Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the gr

some of what we think to be racial or gender bias merely bias in favour of the status quo? After all, the less eccentric your hire, the less blame you are exposed to if something goes wrong.

Well, have you ever eaten Chilean sea bass?* It is the product of a particular sort of alchemy, ‘The Alchemy of Semantics’. The $20 slice of fish that graces plates in high-end restaurants under the name ‘Chilean sea bass’ actually comes from a fish that for many years was known as the Patagonian toothfish. No one is going to pay $20 for a plate of

psycho-logic as a neutral and non-judgemental term. I

Food has become remarkably inefficient, and the pill-promoting futurists of the 1960s would be astonished to see how wrong they were. People spend hours preparing it, eating it and watching television programmes about it. People cherish local ingredients, and willingly pay a premium for foods produced without chemical fertilisers. By contrast, when

‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’*

We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.