YouSaid · the spoken record

Rory Sutherland

lines on the record: 160
first: 2025-12-09
most recent: 2025-12-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, no, no, no, it's perfectly reasonable to say that the people who work in this field and not representative of the whole human population that's a reasonable assertion.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The exact opposite By the way, you should do both. A really, really good service organization allows for very streamlined, efficient service for people who know exactly what they want. and extremely empathetic service for people who are undecided uncertain or find themselves in an unusual situation. So, you need to do both. And that's where I think the tech bros have got it all wrong because they see the opportunity of tech as being a one-way street towards ever greater efficiency, streamlining. And let's face it, tech bros are not neurotypical in terms of what they want from things. When you allow tech bros too much power over decision making, along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what you're real world customers really care about.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, that's why my father had four Dysons. Stingy man, though he was, I hope he won't mind me saying this, my late father, but every time he rang them up, which might have been only once every year, Did something astonishing, and they were really, really helpful, and they solved the problem, and the part arrived the next day. Sometimes they didn't even charge for the replacement part, and therefore he completely trusted those people, and therefore was willing to pay an enormous premium, really, over other vacuum cleaners which might have had the same notional effectiveness, precisely because of that trust.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were going blah, blah, blah, average call time, blah, blah, blah, average wait time. And it was the standard kind of call center metrics about effectively how quickly can we get these people off the phone. I mean, it's a bit more sophisticated than that. I'm sure there's some measure of satisfaction, but it was kind of evaluating the call center on an operational efficiency standpoint. And Dyson basically said, stop right now. You've got this all wrong. The way we should look at this is we should treat it as an honor if one of our customers chooses to get in touch with us and we should therefore respond to them accordingly. As if we're flattered by the contact, not as if we're bothered by the interruption. Or words to that effect. I'm putting words in his mouth, but this is roughly speaking what the person said happened in the meeting.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it incoherent, by the way? The shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder was you optimizing for, it's a completely incoherent nonsense, which is very, very friendly to stock market analysts who want a ready supply of quarterly data so they can bullshit their way out of things. How valuable it is to people with pensions is a completely separate matter. Because one of the things it does is it prevents companies from innovating, effectively, and it prevents them from investing properly in customer relationships. Okay.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to go back. You're sitting, by the way, exactly the same thing Dan Davis did, which is one huge advantage of being a customer value company, not a shareholder value company, is that customers live in the real world. And therefore you are actually rooted in reality, whereas shareholders, by the way, not share owners, but the shareholders are principally interested in justifying their own existence to their investors, and therefore they're dealing with a highly artificial construct in terms of defining the value of a customer”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got it exactly. And I think that will ultimately, you'll have to have the human as the last port of call on that. Also, your call center is the only way you can find out the problems that people can't solve anywhere else. You see what I mean? Was a very smart person I met at Microsoft who when they took over some fairly niche Microsoft product, they put the call center in the middle of the development team. I mean, I would argue that the call centre of British Airways should be on the same floor as the boardroom. Because it's where you find out where you're going wrong with your existing customers who are the most important people.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I don't think you can substitute for the human in cases of unusual problems, special circumstances, empathy, generally. Don't get me wrong. I think you can get AI empathy. I'm not suggesting that AI is going to be completely unempathic. But at some point, it's rather like the equivalent of I want to speak to the manager. There will be situations where you want to speak to a person who can understand your specific situation and has the power to intervene to override the normal rules and regulations to solve your problem because it is common sensical to do so, even if, you know, Service level agreement doesn't normally allow us to send out a replacement part, in this case, since your part is faulty, you will”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story I heard from someone who worked at Dyson for twelve years is that he was sitting in a presentation James Dyson presiding. They were presenting the call centre sort of efficiency statistics. By the way, I'm absolutely fanatical about call centers because I'm terrified that in an AI age, people will try and effectively automate them. I think what you should do instead is make them slightly smaller but a lot better.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advertising is a subordinate part of marketing and in many cases, even I've worked in advertising for 36 years, I want to think of myself probably unsuccessfully, but I still aspire to be a marketer. Not an advertising person, because advertising is a useful toolkit available to the marketer and, by the way, generally is pretty effective. But Peter Drucker, the purpose of business is to find and keep a customer profitably. That's the purpose of marketing. It's, you know, to either create or find customers with whom over time you can engage in mutually advantageous relationships to mutual profit, that is.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, yeah. Ford Motor Company falls into that definition. I think the family or some, there's a particular class of shares.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Western family would control loblaws to some extent even though they're not a majority shareholder. Well, I think if you...”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is Rogers? Is Rogers still family controlled? I mean, Canada's absolutely packed full of well that entire, what about that?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Loblaw's family owned, isn't it? For example, in Canada. Family control McCain, family control So, what I was saying about the advertising effectiveness awards, four out of the five gold winners, it's only every two years this award, and it's very, very rigorously judged. Four out of the five winners, namely McCain, your Canadian heroes, McCain, Yorkshire Texavers, and Lathwaites, a wine company. Four out of the five winners. The fifth one was Guinness, which is sort of a family company, in a sense, although it's owned by a Dageo. And so my point is that we should actually have a kite mark that allows consumers to prefer to buy from companies which aren't listed on some stock exchange somewhere and hence aren't controlled by the finance function because they're more trustworthy.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice story from Dyson, which his family owned. In fact, I think family run companies, this would include people like Essie Johnson. I think they should wear a badge. You see what I mean? Just as you have a kite mark on British.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They also are considering posterity, aren't they? What is my legacy? I mean, it's interesting, actually, the German car industry, although their public companies are sort of family run, Aldi famously which owns Trader Joe's, is basically owned by actually two German families. They had a huge feud. But something's going on there. One of the things they do is they look after their staff better. And I think when you look after your staff better, the customer notices.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do something, they look after their customers, and there is an interesting exception to this probably, which is, for example, Costco, which actually Enterprise Rentar is family owned, isn't it? Enterprise is family-owned. And I've told everybody this, in the IPA advertising effectiveness awards in the UK. My argument is that with the exception of PNG, Diagio, Unilever, marketing led companies, I don't think that PLC is, what do you call them in publicly traded companies? Because the requirement for short-term self-justification and numbers effectively overrides the real purpose of marketing, which is investment in long-term customer value.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, my theory is the primary reason for the success of these private companies, the secondary reason is they look after their consumers better because they're effectively unwittingly their practitioners in the customer value movement, not the shareholder value movement.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he had, I think, three, when he died, he had three or four Dyson devices which he'd bought from New in his home. He had one on each floor to save him carrying them upstairs. Now these are by any objective measure pretty expensive vacuum cleaners One of the reasons he was so fanatically loyal was that Dyson, now interestingly, I'm going to make a point here, which is a privately owned company. and do not do not underestimate the importance of this. PLCs or companies on the NASDAQ or the Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a really interesting organization. I can't remember what they're called online. They call this a brand quake. A brand quake is where you do something. It could be resolving a problem really well. That would be a very good opportunity for a brand quake. The person has a problem. You put quite a lot of effort and intelligence into solving it very effectively for them. And then you wring them back to check that the problem has indeed been solved. Now that would be an example of something. I'll give you the, okay, I'll give you the perfect story of this. My father, who is half Scottish and without stereotyping anybody, was quite parsimonious with what he bought generally. I mean, I'm not saying it's genetic, by the way. I'm just culturally, he was descended from long lines of Highland Scots who didn't get where they were today by, you know, splashing out.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so some of the role of these intermediaries is just highly complicated. But when I say that we fundamentally seem to attach very, very high weighting to, for example, a call center experience versus website design. I'm not suggesting for a second website design isn't really important.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, you know, a small town or would have been to a large extent a prestige economy. And therefore, dealing with the Posh local estate agent rather than some guy who claims to be cheap is not irrational. The commission may be higher, whatever it may be. But in terms of reputational skin in the game as insurance against being, you know, treated appallingly. And, you know, I think there's a kind of weird thing going on, which is that, you know, the job of the real estate agent is to some extent to be the person who stays behind in the place where the house is sold, to suffer the reputational consequences of anything outrageous. Because the vendor of the house isn't really reputationally vulnerable if they're moving 300 miles away.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that, right? And so it is very interesting because is it irrational if it's a very reliable mechanism? So, all right, one example would be, I don't think it works very well nowadays because there are enough posh spibs around. But in the 19th century, if you were a posh and respected real estate agent, you had a lot of reputational skin in the game, in the local community, both commercially in so you were highly vulnerable to reputational damage, both commercially and also socially.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can absolutely, you can separate them. And that's why, you know In a weird kind of way, I think you notice sometimes that the queue for the priority lane in security is longer than the queue for the amateur lane, but frequent business travelers will still join the priority lane on the assumption that the people in front of them are more competent. I mean, there's a George Clooney up in the air.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big, small airport thing, personally. Yeah, yeah. Actually, it's kind of interesting because airports are schizophrenic in a way because the clientel of an airport is roughly speaking a 50-50 mix between people who fly a hell of a lot and just want to get through the damn thing as quickly as they can. And people who only fly once a year who regard the trip to the airport as part of the holiday and they love going through a shopping centre and looking at Hermes outlets or whatever. And so airports are effectively catering for two totally disparate groups of traveler.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fairness, if you study social science matters, but I agree with you that the, I mean, my wife occasionates been annoyed with me because I will literally apply Caleb logic to decision. Just to give an example, I always argue that Over thirty six years holidays where I've rented a car are better than holidays where I haven't. And my argument is you have more optionality So, if you rented a car and you find the hotels a bit meh or the hotel's not in a great area, you can just get in the car and go and find a beach somewhere else and go there every day. In other words, so I deploy occasionally we'll deploy these kind of Taleb lines and I'll also say let's fly from so-and-so because it's the satisfys end.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The barbell approach. First of all, make sure you don't do anything disastrous. Then after that, try and get lucky. Say it like it's a”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I shouldn't have been here. My fault. I got in the way of your soup. The psychopath will lose his rag and can't control this. And likewise, if you turn up late, there's a chance they'll go, look, I've been sitting on my own like an idiot for 15 minutes. Whereas you and I would go, oh, I know, I only just got here myself the traffic's terrible. We don't fully know, you see, the value of what is going on in using a personal quality as a proxy for a decision which is simply too complicated to legalize or to reduce to numbers. Also, it is, I completely agree in economic terms, it's suboptimal, but if it leads to downside variance reduction, which is what we're really trying to do, we're not trying to optimize. We're trying to reduce the risk of downside variance. That's true in all sorts of things, investment strategy.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they'll lose it. Or you turn up late, and someone like, assuming you're not a psycho because you're Canadian, so that's probably by default. Relatively low. We're too polite. You're too polite, exactly, yes. It'd be too tiring to be a psychopath in Canada, wouldn't it?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Miller's theory is that it's a psychopath detection test. So that if you. So one of the worst things that can happen to women is to get into a relationship with someone who's psychopathic because you end up with an empty bank account and your sister's pregnant by him and everything go, you know, everything goes hopelessly wrong. Someone who's written very interestingly about this, by the way, is fabulous woman who writes about education and absolutely brilliant. I'll remember her name in a second, but she's written quite about this, having a psychopath in the family. Likewise, Kevin Dutton has also written about this about his own father. There are certain things which you can do which make it very likely that psychopaths will out themselves. So the perfect test might be you bribe the waiter to tip soup on them. Oh, indeed.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now might find it difficult this is a Geoffrey Miller theory that if you're on a first date there's an element where apparently it's a long time I've been married for 30 something years but women on a first date will turn up a bit late or do something a little bit annoying”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not manipulation. Be careful of that because no, no, no. We've got to be really careful. I think we've got to be really careful here. One thing might be that a genuine cold-blooded psychopath,”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though the utility of the bear as distinct from how good the transaction feels, the actual utility of the cold beer is identical in both cases. I think that's Richard Thalon. I think it's extraordinarily interesting because I think we can make. Car salesman will know this. Make the transaction feel good. Make them feel good when they drive out of the place.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And your readiness to pay changes partly in accordance to what you imagine to be the overheads of the establishment selling the good.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beer is going to be consumed back where they're sitting. So the ambiance or the clientele of the establishment selling the beer is irrelevant because you're not going to consume it there. And the interesting thing is in one situation he says there is a boutique hotel selling chilled beer, and in the other situation he says there's a shack selling cold beer.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's in I think it's in Nudge, and the famous thought experiment is this, which I find fascinating, and I think it's a really insightful thought experiment. So the idea is you and your best friend are lying on a beach somewhere, and it's hot, and you're very thirsty. And about a quarter of a mile down the beach, there's a place that sells iced cold beer. And your friend says to you, and he asks people to imagine this, your friend says to you, I'm off to buy a beer. Tell me what the maximum amount you're happy to pay for a beer is, and if the price they quote falls below that threshold, okay, I will buy the beer, and if not, I won't. And he asks people to imagine what the threshold would be of what they'd pay for a beer on a hot day when they were parched. For a cold beer.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Richard Thaylor did, I think, his most interesting work of all is actually on the concept of transaction utility, which you may remember. Do you remember this?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. But I guarantee if you went and looked around their house and placed an offer while being an expert in botany and generally quoting. You could buy their house for $200,000 less than if you turned up and said, brilliant, we can knock down that tree and put in a helipad. I think if you said we can knock down that tree and put in a carting track, right, I don't think they'd sell it to you at any price.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Habits.com or whatever. Okay, realtor.com. Exactly. You go on one of those things. You choose the house you want. You look at it. You then look at the house, get a survey done by the house. We assume that there is, you know, this is a purely transactional exchange. Maybe in a rational world, that's exactly what it would be. But for one thing, actually, someone who's invested fifteen years in doing upper house probably cares about what the person buying it is going to do to the house. So my parents in law, for example, are fanatical gardeners. Don't get into this seriously. Get into something like crack.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really interesting question, which is I think we ought to study these things much more because the assumption of an economist is that you need to disintermediate. You don't need a state agents. We just go on willow, zillow, sorry, or right move in the UK or whatever it is. What's the Canadian equivalent?”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's one of the reasons why apparently real estate agents will leave any kind of contact between the two until after at least a survey has been done and enough commitments taken place. I once, by the way, I once didn't buy a house basically because the guy was being an asshole about the fridge. Now the fridge was only worth, I think, 0.2% of the value of the house or 0.02% of the value of the house, I can't quite remember. But because he was being a dick about the fridge, I no longer trusted him about the house. Weirdly, it turned out my instinct was right because then a friend of ours went to buy the same house. They got some separate land registry search done and found out that a chunk of the garden actually belonged to Network Rail, not to the house. It effectively filched a large part of the garden.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, when you think about it, that's completely. Unless the person's moving next door, obviously if you're buying a house from someone who's planning to move next door and they turn out to be a psycho, that's relevant information. But it seems to be the case that if you meet the vendor and you basically don't trust them or think they're a bit shifty, it doesn't matter what the price is. It doesn't matter the condition of the house. Suddenly you revise your valuation of the house downwards if you don't like the person selling it to you.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And similarly, I think she might do better than someone with an engineering qualification who ignored who the seller was and their personality and character. Now, as a bit of evidence of this, I discovered, because I've been investigating this, various real estate agents have said to me that every estate agent does their utmost to make sure that until things are signed and sealed the vendor never meets the buyer and vice versa. And the reason for that is if one of them doesn't like the other, they won't buy or sell.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we're doing here is we're effectively saying what I'm going to do as a stand in for the question, do I buy the car, which I don't have the technical knowledge to answer. I'm going to ask a supplementary heuristic question, which is, do I trust the person who's selling the car to me? And it's an interesting question. My mother didn't know anything about cars, knew a lot about people. I think she would very reliably go around buying cars just through her assessment of the seller.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decide you're incident paying, let's say, $5,000 for this car. So you go and ring on the doorbell of the vendor. And the door is answered in one situation by, for example, a female vicar. Could be Catholic, well, they can't be Catholic, but, you know, Episcopalian doesn't really matter. Female vicar. And it's a tidy, clean house. At that point you probably upweight what you're prepared to pay by 20% or so. In a parallel universe, the door is answered by a guy in his underpants. In other words, someone with no shame. In that instance, you devalue the car, I suspect, by about $1,000 or more. In fact, you may not even buy it at all.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because for most of our evolutionary existence, that was one of the five most important questions to get right. Do I trust this person? You know, will they attack me? Are they an ally? Are they a foe? If I pay the money, will they deliver? And so consequently, I think what we do in our brains is we use our human judgment as a proxy. Now, a story to back up that, you probably remember this, okay? It's in my book Alchemy, which is imagine you're turning up to buy a secondhand car and you turn up at the house, nondescript house, and the car's parked outside the house, and you have a lucky loo at the car and you judge the, you know, whether the pedal's a wall and the condition of the bodywork, and you have a look around the car.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it makes, if you're good and nice, that's how much difference it makes. In other words, it more or less drowns out all your other stuff, all the other noise. If every time you have a personal experience, you have a good experience. Then, broadly speaking, in the human brain, that's a good organization which I can trust. And when you think about it, I suddenly realize why this probably is. We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? We have quarter of a million, half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've argued for quite a time if I were being completely honest, I've worked in advertising for 36 years, and if I were a wholly honest person without fear of annoying my colleagues, probably 50% of the time I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call centre. the people too much, get the best practitioners. I think it's perfectly legitimate in some organizations there should be the very best call center for people should be on six figures.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When someone had a theory and they said, I think something else is going on. And the theory, which was put to the test and proved absolutely right, was that the major determinant of whether you liked Royal Mail or not was whether you liked your postman or posti, technically, to be used the gender neutral term. So people who had a rather unreliable service, but the postman did the odd favor for them, left things in the porch, had a chat with them. Those people thought it was a brilliant organization. Regardless of the actual metrics that were being pursued. And I think that's very true in any service organization. There's an electricity company, a gas company, a water company, a utility. You may interact with them online 95% of the time. But the one or two occasions where you interact by telephone or face-to-face disproportionately affect your perception of the organization.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, not yours. Yes, it is yours, Pierce. And they couldn't make any sense of the fact that the brand perception of Royal Mail bore no relation to service levels. So there would be districts and areas where, you know, every single first class letter arrived early the following day, extraordinarily reliable levels of service, and Role Mel wasn't particularly held in affection or esteem. There were other areas where the service was frankly a bit ropey and people seemed to love it. Now this obviously upset them because they thought that all the billions, or certainly hundreds of millions they'd invested in service quality improvement should translate into customer satisfaction and therefore some sort of brand voltage.”
2025-12-09 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source