Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.

In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can.

The Nobel Prize-winning behavioural scientist Richard Thaler said, ‘As a general rule the US Government is run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists. Others interested in helping the lawyers out need not apply.’

And once human psychology has a role to play, it is perfectly possible for behaviour to become entirely contradictory. For instance, there are two equally potent, but completely contradictory, ways to sell a product: ‘Not many people own one of these, so it must be good’ and ‘Lots of people already own one of these, so it must be good.’

While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work.

The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. At Ogilvy, I founded a division that employs psychology graduates to look at behavioural change problems through a new lens. Our mantra is ‘Test counterintuitive things, because no one else ever does.’

Believe it or not, the phrase ‘Often a bridesmaid, never a bride’ has its origins in an advert for Listerine – here was a hygiene product being sold not on medical benefits but on the fear of social and sexual rejection.

One of the great contributors to the profits of high-end restaurants is the fact that bottled water comes in two types, enabling waiters to ask ‘still or sparkling?’, making it rather difficult to say ‘just tap’.

Don’t design for average. Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea focusing on one outlier than on ten average users.

No one was ever fired for pretending economics was true.

Create a name, and you’ve created a norm.*

But while it is accepted that physical objects are designed around the evolved human frame, it is not universally accepted that the world is shaped to work with the evolved human brain. Mainstream economics, for the purposes of mathematical neatness, assumes that the human brain works like a clockwork device. A world designed by economists would be one where chairs were designed merely to stably support the weight of the sitter, with no regard given to physical comfort or padding.

A knowledge of the human physique is considered essential in designing a chair, but a knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.

People with approval ratings below 97 per cent can barely sell equivalent goods for half the price of sellers with a track record of 100 per cent satisfaction.

simply adding coloured flecks to a plain white powder will make people believe it is more effective, even if they do not know what role these flecks perform.

If a concentrated product requires you to mix it with water first, or to mix together two separate ingredients before using it, our belief in its potency is restored by this small amount of extra bother.*

General Mills brought in a team of psychologists to find out why consumers were avoiding it. One of their explanations was guilt: the product was so damned easy to make compared to traditional baking that people felt they were cheating. The fact that the cake tasted excellent and received plaudits didn’t help – this simply meant that the ‘cook’ felt awkward about getting more credit than they had earned. In response to these results, General Mills added a little psychological alchemy – or ‘benign bullshit’. They revised the instructions on the packaging to make baking less convenient: as well as water, the housewife was charged with adding ‘a real egg’ to the ingredients. When they relaunched the range with the slogan ‘Just Add an Egg’, sales shot up.

Conventional wisdom about human decision-making has always held that our attitudes drive our behaviour, but evidence strongly suggests that the process mostly works in reverse: the behaviours we adopt shape our attitudes. Perhaps someone who separates their rubbish into waste and recyclables will become more environmentally conscious as a result of having adopted the behaviour, just as Tesla drivers will wax enthusiastically about the environmental purity of their vehicles, regardless of their initial reasons for buying the car.*

Taxes, like parking fines, are seen as wholly bad, but a little alchemy could solve this problem quite easily. In ancient Rome, wealth taxes were levied to fund military campaigns or public works, and since the names of the people who paid them were displayed on a monument, with the money dedicated to a specific end, rich people were happy to pay, with those initially deemed too poor to be liable volunteering themselves, saying ‘Actually I’m much richer than you think.’

Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents. This pseudo-rational approach, with its obsession with following an approved process, excludes counter-intuitive possible solutions and restricts solution-seeking to a small and homogeneous group of people. After all, not even accountants or economists use logic to solve everyday domestic dilemmas, so why do they instinctively reach for calculators and spreadsheets the moment they enter an office? The conventional answer is that we deploy more rigour and structure to our decision-making in business because so much is at stake; but another, less optimistic, explanation is that the limitations of this approach are in fact what makes it appealing – the last thing people want when faced with a problem is a range of creative solutions, with no means of choosing between them other than their subjective judgement.

I have heard rumours that various hip-hop clothing brands have deployed a similar strategy to Frederick; by making it relatively easy for their clothes to be shoplifted, the stolen clothes ended up being worn by people who were significantly cooler than the people who paid full price.