Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

So the mail pack we produced was elaborate, and of a kind that would have been uneconomical to produce in bulk – and it also won an award. But I most recall it because we worked on it with a Midwestern account director called Steve Barton, who said something telling when he briefed the project. ‘Look’, he said, ‘I’d like you to produce a stand-out piece of creative work here. But if you can’t, what I’d like you to do is write them a really nice one-page letter – and we’ll send it out by FedEx.’ Steve was effectively describing what biologists call ‘costly signalling theory’, the fact that the meaning and significance attached to a something is in direct proportion to the expense with which it is communicated. Imagine you are the recipient – could you throw away a FedEx envelope unopened? I think it is safe to say that you could not. What we wanted from the recipient was not simply the ingestion of information: it was attention, conviction and a sense of import, something that an economically rational 50p stamp could never obtain but that a £10 FedEx envelope could. In the end, the campaign was hugely successful.