Coke as the bum on the street.”"

"The value of Twitter comes when you are overheard. To understand what I mean by this, consider how the telephone network worked in the small Welsh town where my father lived in the 1950s. A typical call ran as follows: “Oh, hello Mrs X, could you put me through to Newport station, please?” Mrs X (the operator) would then connect you to the station and you would ask for and be given the times of the following day’s trains to Bristol. So far, normal enough. But 30 seconds after you had hung up, the telephone would ring: “It’s Mrs X here from the exchange. If you want to get to Bristol, I remember hearing Mr Shaw saying he was driving down tomorrow morning, so maybe you could ring and ask him for a lift?” Now I suppose being connected to this telephone exchange was pretty hopeless if you wanted to have an extramarital affair or run an international drugs cartel. But sometimes, as in this example, it was very useful. The same goes for Twitter. Collective knowledge is valuable. Mention that you are thinking of having a curry in Oxford and in minutes someone will come up with a recommendation (Spice Valley or Saffron, apparently). For this reason, some very clever people believe that the threat to Google, when it comes, will come from a collective social brain like this."

"Why do we spend ages trying to perfect our processes and to refine our formal ways of working while spending almost no effort at all asking how we could get luckier. Or asking what we are doing that may be killing our luck."

"What it seems to show is that people are overwhelmingly intentionalists, not consequentialists. In other words, once they suspect an individual’s intentions are largely self-interested, it colours how they perceive the outcome. Hence they are far readier to attribute a bad outcome to self-interested behaviours than a beneficial one."

"The obsession with shareholder value has perhaps created autistic businesses — of a kind that nobody much wants to work for or buy from. By nakedly pursuing a narrow obsession with profit, companies are damaging brand value — and ultimately shareholder value. Or, to put it another way, the problem with all this naked greed isn’t the greed, it’s the nakedness. At a societal level, it means the benefits of competitive free market economics (choice, low prices, innovation) don’t really translate into happiness, gratitude or affection — as they are tainted by the self-interest with which they have been obtained."

"The street finds its own uses for things, as someone once said. And isn’t it interesting how many successful brands eschew user imagery. easyJet works hard to deposition itself — to be socially neutral. Apple uses dead people or silhouettes. BMW for years had a rule that no people could be shown in its ads (an especially wise move as not even BMW drivers like other BMW drivers — or anyone else for that matter; note to BMW … don’t try starting a social network). Is Red Bull an energy drink or a mixer? What is the user-imagery of Amazon? Who is the typical Google user? What makes Google better? The fact that we cannot answer these questions simply would typically be considered a flaw."

"Notice that all creative people have to present and justify their thinking to rational people. This does not usually apply the other way round. I have never seen a creative person given the chance to critique a media schedule or a budget. Yet media buyers are routinely asked what they think of the ads."

"The benefits of owning a brand are entirely connected to longevity — something which is true even of “new” brands such as Google. A brand provides an organisation with its heritable characteristics, with a trust that survives beyond an individual transaction. That trust hangs on consistency. It is also through consistency that brands become truly eloquent, by a kind of power of distillation — rather as, when you are in a long-term relationship, you can leave a great deal unsaid. This brand shorthand (Steve Hayden describes a brand as the most effective form of data compression in existence) should give long lived brands a considerable advantage over competitors. Twenty years ago it did."

"usually the best financial return to be derived from brands is best achieved by having, in Tim Harford’s words: “a strong brand in a conservative market.”"

"By fitting in, you may not have the best musical taste in the world, or eat the best food, or drive the best car — but you won’t go far wrong either. And, when making a purchase, what most people want, most of the time, is not the best they can buy: they want something that’s very unlikely to be crap."

"One book, called Serendipity, makes the point that most scientific advance comes not through the dogged and meticulous pursuit of a solution, but through a kind of inspired opportunism in response to a lucky connection. Another, called A Perfect Mess details how a messy desk and the accidental juxtaposition of two apparently unrelated papers led to a Nobel prize."

"There is a universally-held belief that advertising makes people want more things. This may indeed be true. But an equally important (and perhaps even more lucrative) use of advertising is to make people content with less."

"If you want a long-lived brand, avoid strategy altogether — instead have an Ideal (like Nike, Apple) or an executional device (Andrex, The Economist). Anything with a strategy is doomed never to outlive your client. Discuss."

"How do you use all of this insight in your day-to-day? The first rule is very simple. You go to people and say — and this, to be honest is the most basic crazy principle of the lot — “don’t look at it like this necessarily—try looking at it like that”. Treating the perception … ? Treating the perception, or the frame of reference. Frames of reference are interesting because it does our head in to look at 10 metrics at once, we don’t like making really complicated decisions."

"The ad business is weird. I can go to a client with three things from behavioural economics, actual insight which he may be able to use, but the problem with market research is we as the ad agency just became completely passive recipients of insights. Unless a client came to us and said: “we’ve had this insight”, we couldn’t really start work because we couldn’t generate our own raw materials. It was a bit like being a shoe repair business where you just sit there, and unless anybody like comes along and says: “I’ve got a hole in my shoe”, there’s nothing you can do. Why are the key cutting and shoe repair in the same place? Machinery, perhaps? You need a big rotating thing for both maybe do you? Is that the idea? You need a big electric motor? I feel a bit helpless. You know, we actually wait for our clients to come to us and say: “we’ve got a problem and here’s a budget.” My view is that behavioural economics can enable us to go and say: “you’re doing that all wrong, mate.”"

"It always reminds me of the comments of a colleague in Singapore, describing some spectacular example of government efficiency. “When they’re this good,” she said, “You almost don’t mind that you don’t get to vote for them.”"

"Let’s look at a few other surprises. How many McKinseyites routinely go to flea-markets or car-boot sales? Very few, I think it’s fair to assert. And yet the employees of large consulting firms are massive users of eBay. Once again, the medium is the product."

"Minor irritations are really worth focussing on because unlike things like health care, they’re relatively cheap to solve and the difference they make to the quality of life may be enormous."

"Imagine this: you are going into a meeting at Dulux to announce your new advertising strategy. Will anyone ask you a hard question about what was wrong with the old one? Probably not. Announce you are killing off the dog, and you’ll face a fight. Next try suggesting the Economist should abandon red, and Sheilas’ Wheels should try plainsong. See the point?"

"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?"

"In determining the size, breadth, nature and reaction of your target audience, the medium of engagement is often far more important that what might conventionally be called the “core product offering.”"

"Our job then is to do whatever is required to overcome the psychological obstacles that consumers may have when buying whatever it is our client’s want to sell. Our secondary job is actually understanding people well enough so that our clients can develop products that people want to buy at a price they want to pay, okay? And that’s it. Those are the two ways, you either change the people or circumstances so the existing product sells more, or you change the product so the people want it more."

"What those people weren’t realising was path dependency, which is about how I want a book or I hear about a book or someone mentions a book or I read about a book or I think about a book or my course professor tells me I need a book. The next decision is which channel I should buy it in — shall I go to a shop or shall I go online? And then the third decision is, in that channel, which branch shall I go to? Now, within the bookshop channel, Barnes & Noble were strong, but once you’ve made the decision that you’re buying that book online the strongest brand in the online channel was Amazon."

"our models of human behaviour and persuasion are so pathetically shallow and make no attempt to place our discipline within any evidence-based scientific framework. “Rather like astrologers,”I said, quoting my colleague Alasdair Graham: “we use a language which is convincing to fellow converts but sounds suspiciously like bollocks to anyone else.”"

"biases. I have to fight really hard not to buy a second home because we tend to see things that we own as an investment whereas things that we rent we see as an extravagance. My argument is that if I buy this place, even if it’s crap, it’s not going to go up in value, realistically, for the next few years and the council tax alone is going to be two grand a year. Well, for two grand I can go and stay in a hotel for 20 nights and actually have people bring me tea and shit."

"It is a pretty weird way, but what else can you do? One thing you can do in marketing if you’re really, really clever, and maybe you don’t get the chance to do it more than once in your lifetime, is that you can just change the order in which people make a decision. There was an interesting estate agent called Stern Studios, do you remember that? Their whole gig was that they covered the whole of London but only sold studio and one bedroom flats. Oh yes, I remember that. Now that was interesting. What fascinated me about that was that it’s actually changing the order in which people decide. First they decide they’re going to buy a studio flat, and then what they’ll actually do is look at probably five or six postal districts. So that changed the fundamental order of decision making."

"We seem to be very, very nervy as people, so one of the first roles of marketing is to foster reassurance that what we’re doing isn’t weird and doesn’t stand out."

"The problem of decision making is that mentally we can’t cope with multiple comparison variables simultaneously."

"Champagne cocktails: A glass of champagne cannot be improved upon by adding fruit purée, sherbet around the rim, or an indoor sparkler, and then charging £15 plus 15% service for the privilege. All these things, and the ones that you add, form part of a wider economic question. To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need? As Robert H. Frank, professor of economics at Cornell, asserts: “Local context shapes perception of quality, the demand for which knows no limits.” Or, in layman’s language: “When you’re surrounded by rich gits, it’s hard not to act like a bit of a git yourself.” When just a few of those gits lose their jobs, the rest of us, perversely, may become a lot better off."

"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."

"In other words, is strategy now so hopelessly mutable that hanging your brand on a strategy is like tying your dog to a parked car (something that works for as long as the car remains stationary, but with terrible consequences once it moves off)? Even in an organisation with an unwavering business purpose, an advertising strategy will rarely stay constant: after all, in marketing, the definition of “strategy” is “that thing which an incoming marketing director seeks to change or reinvent — usually biannually.”"

"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."

"The Theory of Weak Ties, a landmark sociology paper of the 1970s provides backing for this. What this suggests (and it is largely borne out by experience) is that one’s peripheral contacts and vague acquaintances are more likely to be the agents of the major events in one’s life than one’s closest friends. It is your wider circle of friends who supply you with your luck."

"Take the economist ad —“‘I never read the economist’—Management Trainee aged 42”—it’s a very boring proposition. It’s “read this magazine and you’ll be more successful at your job”, but by saying it in an oblique and funny way, it’s perfectly okay to say it."

"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."

"spend just as much time working on how you can reduce consumer transaction costs as you do trying to reduce manufacturing costs. Could you get young people to save for a pension — if they could choose the monthly amount by SMS? Could you get people to travel more by train if it were possible to reserve a parking space? Maybe you only need the hard sell because your product isn’t easy to"