July 13, 2021

Behavioral Science, Marketing, and Persuasion with Rory Sutherland on Infinite Loops with Jim O’Shaughnessy

Two make-or-break marketing questions
- 1. How good is your product?
- 2. How well are you selling it?
Minority rule is where a small boycotting minority can change the consumption patterns of a much larger group by simply refusing to consume something
If you want support, ask for advice – when you ask for an opinion, you turn on a person’s critic mode
“The worst mistake you can make in a social setting is to appear not to understand the implicit rules of the game, like dress codes” – Rory Sutherland
People use the ambiguity around a rule set to exclude other people
If you have subtle normative rules, it’s a nasty way of practicing exclusion
“The objective of nearly all of woke speech is more or less compatible with anybody’s aspiration to be a civilized and decent human being. To be honest, a decent, reputable human being is generally a pretty woke human being.”- Rory Sutherland
People stop making intelligent decisions about risks when they allow the regulatory rules to take the place of judgment – their reasoning: if it’s regulatorily approved, the blame will fall somewhere else

Rory Sutherland, (@rorysutherland1) is the vice-chairman of the Ogilvy group, author of Alchemy and the audiobook Hacking the Unconscious.

Two critical marketing questions:
- 1. How good is your product?
- 2. How well are you selling it?
If you don’t get a tick on both of those, you’re going to fail
Create artificial scarcity and magnify the economic effects because part of the sale is a narrative: “Normally this is a really expensive thing, but because we need to clear our stock, you get an expensive thing for a low price”

If you feel you are part of a smaller group or a subset of people, the atmosphere, and level of politeness among those people will be higher
Even when randomly put into an in-group, a person is likely to give preference to those people even if they have no idea who they are
Minority rule is where a small boycotting minority can change the consumption patterns of a much larger group by simply refusing to consume something

If you want support, ask for advice. By asking for an opinion, you turn on a person’s critic mode
“I wonder if you can help me?” – the seven magic words to getting what you want because it suggests to the other person that they’re free to say no, but they’re highly incentivized
Tiny distinctions between words, like opinion, versus advice, versus help, make a difference

If you want to get people fired up, violate the game rules, because people naturally understand game rules
“The worst mistake you can make in a social setting is to appear not to understand the implicit rules of the game, like dress codes” – Rory Sutherland
Normative rules are explicit – someone from an out-group can understand the rule, like a school uniform
If you have subtle normative rules or hidden rules, it’s a nasty way of effectively practicing exclusion and it makes it difficult to break into that group
- i.e: when everybody can wear their own clothes, often just a few kids understand the nuances of sneakers or hoodies or whether Abercrombie & Fitch is fashionable or social death
People use the ambiguity around a rule set to exclude other people
“My view is that the job of democracy, every now and then, is a large group of people get to kick against an elite. If democracy, never does anything you don’t like, there’s probably something a bit wrong with it.” – Rory Sutherland

“I see institutional behavior containing a lot of stupidity, which people think of as intelligence and because, the job in any large institution is to make every decision you make, not necessarily a good decision in terms of its consequences, but a good decision in terms of the ease of which you can defend it.” – Rory Sutherland
The number of interesting ideas that get through sequential logic is a small subset of the potential good ideas – if you demand sense-making as a precondition, you’re limiting the solution space
All problem solving in government is, legislation first, economic incentive second, persuasion third
“I think we’re prisoners of our models. Our models start off being useful and end up replacing reality” – Rory Sutherland
Companies are forced to share the same model for purposes of mutual comprehension and comparative performance year-to-year
Chasing targets is easy, changing targets is hard

Ancient Greek democracy had two concepts:
- Freedom of speech
- Equality of speech
There was very little equality of speech 20 or 30 years ago
Attempts to curb free speech tend to have unintended consequences
But the problem with social media is that the main focus is, how do I get attention?
“The objective of nearly all of woke speech is more or less compatible with anybody’s aspiration to be a civilized and decent human being. To be honest, a decent, reputable human being is generally a pretty woke human being.”- Rory Sutherland
If the vocabulary becomes heavily policed by one particular group to a point where it becomes alienating or incomprehensible to everybody outside that group, peer group solidarity and identity is achieved but at a price
Separate the intention of something from the means that are being adopted to promote it

Canadians developed a banking code in Canada around 1882 where the banking code must be revised every 10 years
If you have the same banking code for too long, people will game the system
People stop making intelligent decisions about risks when they allow the regulatory rules to take the place of judgment – their reasoning: if it’s regulatorily approved the blame will fall somewhere else

“There are unanticipated positives that emerge from being forced to do things that we never wanted to do. And I think that has implications for human decision-making, which is, at a very crude level, as an individual consumer there are lots of things where we don’t know what they’re like until we’ve tried them.” – Rory Sutherland