You don't get 7 million TED talk views for nothing. Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and the author of “Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life.”
And we had a wide-ranging, crazy, seminal, wonderful, and entertaining discussion! A short list of the topics we hit:
Why marketing is not physics
Why linear thinking doesn’t make quantum breakthroughs
Why brands should START with retention before anything else
Alchemy and magic
AB testing (yes, he uses data!)
What Uber’s killer feature really is
How brands really only need to done one thing brilliantly to be successful
Hotels and weatherproofing
Why Tesla’s dog mode made a non-dog-owner want to buy one
DoubleTree’s chocolate chip cookie
Rory’s friend Dave
Why brands should ask their customers to do them a favor
How brands can get COVID-19 era marketing horribly wrong
Delivering drinking water in vans
Consumer loyalty
Brand loyalty to customers
What Amazon gets right
Why your price should probably be higher to sell more
Clock radios
Nespresso versus Maxwell House
The beautiful insanity of Dyson vacuums and hair dryers
Use data to exploit versus using data to explore
Data versus common sense
P values (in analytics and statistics)
Mental lockjaw