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

by Rory Sutherland

‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’

‘I don’t think it works like that at all. You see an electric drill in a shop and decide you want it. Then you take it home and wander around your house looking for excuses to drill holes in things.’

If you want a simple life, unladen by weird decisions, do not marry anyone who has worked in the creative department of an advertising agency.

The iPhone, perhaps the most successful product since the Ford Model T, was developed not in response to consumer demand or after iterative consultation with focus groups; it was the monomaniacal conception of one slightly deranged man.fn3

Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need.

it seemed that if you sent out an email promoting a play or musical, you sold fewer tickets if you included an offer for reduced-price tickets with the email. Conversely, offering tickets at the full price seemed to increase demand.

Yes, I know it’s bullshit but, as we’ve already seen, placebos work even if you tell people they are placebos.

Big data makes the assumption that reality maps neatly on to behaviour, but it doesn’t. Context changes everything.

‘You see,’ Korzybski said, ‘I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.’1

So, marketing can not only justify a high price but it can also detoxify a low one. Make something too cheap without sufficient explanation and it simply might not be believable – after all, things which seem too good to be true usually are.