Rory Sutherland

And so sometimes in marketing, all you've got to do is tell people a fact.

It's not always about persuasion.

It's not always about getting people.

It's simply putting people in a state of knowledge or belief or conviction that this thing can make a difference to their lives.

And by the way, you're almost always up against a problem, which is that the two human default modes are do what everybody else does and do what I've done before for obvious reasons.

What you've done before and what everybody else always does is not necessarily optimal, but it's much less likely to be catastrophic than trying something new that nobody else ever does.

So we're kind of herd species and we're kind of habitual species.

So in the marketing of something which is genuinely new, you know, you're the Tesla, the electric car, there is a degree of extreme anxiety within.

which you don't encounter when you repeat buy or when you buy the brand leader.

There's like a resistance you have to overcome.

Yeah, you have to overcome it because just as a camera has a default mode, the human default mode is do what I did before, do what everybody else does.

I feel comfortable doing that.

Very, very rational default mode.

There's nothing silly about that in terms of, if you think about it, our evolutionary brain architecture.

Those two things make a lot of sense.

But it does mean, and something I only realized about a year ago, 35 years after I've started working in the business, is that as a consequence of that, big innovative new ideas don't require less marketing.

They require more.

Because you're asking people to, at the initial stages, you're asking someone to do something that nobody else has done.

And you're asking them to do something they haven't done before, both of which create a kind of disquiet.

And so providing people with conviction and reassurance, quite often, I suspect, by the way, in the early stages of a technology, that happens one-to-one.