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Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense by Rory Sutherland
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Alchemy Quotes Showing 91-120 of 209
“that many problems might be solved if we abandoned the rationalist obsession with universal, context-free laws. Once free of this constraint, you might have the freedom to generate magical ideas, some of which may be silly but of which others will be invaluable.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
“The lesson we should learn from the appendix is that something can be valuable without necessarily being valuable all the time.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
“This freedom is much more valuable than we realise, because to reach intelligent answers, you often need to ask really dumb questions.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
“Every day, companies or governments wrongly make highly simplistic assumptions about what people care about. Two major US retailers, JCPenney and Macy’s, both fell foul of this misunderstanding when they tried to reduce their reliance on couponing and sales, and instead simply reduced their permanent prices. In both cases, the strategy was a commercial disaster. People didn’t want low prices – they wanted concrete savings. One possible explanation for this is that we are psychologically rivalrous,”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
“But what about snake-oil salesmen,* the fakers, fraudsters and conmen? Alchemy, precisely because it is not an exact science, has always been rife with charlatanry, and we should be on our guard for this. Many of the remedies proposed by people in advertising and design are wrong, and many of the findings of behavioural scientists have already been or will be proved wrong. Some parts of this book are also undoubtedly wrong – I am conscious that I have written this book from an incredibly optimistic perspective, but my argument is not that alchemy is always reliable, ethical or beneficial. Far from it – it is simply that we should not recoil from testing alchemical solutions because they do not fit with our reductionist ideas about how the world works. The purpose of this book is to persuade the reader that alchemy exists whether we like it or not, and that it is possible to use it for good; besides, if people are more aware of its existence, they will be better at spotting its misuses.*”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
“This explains why we generally buy televisions from shops rather than from strangers on the street – the shop has invested in stock, it has a stable location and it is vulnerable to reputational damage.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The question of how to get to Gatwick is what you might call a ‘wide context’ problem. It allows for vagueness and multiple right answers, and it doesn’t demand absolute adherence to any precise rules. There is no formula for the solution, it allows scope for all kinds of possible ‘rightish’ answers and all kinds of information can be taken into account when coming up with an answer. These are the problems we seem instinctively better equipped to solve, but which computers find hard. If I were to delve into my unconscious and uncover some of the variables at play in my brain when I next have to get to the airport, they might include ‘Is it raining?’, ‘How much luggage do I have?’, ‘How long am I going to be away for?’, ‘What is the average time via the M25 versus taking the A25?’, ‘What is the variance of journey time on the M25 versus the A25?’fn2 and ‘Does my flight leave from the North or South Terminal?’ If you think of getting to Gatwick as a narrow problem in the way your GPS does – a simple question of getting to the airport as quickly as possible – some of these factors may seem irrelevant, but they are all important in real life. The weather affects the traffic. If I am going away for two weeks rather than one night, it affects the cost of parking, and therefore the relative cost of going by train, car or taxi – and the amount of luggage I have. The variance of travel time on the M25 matters to whether it’s worth risking. And heavy luggage makes the train less appealing, especially if you are flying from the North Terminal, which is much further away from the rail station. It’s interesting that we find solving complex problems like this so easy – it suggests that our brains have evolved to answer ‘wide context’ problems because most problems we faced as we developed were of this type. Blurry ‘pretty good’ decision-making has simply proven more useful than precise logic.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“My contention is that placebos need to be slightly absurd to work.fn1 All three elements that seem to make Red Bull such a potent mental hackfn2 make no sense from a logical point of view. People want cheap, abundant and nice-tasting drinks, surely? And yet the success of Red Bull proves that they don’t. Something about these three illogicalities may well be essential to its unconscious appeal, or to its potency as a placebo. If we are to subconsciously believe that a drink has medicinal or psychotropic powers, perhaps it can’t taste conventionally nice.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The results showed a clear trend: although everyone had drunk exactly the same drink, the ‘vodka Red Bull group’ reported feeling much drunker, took more risks than the others and were more confident when it came to approaching women.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The scientists who devised it had been briefed to come up with an effective cold and flu medicine: they succeeded, but with one problematic side effect – the formulation led to severe drowsiness. Despairingly, they were at the point of starting again when an alchemist from the marketing department came up with an idea. ‘If we position the product as a night-time cold and flu remedy, the drowsiness isn’t a problem – it’s a selling point. It will not only minimise your cold and flu symptoms, but it will help you sleep through them too.’ Night Nurse was born: a masterclass in the magic of reframing.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“Credit card companies have discovered this already, with promises like ‘Apply now and get approval within 12 hours’ – they found, through testing, accident or experimentation, that this made a difference to people’s keenness to respond. Whether you’re carrying out market research or using neoclassical economic assumptions, you wouldn’t realise that the amount of time spent in uncertainty might be an important factor.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“It seems likely that a significant part of what you’re doing when you spend two hours on self-grooming is self-administering a confidence placebo to produce emotions that you can’t generate through a conscious act of will.fn4”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“the immune system is costly to run, and so as long as an infection is not lethal, it will wait for a signal that fighting it will not endanger the animal in other ways. It seems that the Siberian hamster subconsciously fights infection more energetically in summer because that is when food supplies are sufficiently plentiful to sustain an immune response. Trimmer’s model demonstrated that in challenging environments, animals fared better by weathering infections and conserving resources. Humphrey argues that people subconsciously respond to a sham treatment because it assures us that it will weaken the infection without overburdening the body’s resources. In populations where food is plentiful we can, in theory, mount a full immune response at any time, but Humphrey believes that the subconscious switch has not yet adapted to this – thus it takes a placebo to convince the mind that it is the right time for an immune response.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“Nicholas Humphrey argues that placebos work by prompting the body to invest more resources in its recovery.fn2 He believes that evolution has calibrated our immune system to suit a harsher environment than the current one, so we need to convince our unconscious that the conditions for recovery are especially favourable in order for our immune system to work at full tilt.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The production of rivets under communism demonstrated a similar pattern. Typically a factory was given a monthly quota that it was required to manufacture – the unbranded rivets were then sent to a central rivets depository, where they intermingled with all the other factories’ rivets. From there, all the rivets, whose provenance was by now completely indistinguishable, would be transported to wherever they were needed. The Soviets soon found that, without a maker’s name attached to a product, no one had any incentive to make a quality product, which pushed quantity upwards and quality downwards. The easiest way to produce a million rivets every month was to produce a million bad rivets, which soon led to ships falling apart. Furthermore, you did not know which factory to blame, because the rivets had become commoditised, which is to say anonymised. Eventually the regime swallowed their ideological pride and made factories stamp their names on their rivets – the feedback mechanism was restored and quality returned to acceptable levels.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“It is agreed by both game theorists and evolutionary biologists that the prospects for cooperation are far greater when there is a high expectation of repetition than in single-shot transactions. Clay Shirky has even described social capital as ‘the shadow of the future at a societal scale’. We acquire it as a means of signalling our commitment to long-term, mutually beneficial behaviours, yet some businesses barely consider this at all – procurement, by setting shorter and shorter contract periods, may be unwittingly working to reduce cooperation.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“Upfront investment is proof of long-term commitment, which is a guarantor of honest behaviour.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The strongest marketing approach in a business-to-business context comes not from explaining that your product is good, but from sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt (now commonly abbreviated as FUD) around the available alternatives. The desire to make good decisions and the urge not to get fired or blamed may at first seem to be similar motivations, but they are, in fact, never quite the same thing, and may sometimes be diametrically different.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“If you want to offer ease of use – and ease of purchase – it is often a good idea not to offer people a Swiss Army knife, something that claims to do lots of things.fn8 With the notable exception of the mobile phone, we generally find it easier to buy things that serve a single purpose. However, the engineering mentality – as at Sony – runs counter to this; the idea of removing functionality seems completely illogical, and it is extremely hard to make the case for over-riding conventional logic in any business or government setting, unless you are the chairman, chief executive or minister in charge. Although you may think that people instinctively want to make the best possible decision, there is a stronger force that animates business decision-making: the desire not to get blamed or fired. The best insurance against blame is to use conventional logic in every decision.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“In the same way that McDonald’s omitted cutlery from its restaurants to make it obvious how you were supposed to eat its hamburgers, by removing the recording function from Walkmans, Sony produced a product that had a lower range of functionality, but a far greater potential to a change behaviour.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“When Hurricane Andrew hit the south-eastern US in 1992, it was the worst hurricane in US history. It caused incalculable damage both to property and to the environment; however, its biggest environmental effect, perhaps, was not the loss of a species, but the opposite. In South Florida, the hurricane burst a large coastal aquarium tank, releasing an unwelcome species of fish into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The lionfish comes from the tropical waters around Indonesia. Though beautiful to look at, it is a voracious predator of other fish, and is able to eat as many as 30 in half an hour. Furthermore, one female lionfish can produce over two million eggs per year, which was a particular problem in the Caribbean, where it has no natural predators.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The department devised a plan, aimed at luring in female students and making sure they actually enjoyed their computer science initiation, in the hopes of converting them to majors. A course previously entitled ‘Introduction to programming in Java’ was renamed ‘Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python’.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“To fund the war effort against France, Princess Marianne appealed in 1813 to all wealthy and aristocratic women there to swap their gold ornaments for base metal, to fund the war effort. In return they were given iron replicas of the gold items of jewellery they had donated, stamped with the words ‘Gold gab ich für Eisen’, ‘I gave gold for iron’. At social events thereafter, wearing and displaying the iron replica jewellery and ornaments became a far better indication of status than wearing gold itself. Gold jewellery merely proved that your family was rich, while iron jewellery proved that your family was not only rich but also generous and patriotic.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“Preoccupied as they were with the hopeless idea of ‘transmutation’ – the transformation of one element into another – the alchemists failed to experiment with the rebranding of lead. Perhaps they could have added a mystery ingredient or polishing technique to make it slightly shinier and named the result ‘Black Gold’.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“TURNING LEAD INTO GOLD: VALUE IS IN THE MIND AND HEART OF THE VALUER”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“A nervous and bureaucratic culture is closed-mindedly attaching more importance to the purity of the methodology than to the possible value of the solution,”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“The bureaucrats to whom he must justify his activities, however, demand reasons right from the beginning to justify funding, but the idea that there is a robust scientific process that will reliably lead to progress seems unfounded.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“For all we obsess about scientific methodology, Geim knows it is far more common for a mixture of luck, experimentation and instinctive guesswork to provide the decisive breakthrough; reason only comes into play afterwards.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
“As I always advise young people, ‘Find one or two things your boss is rubbish at and be quite good at them.’ Complementary talent is far more valuable than conformist talent.”
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense