Killer marketing secrets that always work (ft. Ogilvy Adman, Rory Sutherland)

There are two ways of making money. You can either make desirable things or you can make things desirable, and there's not much you can do about the laws of physics, whereas the laws of psychology are magnificently malleable.

[singing] I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back.

We know about you, but do you know, uh-

[chuckles]

... what you're getting into at all?

Up to a point. I know of the podcast quite well.

I know that you're, like, recently a, uh, a, a kind of a social media star, e-even though you've been killing it for decades. Uh, I heard a story about how someone just started, like, uploading some of your talks and it went viral, and then you said, "Maybe I should do this."

It happened, I think, accidentally, and I've kinda reversed engineered what happened, which is that most marketing people talk about what they do, and my argument is, of necessity, I started talking about how we think. And consequently, um, you know, the willingness to accept the fact that surprisingly arbitrary-seeming trivial decisions may have a monumental effect or is actually necessary to have a proper understanding of living in a complex inter- you know, interconnected system. You know, if you believe there are important strategic things and then there are trivial things which you delegate down to junior people and in which you have no interest whatsoever, fundamentally, I think you're missing the point because, uh, the real world isn't like that. It's, you know, it's full of butterfly effects, silver bullets, you know, str- you know, small things. "Alchemy," I call my book, because you can turn lead into gold. You can literally take something which is seen as a product disadvantage and turn it into a strength.

I think you had a good example of that with, uh... Have you ever heard, Sean, the story of how horsepower kinda came to be?

No.

Uh, t-tell that story.

So one of my, one of my great contentions is that when we look at great entrepreneurs or great inventors, Jobs, you know, if you say, uh, Edison, Ford, Watt, Boulton, they tend to be written up as historians as inventors. And my argument is that an invention isn't an innovation until it changes behavior. I think it's Stewart Butterfield of Slack who said something very similar. You know, the only real measure of the effect of you're having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior. And you can invent anything you like, but if you can't get anybody to adopt it, it's an invention, but it's not an innovation. And Watt was selling steam engines to mine owners, and the purpose of the steam engine was to replace the horses they used to walk round and round in circles, draining the mine so that miners could go in and effectively mine coal, slate, gold, whatever, without drowning. What he realized is that you could, you... As an engineer, you could talk around, you know, the calorific capacity of the boiler or the length of the s- piston stroke or whatever, and these people didn't wanna know. So Watt and Boulton, amongst themselves, said, "Well, what do these people really want to know before