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

**Rory Sutherland** (0:00)
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 magnificent, emalatable.

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
We know about you, but do you know what you're getting into at all?

**Rory Sutherland** (0:26)
Up to a point. I know of the podcast quite well.

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
I know that you're recently a social media star. Even though you've been killing it for decades, I've heard a story about how someone just started uploading some of your talks and it went viral, and then you said, maybe I should do this.

**Rory Sutherland** (0:41)
It happened, I think, accidentally, and I've reversed engineered what happened, which is that most marketing people talk about what they do. My argument is, of necessity, I started talking about how we think. Consequently, the willingness to accept the fact that surprisingly arbitrary seeming trivial decisions may have a monumental effect is actually necessary to have a proper understanding of living in a complex interconnected system.
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 the real world isn't like that. It's full of butterfly effects, silver bullets, 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.

**Sam Parr** (1:46)
I think you had a good example of that with, have you ever heard, Shaan, the story of how horsepower came to be? No, I can't tell that story.

**Rory Sutherland** (1:57)
So one of my great contentions is that when we look at great entrepreneurs or great inventors, jobs, if you say Edison, Ford, Watt, Bolton, they tend to be written up as historians, as inventors. My argument is that an invention isn't an innovation until it changes behavior. I think it's Stuart Butterfield of Slack, who said something very similar. The only real measure of the effect you're having on innovation is the extent to which you change behavior. 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. Watt was selling steam engines to mine owners.
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, cold, whatever, without drowning. What he realized is that as an engineer, you could talk around the calorific capacity of the boiler or the length of the piston stroke or whatever, and these people didn't want to know. So Watt and Bolton amongst themselves said, well, what do these people really want to know before they're prepared to buy a steam engine?
They said they want to know how many horses they no longer need to feed if they buy a steam engine. How many horses can I get rid of if I buy a steam engine? So Watt went out and invented a unit we still use today, which is called the horsepower. And the reason it's not named after a famous scientist, like the Ohm or the Newton or the Coulomb or the Watt for that matter, or Celsius or anything of that kind, is because it's a marketing unit. It was invented for marketing purposes because he could then go and say, if you buy a 25 horsepower steam engine, you can actually get rid of 75 horses because I think the horses worked in shift. So it does the work of 25 horses, but it does it 24 hours a day, so you can now get rid of 75 horses. These people would go scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, cost of horses, cost of feeding horses, cost of looking after horses. On the back of an envelope, they could then go, we'll have two of those. By the way, it went even further than that. The Industrial Revolution was a marketing revolution every bit as much as it was an Industrial Revolution because there was no point in being able to produce things in abundance if you couldn't create corresponding demand. So one of the things about the 18th and 19th century in England was it was absolutely pioneering period in terms of how people marketed things, and that included the steam engine where Watt and Bolton would go to a mine owner. Now, let me get this right. Some people were already using Newcomen engines which were less efficient steam engines than the Watt engine.