This Forgotten 1916 Book Is Better Than Harvard Business School: Rory Sutherland

0:00Read a book. Everybody read a book. Okay. You can buy it for four quid. It was written in 1916 by a guy called Robert Updegraff. It's called Obvious Adams. It was one of David Ogilvie's favorite books. And if you read nothing else as a business book, it's literally 60 pages. You will start reading the first two or three pages and you'll think, why has Rory recommended this hokey shit? By page eight, you'll go, this is better than the Harvard Business Review. it's just a it's just a book funnily enough featuring an advertising guy but it doesn't have to be an advertising guy he's really a marketing problem solver who who achieves his amazing success is by noticing things that are too obvious for other people to talk about and i think i think that book is an absolute prize amusingly which really delights me is every now and then I plug it on a podcast and I go onto Amazon and Obvious Adams is number three in advertising or marketing on Amazon.

1:01And it fills me with joy to think that this book written in 1916 has achieved this, you know, is still being bought. And it deserves to be bought because, you know, like Ogilvy on advertising, like Claude Hopkins, all of those old advertising books are still worth reading. James Webb Young. All of those books are still worth reading because those people were going, basically they were going far enough up to uncover truths that are really universal human truths about how we react to communication, not fanciful tech models of how humans should decide and act. A few more copies sold. You can read it in a single shit.

1:45I mean, it is literally 60 pages. There we go. That's this afternoon plan. So we think about the traditional current day marketeer, and we're thinking about this kind of unpredictable world. There'll be young marketeers now. There's probably a few different poster boys. We've got Rory Sutherland. You can be pinned up on my wall. I'm just a fucking mouth. Seriously, there's a lot of people know this stuff. What I don't understand is what the advertising and marketing world failed to notice is they're much more interesting to people who aren't in marketing and advertising than the people inside those worlds actually notice.

2:22And all I'm trying to do, really, is if some of this information just enters, and I'm not claiming to be right about anything. This is why I'm dissing the scientific method, because it's all about being inarguably right rather than solving a problem. And, you know, I'm dissing the misapplication of the science. My brother's an astrophysicist. I'm perfectly happy for him to get on with whatever he does. But the misapplication of what is pseudoscience, in other words, something that has the appearance of being scientific and logical, which actually is a gross misdirection of effort, or at least is only works over the shorter term before it starts being gamed or creating distortion.

3:06And I think one of the things entrepreneurs do, actually, is they wait for big companies to get trapped by their own metrics. the pursuit of those same metrics then effectively drives them into a corner, which leaves a market space available for somebody else fundamentally.

3:26So all I want people to do really is to go, every time I've got a problem, there may be a psychological solution to it. Maybe the problem is perceptual. It's to do with psychological perception. it's to do with people's own epistemology. Maybe the solution is a creative thing. Maybe the problem is a trivial thing because psychology doesn't have a sense of proportion, in the sense that it's a bit like poker, in that in poker you have a thing called a tell, which is usually a very small thing that the signaller is unaware of, but which the other poker player spots. What I'm saying is that if we demand this ludicrous burden of proof that you can only actually try something if you can already prove it works, we're basically turning our back on any business has now decided that whatever I want to be in the future is I'd rather be certain than get lucky.

4:27Now, I'll give you an example of this. One really valuable but almost impossible to predict and to evaluate quality of a business is just being really fucking famous. Right? Because people can't buy something if they don't know it exists. And they're less likely to buy something if they've never heard of it before. But also, if you're indiscriminately famous, you discover who your target audience really is rather than being focused on those people who your algorithm tells you it is. Now, if you get more and more focused on marketing efficiency, you get trapped in a local maximum. You never discover new market.