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

by Rory Sutherland

A few years ago, the British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s received a large number of customer complaints, claiming that they had changed the taste of their Dairy Milk brand. They were at first baffled, because the formulation hadn’t been altered for years. However, what they had done was change the shapes of the blocks you would break off a bar, rounding their corners. And smoother shapes taste sweeter. Truly.

in Latin American countries, for instance, Spanish words may take on different meanings: ‘Your wife is a tremendous whore’ would seem an odd way to thank your host after dinner, except that in some countries, the formal word for ‘hostess’ has acquired that meaning.

In a business context a Dutchman might say, ‘We tried that and it was shit, so we won’t do it again,’ while an Englishman intending to say the same thing might say, ‘I think it might be a little while before we try that again.’

It is worth remembering that costly signalling may also play a role in this: certain things need to be expensive for symbolic reasons. A £200 dress reduced to £75 is fine, but women may not feel happy wearing a £75 dress to a wedding. TK Maxx,fn3 a psychologically ingenious retailer, is a brilliant place to buy a present for your wife, provided that under no circumstances you reveal to her that you bought it from TK Maxx.

‘There’s your problem,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter what something tastes like in blind tastings, if you put “low in fat” or any other health indicators on the packaging, you’ll make the contents taste worse.’

The Polish-American academic Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) is perhaps most famous for his dictum that ‘The map is not the territory.’

For example, all sleeping bags when sold are packed tightly into unfeasibly small bags. However, the long-term effect of these is that, though the product may look attractive when new and professionally packaged, they are all but impossible to repack after use.

Billions of dollars is now spent on digital advertising because it is assumed to be more efficient – you can target people more accurately and the cost of transmission of each message to a pair of appropriate eyeballs is lower – without it being clear that it is more effective.

if you flew out of Madrid or Barcelona it was impossible not to notice that both airports were magnificent, but also that they were three times larger than necessary. At London Heathrow or Schiphol in Amsterdam, almost every gate is occupied by a waiting aircraft; here, there were planes at every fifth gate or so.

And in the early twentieth century, when it was proposed to install baths for the undergraduates in one Cambridge college, an elderly fellow was having none of this: ‘What do the undergraduates need baths for? The term only lasts eight weeks.’ What had caused this spectacular change