Rory Sutherland
Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.
Rory Sutherland did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Blog The Wiki Man, in The Spectator His fortnightly column, going back years.
The Wiki Man column: short pieces applying behavioural science to whatever is in front of him — dating apps, keyboards, train stations, how to pick a leader. The most regular thing he publishes under his own name.
Link verified 8 Sept 2026.
Podcast As a guest Long interviews he sat for — chosen, not exhaustive.
His own voice by his own participation: conversations he agreed to, on the hosts' own channels. One for now rather than a list padded with episodes nobody checked.
Links
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Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland
The Knowledge Project, Shane Parrish
9 Dec 2025
Link verified 8 Sept 2026.
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Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland
The Knowledge Project, Shane Parrish
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 16 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
People cannot choose without comparison, so an AI that hands over one perfect answer will not satisfy them.
people don't decide like that at the very least you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Giving technologists and management consultants power over decisions optimises a business for something far from what its customers care about.
When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Pursuing efficiency pushes attention onto measurable factors and away from the psychological ones where the larger gains are available.
But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Show 13 more
Cutting a job defined by its narrowest function destroys the tacit value that job was quietly creating.
the dorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one. You know, there are no vagrants to sleep in the doorway, hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel. There are loads and loads of value creation components to that dorman which aren't captured in the open the door definition.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Companies would often be better off moving a tenth to a fifth of their marketing budget into paying call centre staff properly.
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 center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
People judge an organisation by the humans they deal with, because judging other people is the task evolution equipped them for.
We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we? Okay, we have quart of a million half a million years of evolved experience in deciding who to like and trust because for most of our evolutionary, you know, existence, that was one of the most fi five most important questions to get right.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Publicly traded companies are incentivised to behave like psychopaths, because they are optimised for short-term transactions rather than long-term relationships.
PLC's or um uh or or companies on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
The shareholder value movement is incoherent, because it never says which shareholder or which time frame it is optimising for.
the shareholder value movement is totally incoherent because over what time frame which shareholder is what are 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
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
The marketing metrics finance departments trust are the ones that sell technology, not the ones that build customer value over time.
the marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Marketing returns are fat-tailed, so paying for marketing by the hour misprices work whose value comes from a small fraction of it.
the reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid my argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed so is innovation R&D pharmaceutical research science okay in other words 5 to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps 110% of the value
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Entrepreneurship resembles gambling rather than chess, because the large payoffs cannot be identified in advance.
you don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs. You find entrepreneurs in casinos. They're playing poker. They're playing bat gam. You know, they're playing games of chance with an occasional very high payoff. And a lot of life is exactly like that, but you don't know where the huge payoff's going to come in advance.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Competition that removes differentiation makes everyone worse off, because it assumes people already know what they want.
economists have this fantasy of the world of companies in direct competition driving down price and increasing efficiency while supplying the same thing which is based on a false premise that people know what they want to begin with. Now I would argue when you don't create differentiation, everybody suffers.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Reason is only one of several evolved mental faculties, and treating it as the gold standard misdescribes how people decide.
We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
A gift's perceived price is part of what it does, so a drink known to be cheap fails at its job however good it tastes.
it doesn't matter how good the drink is if people think you've bought it for $8.95 it's not doing the job it's supposed to do which is to signal generosity to signal hospitality or to mark a special occasion
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
Large numbers of people are employed to care more about following approved procedure than about the quality of the outcome.
And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
An objective meant to serve people should be defined with psychology included, because changing the psychology is often cheaper than changing the technology.
do not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors because you might be able to solve your problem very very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology not by changing the technology
Marketing Expert: The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign | Rory Sutherland Said 9 Dec 2025
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.