{THROWBACK} Rory Sutherland on Irrational Problem Solving

The Digital Agency Growth Podcast

In business, products, workplaces, and even universities, we tend to see this backward. We tend to talk about biases in consumer behavior, but business-to-business decision-making is riddled with biases. It is how we use and change these biases that will change the way we market products and services. That’s why this week on The Digital Agency Growth Podcast, we are featuring the throwback episode: Irrational Problem Solving with Rory Sutherland!

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In this episode of The Digital Agency Growth Podcast, my guest Rory Sutherland shares the importance of positioning a product differently based on the story we tell about it instead of changing the product altogether and the value we hold on different levels of experience of the same product or service.

Rory is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK, an attractively vague job title that has allowed him to co-found a behavioral science practice within the agency. He works with a consulting practice of psychology graduates who look for ‘unseen opportunities’ in consumer behavior – these are the very small contextual changes that can have enormous effects on the decisions people make. Rory is the author of Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life (my favorite book on marketing and behavioral psychology of the last few years).

In this episode, Rory and I discuss the following:

• Talent and perspective gaps in the advertising business.
• Hacking Harvard, how to unbundle the university experience as an alternative option.
• Irrational police brutality and groupthink in protest demonstrations.
• Why product cannibalization fears are often over-exaggerated.

It is time we start pivoting our marketing and business strategies around the true problems at hand and not the media budget sitting in front of us.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!

CONNECT WITH RORY SUTHERLAND:

Linkedin

Behavorial Economics Masterclass

Alchemy Book

CONNECT WITH DAN ENGLANDER:

LinkedIn

Sales Schema

LINKS MENTIONED:

Albians Seed by David Hackett Fischer

The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank