Dark arts & magic in marketing: Ogilvy vice-chairman Rory Sutherland on data and when not to use it

You don't get 7 million TED talk views for nothing. Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and the author of “Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life.”

And we had a wide-ranging, crazy, seminal, wonderful, and entertaining discussion! A short list of the topics we hit:

Why marketing is not physics

Why linear thinking doesn’t make quantum breakthroughs
Why brands should START with retention before anything else

Alchemy and magic

AB testing (yes, he uses data!)

What Uber’s killer feature really is

How brands really only need to done one thing brilliantly to be successful

Hotels and weatherproofing

Why Tesla’s dog mode made a non-dog-owner want to buy one

DoubleTree’s chocolate chip cookie

Rory’s friend Dave

Why brands should ask their customers to do them a favor

How brands can get COVID-19 era marketing horribly wrong

Delivering drinking water in vans

Consumer loyalty

Brand loyalty to customers

What Amazon gets right

Why your price should probably be higher to sell more

Clock radios

Nespresso versus Maxwell House

The beautiful insanity of Dyson vacuums and hair dryers

Use data to exploit versus using data to explore

Data versus common sense

P values (in analytics and statistics)

Mental lockjaw