Rory Sutherland

Or whether you thought it was some weird newfangled thing that you couldn't possibly trust.

I don't know.

But sometimes, do you ever watch Presh Talwalkar on YouTube?

You know, those mathematical puzzles, geometry puzzles?

I really recommend them because weirdly, I find myself on YouTube watching people solve mathematical equations for fun, which I never thought I'd do.

But Fresh Tell Walker, and I can't remember what it's called, something like something decisions, something.

Anyway, it's a great little YouTube channel.

It's not that little.

It's got a huge following.

And sometimes there's a geometry puzzle which looks completely impossible to solve until you just draw one extra line at which point the solution becomes obvious.

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.