Rory Sutherland

If you want a long-lived brand, avoid strategy altogether — instead have an Ideal (like Nike, Apple) or an executional device (Andrex, The Economist). Anything with a strategy is doomed never to outlive your client. Discuss.

In a single sentence my view is “Planning + Creative = Good. Planning > Creative = Bad.”

Instant feedback may improve behaviour more than delayed punishment.

To Adam Smith’s: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” We should add: “But don’t expect anyone to like the butcher very much.”

As an aside, American government buildings are the only buildings on the world where lavatories and washrooms are often not stacked above each other on successive floors — a universal practice in the private sector where it serves to minimise plumbing. The reason? The US government pays builders and plumbers by the hour, not by the job.

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.

Yet marketers very rarely acknowledge this distinction when debating the role of the brand — and it pays little attention to the job of being assuredly not crap — even though I suggest it is by far the more valuable economic role that brands play: not to be a promise of ultimate superiority but a cast iron assurance of pretty dependable non-shitnes

What you actually find is that if you do good science rather than bad science, if you accept that actually this is seduction not persuasion, that it’s much more oblique than clients and researchers like to think, that reason plays a much smaller part in it than people realise.

they were too busy going: “well you can get a 5am