The Welsh Schoolboy Who Became A Marketing Genius Working With The World's Biggest Companies
As a 10-year-old at Haberdashers School, Rory Sutherland considered a career in advertising. Growing up in the golden age of television, she believes that everyone her age should be exposed to commercials. This is not typical student thinking. But Rory is no ordinary person, so he has carved out a unique identity as a marketing scientist, working with some of the world's biggest companies, including Coca-Cola, American Express and BT.
Rory, who grew up in affluent Monmouthshire, currently lives in West Kent, but we caught up with him briefly in Cardiff when he spoke to the Chartered Institute of Marketing at Cardiff Arms Park. First off, Rory's outfit is as flashy as her performance, in a bright gold jacket. The gray curls surprisingly take on a life of their own as the eyebrows rise and fall with pleasure.
Covid (by me) would pay in person for any match, but even on a video call, Rory's enthusiasm was palpable. An Hour is also similar to an episode of QI in its digital endeavors, but twice as fast and a bit more political. There's hardly a topic that Rory doesn't know about. His speech seemed casual, an idea struck him. From trains running between Haverfordwest and London in the eighties to comparing Covid symptoms, there is no limit. It's been called "funny" more times than I can count. He says it's good to be lazy after covid.
Rory was immediately friendly and genuinely interested in what I had to say. When he saw I was in Pembrokeshire, he told me about his grandfather in Tredegar, who wanted to retire in Pembrokeshire. Sadly he died early but built many houses at Little Haven and ensured his family enjoyed many holidays in West Wales. "Good memories," Rory said happily.
He enjoyed his stay in the capital. he believed Cardiff was a "very attractive marketing group", partly due to the influence of large insurers such as Admiral. And so he began to scream again. "It's a beautiful city, by the way," he said cheerfully. “Every time I go back to Cardiff it's more fun than before. It makes me want to go home. Especially the part of Wales I saw growing up in Monmouth, which is English, which I honestly didn't have. realize you're Welsh until you're gone.
"Every business transaction involves a social exchange, whether you buy a coffee," he says, a stark contrast between Wales and his home in the south-east. "There's a general warmth of people in every deal, which isn't always the case in the south of England."
Rory, 57, spent his career working in London advertising agencies and graduated from Ogilvy and Mather in 1988 after studying classics at Cambridge. "I learned more in the first three years than I did in college," he says. "There's a myth that education increases a person's resources more than the time spent in a fun business, but I don't think that's true."
Founded by proud and passionate Scotsman David Ogilvy, Ogilvy & Mather is becoming one of the largest advertising networks in the world. The man behind the brand says, "Customers aren't stupid, they're your wives" and "You'll never achieve fame and fortune if you don't have great ideas."
More than three decades later, Rory is still going strong, running the behavioral science department at Ogilvychange, earning a blue Twitter badge and talking to Ted along the way. Currently, he is the vice president of Ogilvy & Mather Business Group. He writes a fortnightly column in the Spectator, has written three books and invites government advisers to learn his opinion. Here is someone who knows more about us than we do.
Life was good at Usk. Rory's parents were businessmen and property owners who built steamboats and created strange inventions on the Usk Canal. Rory enjoyed his school days and achieved straight A's in Maths, Advanced Maths, Latin and Greek. "I think it's like a free MBA if you develop a small business," he said. "I think almost by osmosis, you grow a lot of business by being involved in family life and being involved in those things."
Rory has always had "creative tendencies." He continued, “For example, if you give me a puzzle to solve, I only care how biased the solution is, how impractical the school system encourages people to believe there is only one right answer. Question: "I prefer questions, but I prefer more than one." He added the reasons why they love detective novels and mysteries.
Rory started working in Ogilvy's planning department in 1988, but was fired a year later after a personal dispute. There's nothing dirty about it, seriously, just a difference of opinion. But the experience helped Rory realize that he wanted to be a copywriter at Ogilvy, which he did. In that first year, he learned a valuable lesson in testing direct marketing messages. "The way people make decisions is not the way we think," he said. "Often it has nothing to do with what we actually choose."
But then work requires a constant supply of ideas, the bigger the better, and long and expensive campaigns can begin. It was a time when television commercial writers dreamed up catchphrases that would become part of mainstream culture to this day. Think Snap, Crackle and Pop; Beanz Meanz Heinz; Good sign.
Rory is not an accountant. In fact, he considers economic theory to be the cause of trade disruption. For all the major commercials of the eighties and nineties, it is very difficult to measure the impact of television advertising. The industry slogan is "I know which half works, I don't know which half doesn't". But with the advent of the Internet, everything changed and the focus shifted to new screens. It promises a direct communication channel between sellers and buyers. The unpredictability of TV targeting is being replaced by the new 'measurable customer engagement'.
Creative ideas have been replaced by data and evidence, Rory said, to their detriment. The result is a crowd of economists, technocrats, analysts and spreadsheet analysts who leave little room for magic or even sentimentality. "When you want logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic," he wrote in Alchemy. the shocking power of meaningless ideas”.
"We have created a world view model that is not necessarily bad, but is used and trusted globally. "Because maps are not regions. tube maps are a great way to get around the system, but London maps are terrible. Economics for the real business world. Tube maps are a guide to getting around London. Sometimes helpful, sometimes very misleading. Everyone uses the same map and more. It is important because of what they left behind, because of what they have."
Rory sees things differently. "My understanding of marketing is simply the science of finding economists wrong," he says. "The human mind does not work with logic like a horse works with gasoline."
Rory is definitely educated and very knowledgeable, but she has a strange way of looking at the world. It almost always matches my own experiences. He writes about the genius of the bottomless breakfast, "My English is three words longer than 'all day breakfast'" and columns on motorway service stations with a sense of humor and irreverence.
"I see comedy as one of the forces that makes us look different," he says, before developing another theory about human behavior. But there is always more than one explanation. I like to say. "Let's look deeper." why people buy the things they do and why they make the decisions they do." The same applies, for example, to studying how people react to Covid vaccines. We create stereotypes that do not suit us." It's the same reason we had "interesting features" during the Brexit debate, he added.
"People who are interested in politics today see it as a way to solve problems, and people who are involved in politics like to win arguments." It started with another touch, this time with globalization, but it inexplicably returned at the same time as Covid and the negative bias of the national media. Rory is definitely a force of nature and almost impossible to beat.
Returning to a career in marketing, Rory explains that before you can influence human behavior, you need to understand what people often don't think, think or say. Rory acknowledges and respects that we are not robots and acknowledges "the gap between our unconscious emotional motivations and our postrational perspective."
For example, our video call is a clear example of this. "It took an epidemic to spread the adoption of this technology," he said. “But the world of logic says work hard and travel less. The power of the internet is something Rory has been working on for years. In the early 90s, Rory was behind BT getting people to join this new concept called the Internet. It's almost impossible to believe now, but once he had to sell us, Rory added.
"Nobody noticed, but with consumerism, the internet has taken away a lot of the advantages of living in a big city. Now it's not the most attractive place to shop, but the site is there." Almost every topic brings a new theory about consumption patterns. His "most important discovery" during the quarantine was what he called a "chronology hack." " he said: In victory..
As someone who is considered a leading expert in the psychology of human behavior but never studied the subject, he says he is completely "self-taught." "Advertising led me to behavioral science," he continues. In the first months after graduation, "basic economics is an interesting concept, but in some cases it has little value in terms of reality." "Since 15 years ago, ``Why do people do what they do?''
Psychology doesn't give you the right answers, but it "tells you the best places and questions to ask," he continues. He said that the marketing approach for the government is as important as advertising. His outspoken views prompted the government to take action. "I've made my point many times when asked," said Rory, who has recently criticized measures such as the 1% tax or regulation. Stamp duty
"One of the amazing things is if you go to a marketer and say, 'we want people to stop doing this and start doing this,' at least they have the decency to look at 10 things they can do before someone leaves." . "These are bribes or laws. Laws," he said. "Governments have a very narrow view of the economy, the only way to get people to do something is to start with legislation and economics, use incentives and incentives as a plan B and only then consider the cost of persuasion if it doesn't work. ".
Any "value" retailer will try to avoid the economic solution by lowering the price of the product to get more people to buy, because that's a very expensive solution, he continues. "If you say a large chocolate bar is 50% more free and you raise the price by 50%, will more people buy it?" Before confessing, Rory said that it was an illegal act and that it would only be a concept. But he knows that people see the deal and when in doubt, they choose to buy the deal without the deal. Or take the M&S deal, which offers three products for £7; "When you buy all three products, you feel like you're missing out on a bargain," he says.
After all, Rory can answer her questions because once or twice a year the chocolate situation happens randomly. He says, I can't say, they understand that sometimes someone forgets to change the price. "You're doing 50% free and it's 50% more than that small amount," says Rory. "It's a shame how much money you make when this happens." All this shows how we ordinary consumers do not bargain for 'consumer value'. Rory added: “There's something else: all the hype, the self-invitation, the crowds, the FOMO. In addition to low prices, there are all kinds of psychological factors."
In fact, we are talking about the "butterfly effect" of consumer behavior, where small contextual changes can have a big impact on the decisions people make. For example, doubling the sales volume of a call center by adding a few sentences to the script. It is effectively “found media” and “found media”; looking for unexpected and inexpensive pressures that change the way people think and act. Simply put, it's about creating value "from everywhere," he says.
"The value of something is determined by perception, and getting people to think about something else is the way to create value out of nothing," he says. "That's why my book is called "Alchemy". London uses Overgrade as a prime example. "It's been around a lot in the past, but it's been underutilized," he said. “Well, you add a new mechanism and you crush the station. But by effectively adding that line to the Tube map and renaming it, suddenly it becomes the Overground. You've made the M25 the color of most of London's public transport. Usage percentage. It's up to 100 a day and people are reviewing London."
"Great value is created through information. If you don't understand or see what you see, product is created and wasted because you don't let people understand it. Marketing is thinking about things. This shows their value more clearly. ".
It seems simple, but it is not. A man from Wales has stepped up to show the industry what it's missing.
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