Alchemy Quotes

“However, in one respect it is a monstrous lie, because it completely misrepresents the process by which you progressed to the top. It pays an undue tribute to rational decision-making, optimisation and sequential logic – a tribute that really should be laid at the altar of trial and error, good instincts, and luck.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The first lens is market research or, to give it a simpler name, asking people. However, the problem with it is that, if we remember David Ogilvy’s words: ‘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.’ People simply do not have introspective access to their motivations.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Logic requires that people find universal laws, but outside of scientific fields, there are fewer of these than we might expect.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Had Darwin waited a hundred and fifty years or so, he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble and seasickness in uncovering our primate ancestry by travelling from Down House to his (and my) local Sainsbury’s supermarket in Otford in Kent. There he could have learned from point-of-sale data that, over 30,000 items on the shelves, the single item most frequently purchased, as by all grocery shoppers in Britain, is . . . a banana.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“As Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks, ‘the way a question is phrased is itself information’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘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.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“There is hence an ever-present temptation to pretend things are more ‘logical’ than they really are.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, ‘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.’* Trivers and Kurzban explained the evolutionary science behind that conundrum: we simply don’t have access to our genuine motivations, because it is not in our interest to know.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“One problem (of many) with Soviet-style command economies is that they can only work if people know what they want and need, and can define and express their wants adequately. But this is impossible, because not only do people not know what they want, they don’t even know why they like the things they buy. The only way you can discover what people really want (their ‘revealed preferences’, in economic parlance) is through seeing what they actually pay for under a variety of different conditions, in a variety of contexts. This requires trial and error – which requires competitive markets and marketing.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“In many ways, expensive advertising and brands arise as a solution to a problem identified by George Akerlof in his 1970 paper ‘The Market for Lemons’ in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The problem is known as ‘information asymmetry’, whereby the seller knows more about what he is selling than the buyer knows about what he is buying. This lesson was learned the hard way in Eastern Bloc countries under communism; brands were considered un-Marxist, so bread was simply labelled ‘bread’. Customers had no idea who had made it or whom to blame if it arrived full of maggots, and couldn’t avoid that make in future if it did, because all bread packaging looked the same. Unhappy customers had no threat of sanction; happy customers had no prospect of rewarding producers through repeat custom. And so the bread was rubbish.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“As the novelist Upton Sinclair once remarked, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“It is an enormous mistake to assume that what the translator conveys is what the speaker intended, and it is equally foolish to assume that what you intended to say is what will be understood.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“An approach seeking to minimise variance or minimise downsides often involves behaviour that seems nonsensical to those who don’t understand what the actor is trying to do.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“All powerful messages must contain an element of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, disproportion, inefficiency, scarcity, difficulty or extravagance – because rational behaviour and talk, for all their strengths, convey no meaning.[...] Meaning is conveyed by the things we do that are not in our own short-term self-interest – by the costs that we incur and the risks we take.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“We naturally assume that something that only does one thing is better than something that claims to do many things”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Anyone can easily build a career on a single eccentric talent, if it is cunningly deployed. 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 Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Evolved human instinct may be a much better at statistics than modern economists”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“What is important is how you behave, not knowing why you do.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“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

“WHAT GETS MISMEASURED GETS MISMANAGED”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“The sandwich was not invented by an average eater.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Not a single pilot of the 4,000 measured was within the average range on all ten bodily measures.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Don’t design for average.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“asking the real why’.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“Never call a behaviour irrational until you really know what the person is trying to do.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense