Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group The Spectator's Wiki Man.
Sevenoaks and Deal, Kent
Joined February 2007
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Rory Sutherland retweeted
I asked a large logistics company in Europe how they were using AI and they told me they can't use AI because of German workers councils. It was weird because I didn't ask them how they were cutting headcount. I asked them how they were using AI.
Rory Sutherland retweeted
Ordered airpods off amazon.ie off what looked like official apple page, many good reviews. Package delivered, opened it, and it was pack of fucking chicken stock cubes. Almost impossible to report this to amazon, and when I called a human they said "just return it"
Rory Sutherland retweeted
Towards the end of his career Daniel Kahneman was asked what the most important finding from all his years of research was.
His answer: make it easy.
It might sound like a statement of the obvious. But Kahneman makes the point that, although people intuitively know if they make a behaviour easier it’ll happen more, they consistently and significantly underestimate the scale of impact of small bits of friction.
As this brilliant cartoon by @marketoonist suggests, businesses are too willing to leave friction in the process. They think people will push through barriers to get to their amazing products. But in reality, the smallest pieces of friction tend to have an outsized effect on behaviour!
The implication is simple - for every customer touchpoint, identify even the tiniest barriers along the way, and if possible, take them out. That can have a bigger effect on behaviour than giving more and more reasons for why people should use your service.
***
If you'd like to learn more, I'm running a training session on behavioural science for better marketing on December 10th. More details here: tickettailor.com/events/astr…
Rory Sutherland retweeted
🚨🇨🇳 A Chinese glass company just turned the RIOTS in France into FREE advertising!
Hengxinfeng filmed NOTHING, just posted a video of its unbreakable windows on social media, and went VIRAL.
EPIC TROLLING!
Rory Sutherland retweeted
This is a trend across cultural and business capitals. A lot of 90s London nostalgia is mourning a time when an entry-level salary in a creative job paid for a scuzzy but livable apartment and unlocked fun hospitality and workplace socializing.
Rory Sutherland retweeted
When literally half your listening time is a single podcast, you can be sure you've found gold 🏅
@myfirstmilpod is the best ive found. And the @rorysutherland episode makes up at least 1/3 of my listening. Worth a repeat for anyone interested in marketing and psychology.
Rory Sutherland retweeted
The fallacy is a classic reminder that narrow cost metrics miss the full picture. Cashiers deter theft, handle exceptions, and create a sense of service that self-checkouts quietly destroy. AI faces the identical risk whenever the only goal is headcount reduction.
Rory Sutherland retweeted
Rory’s point is the doorman fallacy. Self-checkouts look cheaper by offloading cashier work onto shoppers, but they drive up theft (avocados scanned as carrots), make large weekly shops impractical, and erode trust and experience. Finance claims the savings while ignoring the broader value destroyed. Same trap awaits pure AI cost-cutting.
Rory Sutherland retweeted
This is @rorysutherland's “doorman problem”: a hotel fires the doorman to save $, oblivious to all the things he does beyond opening doors. They celebrate short term savings while the value he created making guests feel welcome, valued, and importantly eager to return is ignored
Rory Sutherland retweeted
This is a great @rorysutherland style marketing anecdote.
re: airbnb discourse
in college I worked as a server at an upscale steakhouse. we had a few different steak sauces that were made from scratch daily. they were expensive to make, and less than half of the customers that ordered steak wanted sauce, so the restaurant charged $3 for it
we got complaints constantly. just at my own tables, half a dozen times a week I'd get complaints about being "nickel and dimed" for $3 of sauce on a $70 steak. a few times a month someone would mention it in an angry online review, or ask to speak to a manager and demand that it be removed from the bill because "who the hell charges for condiments?"
after several years of this, finally management had enough. they raised the price of every steak by $3, and now complimentary sauce was included with each steak on request. want to hazard a guess about how many customers complained about the $3 price increase on steak? essentially zero.
it was great, from the restaurants perspective! no more complaints, and instead of making $3 on 40% of steak orderers, they made $3 on all of them. and the customers were much happier, despite this deal being absolutely, unequivocally worse for them.
consumers are not rational agents from microeconomics textbooks. very often the *feeling* of what they're being charged for matters way more than the absolute value of what they're being charged. I think that's more or less what happening with airbnb. people don't want to be charged a cleaning fee and then also told they have to clean, even if in the counterfactual world the additional cleaning fee is more than they'd be willing to pay someone to do the required cleaning. a $100 cleaning fee *feels* better than a $50 cleaning fee + "load the dishwasher and take the trash out to the dumpster", even though most people would not pay $50 to not have to do that.
This was something I always planned to do but knew I would never get around to doing. Nor would I have done it half so well. What Rob is creating here is a kind of Linnaean classification for the human emotions - through a healthy lens of evolutionary theory.
See also:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_…
My new book, ALL THE FEELS, is out! Each feeling gets a chapter: What is it for, what is it measuring, and what is it motivating? Paperback and Kindle versions now available: amazon.com/dp/B0H6DML559 (Repost to experience Feel #37: Pleasure from Helping.)
Interestingly, this only works as a hard-luck story because it's a house. If she owned an impressionist painting or owned a stable of Bugattis, everyone would just shrug and tell her to sell. @larsiusprime
Rory Sutherland retweeted
Antique fonts from centuries gone by, revived from historical specimens and shared for everyone to use by @clairlemon’s husband Harold Lehmann. This is so cool
font-revival.com/
Rory Sutherland retweeted
@rorysutherland perfect
Rory Sutherland retweeted
This is a fantastic set of free tools
@sebs_tweets @rorysutherland @shetlerjones @marcaross @PolemicTMM @Itwitius et al
In response to popular demand, all of the mapmaking tools on my site have been updated with unit selectors for miles, kilometers and nautical miles.
thinkinginspace.net/tools.ht…
Rory Sutherland retweeted
Your country might be great but does it follow Australia’s lead by colour-coordinating its currency with the nation’s favourite snack foods?
Rory Sutherland retweeted
How can it have taken this long for them to grasp this. If you really want non intermittent non fossil fuel energy, this is the only answer.
Rory Sutherland retweeted
Have you noticed that when backing out of a parking space pedestrians no longer stop and wait? They walk right across the path of your moving vehicle.
That didn't happen twenty years ago. Backup cameras, rear cross-traffic radar, and warning chimes haven't just changed the car—they've retrained the pedestrian to assume the machine will see them and stop. Every safety system rewrites the habits of the people around it.
Unintended consequences.
