Insight
Sutherland: Constitutional monarchy prevents prime ministers from developing delusions of grandeur
“Actually having an arbitrary head of state is actually really good, because it means that if the election doesn't go your way, it doesn't force you to reassess your loyalty to the country. The fact that, I mean, the beautiful phrase also used by, I think it's …”
Insight
Sutherland: It Is Easier to Get Fired for Illogic Than Lack of Imagination
“Within an institutional framework, the urge not to break ranks and not to be considered possibly wrong, you know, it's much easier to get fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.”
Insight
Sutherland: Tech industry underestimates the value of face-to-face human interaction
“One of the things that I don't think is understood by tech nerds, and if I'm being really cruel, you know, males in general, in many cases, is the extent to which in evaluating any business or experience, the human component of it, the face-to-face component, …”
Opinion
Sutherland: Publicly Traded Corporations Cannot Do Marketing Well
“With the exception of P&G, Diageo, Unilever, marketing-led companies, I don't think that PLC is, what do you call them in, you know, publicly traded corporations. I don't think they can actually do marketing very well, because the requirement for short-term se…”
Opinion
Sutherland: Non-Listed Companies Deserve a Trust Mark as They Are More Trustworthy
“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.”
Insight
Sutherland: Call centers are the only way to uncover unsolvable customer issues
“Also, your call center is Is the only way you can find out the problems that people can't solve anywhere else.”
Opinion
Sutherland: Tech Vendors Captured Finance Departments With Self-Serving Marketing Metrics
“What has happened is that in marketing, for example, the tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks, and I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adel Borky, very interesting, self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer, Anil Borky, and I coined th…”
Assertion Supported
Sutherland: Trial Lawyers Heavily Fund US Democrats to Block Tort Reform
“Particularly because there's no tort law reform in the US, and that's partly because, I was told yesterday, trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform.”
Insight
Rationality is merely the bronze standard in creative fields like advertising
“This is what's weird about working in advertising, by the way, and I think it's probably similar to theoretical physics, and it's probably similar to entrepreneurialism, ok, which is what's unusual about those fields, is that rationality is the bronze standard…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ogilvy Australia made only $350k on an idea that generated $1 billion
“There's an idea conceived by Ogilvy Australia. It has made that company in excess of a billion dollars in the last 10 years. It's still running. It runs in something like a hundred markets. Still useful today. For that idea, the agency in Australia got paid 35…”
Opinion
Sutherland: Gillette damaged its business by insulting its male customer base
“Gillette ran an advertisement. They realized they had to move on, perhaps, from the best a man can get, despite the fact, obviously, that their customer base is overwhelmingly male for fairly obvious reasons. And they produced an ad which I would argue, and ev…”
Opinion
Sutherland: Jaguar could never win head-to-head against German luxury giants
“Jaguar was always trying to compete head to head with BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. And bluntly put, because of the scale of those entities, it was always going to lose. Because if you're the kind of person who's happy to buy a BMW, an Audi, or a Mercedes, and you'…”
Insight
Sutherland: Triggering outrage in 1% of people yields free earned media
“In some ways, you could argue it's an ingenious marketing strategy, which is that you press the hot buttons of one percent of the population, so they then repeat your message accompanied by their own Signaling outrage. Meanwhile, you get free media coverage pr…”
Insight
Sutherland: Champagne quality is secondary to price as a social signal
“Because in the sparkling, in the champagne business, It doesn't matter how good the drink is. If people think you've bought it for eight 95, it's not doing the job it's supposed to do, which is to signal generosity, to signal hospitality, or to mark your speci…”
Assertion Supported
Sutherland: Swedish Study Found Sunbed Users Had Higher Life Expectancy
“So there was a study, actually, among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect.”
Opinion
Korean technology and car quality are driven by cultural rivalry with Japan
“The Koreans are going to make fantastic tech and fantastic cars, regardless of the profit motive. Do you know why? To wind up the Japanese. So they've got two motivations, ok? Other people are just trying to make money.”
Opinion
Sutherland: Accountants, lawyers, and economists hold too much corporate power
“I'm only angry with accountants and lawyers and economists, not because they do what they do, but because they have too much power doing it. And they've achieved a kind of monopoly over decision making, which I don't think they have a reasonable claim to.”
Insight
Infrastructure spending is more acceptable than psychological solutions
“Because it's always much more acceptable To spend money on infrastructure than it is to spend money on psychology.”
Insight
Sutherland: Intangible Value Is the Most Environmentally Friendly Value Creation
“Intangible value is the most environmentally friendly way of creating value. You don't have to chop down any trees. You don't have to burn any coal. You generate value simply by getting people to look at something that already exists in a more favorable light.”
Insight
People view marketing value as cheating compared to engineering
“We intrinsically tend to think that marketing value is kind of cheating, whereas engineering value is the real deal.”
Insight
Sutherland: Marketing is costly signaling demonstrating long-term commitment
“Marketing would make a lot more sense to everybody, because a very large part of marketing is really costly signaling. So, you know, the cost of something particularly the upfront cost of something which may only pay off over time is a very, very reliable gaug…”
Insight
Sutherland: Multi-year vocational qualifications act as commitment devices that ensure honesty
“If you're prepared to spend four years becoming a cab driver, And four years of your life which you'll never get back is spent reaching that level of qualification. You're patently committed to the job. Secondly, you have a lot of skin in the game because it's…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
People will learn to trap autonomous vehicles with simple visual tricks
“Someone is going to find a way of hacking that driverless car. Within seconds. By which I mean, you know, they'll work out that by putting a particular pattern of balloons on the road, the driverless car basically starts just going around in ridiculous circles…”
Insight
Sutherland: Rationality cannot evolve because total predictability is fatal
“It's impossible for anything rational, To successfully evolve, because the byproduct of being rational and efficient, optimally rational and efficient, would be that you'd be predictable. And if you were completely predictable, you'd be dead.”
Rory Sutherland