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

by Rory Sutherland

Branding isn’t just something to add to great products – it’s essential to their existence. Evolution solved the problem of asymmetric information and trust for flowers and bees back when our ancestors were still living in trees. Bees have been around for at least 20 million years, floral plants a good deal longer. My analogy between signalling in the biological world and advertising in the commercial world may explain something I have noticed for years: if you talk to economists, they tend to hate advertising and barely understand it at all, while if you talk to biologists they understand it perfectly. For decades, the most sympathetic ear I had at The Economist in London was not their marketing correspondent (who seemed to genuinely hate marketing) but their science correspondent, whose background was as an evolutionary biologist.