What most people miss about marketing | Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, author)

**Rory Sutherland** (0:00)
Steve Jobs was not a technologist. He was a pitch man. He was a brilliant salesman. He was a fantastic marketer. When products succeed, we forget the extent to which marketing was actually instrumental or decisive in their success.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:12)
He once said, if you can imagine a standup comedian doing a routine about your product, then you're onto something.

**Rory Sutherland** (0:17)
You need to preserve slightly odd things. Rolls Royces were the only cars which still had a pedal on the floor. Famously, Verve Clique, it's the one with the yellow name. Idiosyncrasies kind of count double.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
Giving you advice for early stage founders to help build their brand.

**Rory Sutherland** (0:32)
Be consistent, be distinctive, and be famous. When you are not famous, you have to find all your customers. Suddenly you reach this magical sort of escape velocity of fame where people start coming to you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:46)
Today my guest is Rory Sutherland. Rory is vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, author of the book Alchemy, The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business and Life, and the founder of Nudgestock, the world's biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity.
Rory is both an example and a huge proponent of thinking from first principles. Through his speaking and his books, he encourages people to not think logically when solving problems, but to think psychologically, using human psychology to inform how you design and build and market your products. Rory is full of amazing stories and ideas and examples and inspiration, which you'll get a sense of as soon as we start talking. I don't even ask him a question and he's already off to the races. This episode is for anyone who wants to think more creatively, help their team be more innovative, and learn how to create more magic in your world. Rory has been one of the most requested guests on this podcast, and I can now see why. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Rory Sutherland.
Rory, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Rory Sutherland** (2:00)
That's a pleasure. It's an audience I don't normally speak to, and it's an audience which I think is particularly valuable, particularly important, but also actually probably could benefit quite a bit from just a little bit of extra psychology.
Not least, by the way, a very simple observation, which is that do not think that good products automatically succeed or that bad ones necessarily fail.
The other thing I'd say is that timing is so important that don't necessarily reject things simply because they failed in the past. One of the best products I've ever worked on in a professional capacity was Facebook Meta TV, the TV portal, sorry, Facebook, the Meta Portal TV. Oh, I love the portal, yeah, big fan.
And I bought it for about $120. It plugs into your TV. It allows you to do obviously WhatsApp or Facebook or indeed Zoom on your television with a fantastic face tracking camera. I mean, it really is sort of $500 worth of equipment which they were selling for about 120 One of the best things I've ever owned, I owned about four of them. When I heard it was being discontinued, I bought another one because I think they're so good. And yet for reasons I fully don't, I don't really understand. Apart from the fact that every single review said, this is brilliant, I think there's a product, but the first seven paragraphs of the article weren't saying this is brilliant. They were saying, who would allow Facebook to put a camera in their home? And so there were basically, it was nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia because you can turn the thing off after all. You don't have to leave it switched off, okay? But there were nine paragraphs of privacy paranoia, basically followed by one paragraph saying, as these kinds of products go, it's brilliant. And yet we still don't have video calling on TV unless you're willing to plug your laptop in or do something pretty fancy and complex. That seems really weird to me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:08)
Let me actually read a quote from you around what good marketing often looks like.
So you once said, if you can imagine a standup comedian doing a routine about your product, then you're onto something. The urge to appear serious is in many ways a disaster in marketing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
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