Rory Sutherland: completely legal marketing hacks that always work

Rory Sutherland: my wife's car is a Mini Cooper Electric and it's got about a I guess it's about uh 28-30 kWh battery and a range of about 100 mi. And I've got the Lotus Eletre, which is a 112 kWh battery, range of about 300 mi... the car's down to 16%... Then I look at the actual range and it's about 58 mi. Now, my wife's car, that's 56%... And my wife's car, we drive around at 56%, i.e. with a range of 56 mi, all the time without the slightest mention of anxiety. But when that's expressed as 16%, not 56 mi, okay? I'm suddenly having conniptions... Now, what that suggests is that range anxiety is much more a factor of psychology than it is of physics... isn't it cheaper just to reduce anxiety rather than to increase range? Because if the way to reduce range anxiety is always to increase range, we'll end up with electric cars being heavier than they need to be, more expensive than they need to be and you know, with 50 kilowatt hours sitting outside your house 95% of the time effectively doing nothing.

Rory Sutherland: trillions of dollars of effort are invested by businesses every year in pursuit of metrics which the customer may not notice or care about, whereas at the same time no money is spent on things which would actually make a huge difference... I call this reverse benchmarking. In other words, you look at all the metrics that everybody cares about in the category. You find a metric that's been completely and ridiculously neglected, and you double down on that thing... What I want to know from you is what out of this evening at the world's best restaurant, Michelin three-star restaurant, something like that. What was a bit disappointing?... the coffee was a bit average... So, he goes back to his own restaurant and he appoints a coffee sommelier and a beer sommelier.

Rory Sutherland: when you cause the cu- customer to pay attention to something, it consequently becomes more important. Because it's surprising and because it it's attention-grabbing, it therefore suddenly uh causes the consumer to completely re-weight their utility function... why is it that when I book a taxi for $100 to pick me up from the airport here in London, they meet me at arrivals and even push my trolley with luggage to the car park, yeah? But if I rent a car for $600, I've got to find and queue at the car rental desk... in some cases, I would literally happily pay 100 quid if the deal is, 'We meet you at arrivals, okay? We take the luggage to the car. We hand you the keys.'

Rory Sutherland: Richard Thaler, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and behavioral economist, the author of Nudge. He once spoke to a board of about 10 people, very large company... Would you take a decision if it had a 50% chance of increasing your profits next year by 50% and a 20% chance of reducing your profits by 30%? And six out of the eight of them said, 'No.'... And they replied, six out of the eight of them, 'Uh because uh 20% of the time or 30% of the time I'd lose my job.'... you realize that the way that businesses are structured, as you push responsibility and accountability further and further down the organization, they become more and more risk averse... both innovation and marketing, I would argue, are fat-tailed activities where 10% of what you do is probably more valuable than everything else. You know, you can't tell in advance which 10% it's going to be... what you do is you get rid of the discovery layer in the pursuit of efficiency. And in the short-term it looks like a great idea. But in the longer term it it it proves fatal, I think.