Rory Sutherland

Sometimes they didn't even charge for the replacement part.

And therefore, he completely trusted those people and therefore was willing to pay an enormous premium

really, over other vacuum cleaners, which might have had the same notional effectiveness, precisely because of that trust.

A really, really good service organization allows for very streamlined, efficient service for people who know exactly what they want.

and extremely empathetic service for people who are undecided, uncertain, or find themselves in an unusual situation.

And so you need to do both.

And that's where I think the tech bros have got it all wrong, because they see the opportunity of tech as being a one-way street towards ever greater efficiency, streamlining.

And let's face it, tech bros are not neurotypical.

in terms of what they want from things.

When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making, along with their running dog lackeys in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very, very distant from what your real-world customers really care about.

You're using tech pros as like a... No, no, no.

It's perfectly reasonable to say that the people who work in this field are not representative of the whole human population.

That's a reasonable assertion.

What is it you're representing when you say tech pro, though?

Anybody in a tech industry, just as anybody in advertising, myself included, is overweighted towards a belief in the ability of advertising to solve all problems.

And I will truly admit that I am guilty as charged.

However, ad people don't get that much opportunity to convince other people of the rightness of their argument.

What has happened is that in marketing, for example...

The tech companies, the consulting firms that sell stacks.

And I owe a lot of this to a guy called Adel Borki, very interesting self-taught Libyan marketing writer, former boxer.