Rory Sutherland

What's the difference between marketing and advertising?

Advertising is a subordinate part of marketing.

And in many cases, even I've worked in advertising for 36 years, I want to think of myself probably unsuccessfully, but I still aspire to be a marketer, not an advertising person, because advertising is a useful toolkit available to the marketer.

And by the way, generally is pretty effective.

But Peter Drucker, the purpose of business is to find and keep a customer profitably.

That's the purpose of marketing.

It's to, you know, to either create or find customers with whom over time you can engage in mutually advantageous relationships to mutual profit.

That's it.

Well,

The story I heard from someone who worked at Dyson for 12 years is that he was sitting in a presentation, James Dyson presiding, and they were presenting the call center sort of efficiency statistics.

By the way, I'm absolutely fanatical about call centers because I'm terrified that in an AI age, people will try and effectively automate them.

I think what you should do instead is make them slightly smaller but a lot better.

because I don't think you can substitute for the human in cases of unusual problems, special circumstances, empathy, generally.

Don't get me wrong, I think you can get AI empathy.

I'm not suggesting that AI is going to be completely unempathic.

But at some point, it's rather like the equivalent of I want to speak to the manager.

There will be situations where you want to speak to a person who can understand your specific situation and has the power to intervene to override the normal...

rules and regulations to solve your problem because it is commonsensical to do so.

Even if, you know, our service level agreement doesn't normally allow us to send out a replacement part.

In this case, since your part is faulty... Somebody who has the power to do the right thing.