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.

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

Sales promotion agencies (the good ones) are familiar with this approach… that of: “make people buy and hopefully they’ll love you” rather than “make people love you and hopefully they’ll buy.” Their philosophy needs to be as much at the heart of what we do as any other.

Then reality comes into it, and actually, the reason they buy the iPad is that they know that every time they get out the Samsung, all their friends will say: “why did you get that, why didn’t you buy the iPad?” and that this will bring with it a little burst of anxiety and a little burst of effort. Never, never underestimate the importance of that

Instant feedback may improve behaviour more than delayed punishment.

arbitrary. Even relatively worthy successes such as Google’s or Microsoft’s may be as much the result of lucky timing as anything else. Instead, capitalism is at its indisputable best not when picking but when picking off. In unerringly killing off the bad: the inefficient, the redundant, the outdated or the needlessly complex.

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.

That sense of “who I am not” means, for instance, that I can never go on a skiing holiday, even though I would probably enjoy it, because for some reason I hate the thought of being the kind of person who goes skiing.

I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand.