Rory Sutherland on Why Marketing Is the Answer to Economic Growth

Category Problems

• Marketing people have opportunities to look at category problems that don't have a media budget attached.


• New technology negatives are salient while positives are invisible.


• New and frightening things are scarier than old things.


• Range anxiety in electric cars has two components: range and anxiety.


• It's cheaper to reduce anxiety than

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Contextual Decision-Making

• People make decisions based on context, which explains why behavioral economics experiments sometimes fail to replicate.


• Changing the booking button from 'find flights' to 'find my flights' increased sales by approximately five percent.


• Instead of trying to change the minds of a million people, consider changing the contex

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Value of the Advertising Process

• The most valuable aspect of advertising might be the strategic thinking required to produce the advertisement itself, not the final product.


• This process forces businesses to address fundamental questions about their purpose, differentiation, and value proposition.


• Rushing to a cheap, adequate result via AI shortcuts

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