Rory Sutherland: Don’t neglect the old

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

I got it wrong. But then Daniel Kahneman got it wrong too, so I’m in good company. Both of us, on first seeing an Amazon Kindle, felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, or like stout Cortez... well, to put it more prosaically, we thought it would replace printed books completely.

This has not happened, and indeed shows no signs of ever happening. Why? Perhaps more importantly, what might the biases have been that lay behind our over-optimism?

I suspect one of them is plain old neophilia. We like new, shiny things – or we simply pay more attention to them and, consequently, rate them more important than they really are. But then something else happens; a trick of the mind. We start to pay far more attention to the specific ways in which the new is better than the old, to a point where we drown out any thought of how the old might have certain advantages that the new does not possess.

The imaginary table above is an old marketing trick that exploits this very same asymmetry of attention. Had the designer of this table so wished, he or she could have listed hundreds more features all shared by the L, the GL and the GLX: automatic transmission; rear wiper; heated rear window; tinted windows (I am showing my age here); Apple CarPlay (that’s better); metallic paint. But they omit these quite deliberately, because the intention of the table is to get you to zone in on the extra doohickeys you get from spending an extra £23,000 on the GLX. It exploits what Kahneman calls WYSIATI – or ‘what you see is all there is’.

By contrast, if the list ran to hundreds of items, with only four unique to the GLX, you might think: ‘I can get 90% of the stuff I want for practically half the price. Why would I pay another 23 grand for a few trivial gizmos?’

In the case of shiny new technology, we don’t need a table designer to misdirect our attention. We do it unconsciously. So, looking at a Kindle and comparing it with the plain old book, we noticed and enthusiastically ticked various distinguishing features straightaway:

• Instant gratification – you can buy a book in seconds
  
• Portability – you can take your whole library in your suitcase
  
• Enlargeable type (showing my age again)
  
• Searchable text
  
• And so on...
  

Misled by our excitement, we neglected to notice a few rather pertinent facts. For one, neither of us has mainstream reading habits – we both read a lot of purely textual non-fiction, for which the Kindle is perfect. We also failed to spot that a huge proportion of books are bought as presents. The Kindle is rubbish for gifting. We overlooked the fact that the Kindle is also rubbish at displaying photographs – so that’s the cookery, food, sport, travel, architecture, art and gardening categories kiboshed too. We also neglected to consider that people rather like to display physical books on their shelves. (Perhaps one consequence of winning the Nobel Prize in economics is that you don’t spend much time worrying about whether you look sufficiently intellectual to visiting dinner guests.)

I suspect, in time, we may come to realise that something of this same asymmetry has also distorted our appreciation of the different characteristics of new and traditional media. Quite simply, we have become so fixated on the things that the new media offers over the old that these small differences have come to dominate our attention, to a point where we think they are all that matters.

Certain characteristics of the new digital media are indeed new and significant (instantaneousness, accountability, pinpoint targeting, and so on). Yet these newly available attributes are a very long way from ticking every box against a complete listing of all the things that a medium can usefully do: costly signalling, social imprinting, reach, creative engagement, etc. We are so fixated on the adaptive cruise control that we have failed to ask questions about the engine.

I spent decades working in direct marketing. We tried to get people excited by accountability, measurement, and so on back then. But direct marketing, unlike digital marketing, wasn’t shiny and new, so people preferred to make TV commercials instead. 

It’s WYSIATI every bloody time.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK

This column was first published in the January 2023 issue of Impact.