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In a month like this, it’s weirdly fitting to host Rory Sutherland, the Dark Knight of irrational problem solving, on the podcast.
Per his official bio:
Rory is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK, an attractively vague job title that has allowed him to co-found a behavioral science practice within the agency.
He works with a consulting practice of psychology graduates who look for ‘unseen opportunities’ in consumer behaviour – these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make.Rory is the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life (my favorite book on marketing and behavioral psychology of the last few years).
Plus there’s this…
This Friday June 12th, alongside a stellar lineup of speakers including Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely, Geoffrey Miller, and Laurie Santos, Rory and Ogilvy Consulting are hosting what looks to be The Gulliver’s Travels of international digital symposiums:
Click here to watch it for free.
Quotes from Rory.
On the ad business:
“In America, the ad business is seen as the arty end of the business world, and in Britain, it’s the greedy end of the art world.”
On telecommuting:
“It was a grotesque failure of the business world not to experiment with [telecommuting] more energetically than they did.”
On B2B biases:
“We tend to talk about biases in consumer behavior, but business-to-business decision-making is riddled with biases, in many cases being far-more extreme than the biases you find with consumers.”
“The efficiency and cost-cutting narrative is too dominant.”
“The only way you find out what people want is by offering it to them.”
On avoiding wasted days at the mattress store with your spouse:
“You don’t get an endorphin rush from mid-market retail.”
Other things we covered:
- Talent and perspective gaps in the ad business.
- Hacking Harvard: how to unbundle the university experience.
- Why product cannibalization fears are often exaggerated.
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