Why do we buy what we buy? Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of worldwide creative advertising agency Ogilvy Group, reveals why advertising has an influence on us, how it effects our daily lives and why we like certain brands more than others.
Rory Sutherland is, to use his more official title, the Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy Group, a worldwide creative advertising agency. He was a classic teacher when first working at the agency, and his first big account was Microsoft – back in the days when they did not have the Windows system yet. Rory thought of the many possibilities that the Internet medium had to offer, even in its limited form compared with today.
The cult of measurebation
Rory Sutherland is a believer in new technologies, and an avid sharer of insights on advertising and social media. He takes the stage today to tell us about the next revolution.
Starting with the claim that the word “clicker” is the same in every language, he talks about words being popularized and creating new demands. For instance the term “measurebation.” This “cult” comes from the world of digital photography. People that are obsessed with all the new qualities and features of the newest camera model: the lens, metrics etc., but “they take shit pictures.” Hence: measurebaters understand one measure, but not the other.
Rory continues by citing different people, mostly Austrian (“I will go bing whenever I cite someone from Austria” – and he did bing a lot). If you want to model human behavior, you require much more complex mathematics. It is like clouds and clocks: one is complex and there are non linear relationships; the other is measurable and predictable. According to the Austrian school (bing) “economics should be subordinate to psychology.” To Rory, the next revolution will be psychological and not about measurable values: creating something, but finding ways to make people actually value it. Basically, to better understand how people behave and use things: “you can add more value and create less by also looking at things from the other side.”
Measurebaters are obsessed with measuring things in the real world. They measure things like “how long you que, but not what makes it so annoying to wait,” two different things. Hence what measurebators change, according to what they have measured, does not match with the actual problems in the real human world. According to Rory, this is “where spreadsheets get dangerous.” Measurebation is “inappropriate in many facets of life.” Looking at the business side of life, measurebaters compare their companies to other companies, and start to compete for the same things or measures. Companies ticking this way end up being the same. Not really adventurous in business.
Be irrational
With his background in the world of advertising, Rory sheds light on the questions why advertisements manage to influence us and why we like some brands more than others. When we as consumers are asked about our most meaningful customer experience, these are most of the time the ones where it cost the company trouble to make us happy, and there was no self interest attached (Rory refers to this a “game-theoretic approach”). Unfortunately business life demands justifications for every decision taken: “you get fired for being creative and not for being rational.” So when your company’s competion is measurebating and being rational, why not try to be irrational? You might even succeed and be liked by your customers: because you made an effort to be different and see things from their not so measurable human point of view.
So, it all comes down to such human thing as “liking” something – a brand or product. Rather than technological aspects winning us over to spend our money on something we saw on TV or stared at while waiting for our public mode of transportation.
