Rory Sutherland on failing to understand simple truths

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I think I’ve been writing this column long enough to owe you a confession. So here it is.

In all the years I’ve been writing for Impact, and in the decades I have spent working in marketing agencies beforehand, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book about market research. Um, mea culpa! Soz! Awks! What can I say?

I must have read more than 100 books about advertising, one way or another – some of them not written by Winston Fletcher; and I must have read a similar number of books about behavioural science or psychology. But as for books written about market research, or written by market researchers, I don’t think I can think of a single one. (Unless, of course, you include Ogilvy on Advertising. We conveniently forget this, but most of David Ogilvy’s philosophies took root not in the advertising industry, but while working for Gallup). Gulp!

Recently, however, Jon Cohen sent me a review copy of his soon-to-be-published book called Asking for Trouble, which is subtitled ‘Understanding what people think when you can’t trust what they say’. This naturally appealed.

Reading this excellent book has suddenly brought me face-to-face with what an abominable lacuna existed in my past reading. Perhaps I should have started off by reading about research, rather than finally ending up here.

The book led me to realise that the solution to so much of the misdirected effort, economic inefficiency, false optimism – and, indeed, false pessimism – within the worlds of business and public policy lies more in your world. If I’d read this book, and others, sooner, I could have wasted so much less of my life failing to understand a very simple truth, which Jon explains almost on the first page.

So much of what we do in marketing simply starts from the wrong place. For example (and this is obvious, once you give it a moment’s thought) the very question “what do you think about this?” is, in a way, absurd, because it starts from the presumption that the respondent is going to be thinking about it to begin with.

Asking what someone thinks about something risks constructing a castle in the air: “In a slightly surreal parallel universe, where, for some bizarre reason, you think about this a lot, what might you think about our idea?”

Of course, once asked, they will have an opinion and will care about it deeply, and will post-rationalise all kinds of elaborate explanations for their preference – but only because the very act of asking the question has made them think about it in the first place.

It’s not that I’m blind to the problem. Obviously, being focused on behavioural science means I’m acutely aware of the wide gap between what economists call ‘expressed preference’ and ‘revealed preference’. What I never realised until reading this book is how much of that disparity was created simply by the act of asking. Moreover, the very act of asking creates a kind of forced comprehension, when it may be completely absent in the real world.

Cohen describes one case where different ways of describing a levy on the tobacco industry had, ultimately, created a distinction in preference between two different phrasings of a proposition. But this distinction was really irrelevant, as what mattered was the blinking incomprehension with which people first reacted in being confronted with either.

What really mattered was the fact that most people stumbled over the meaning of the word levy, in some cases reading it as Levi’s, as in jeans, or levee, as in American Pie.

Then there was the chief executive of a company proposing to launch a super-premium adventure travel agency brand, targeted at uber-wealthy city workers. Quite simply, city workers don’t go out at lunchtime to browse. The prospective CEO heard this, abandoned the plan, and thanked the author for saving him a huge amount of money. As the saying goes, “Yes, there may be a gap in the market – but is there a market in the gap?”

In this case, I’m fairly sure that Cohen was right. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other opportunities to invent new ways of selling premium holidays; but a retail outlet probably isn’t one. The book explained something that has puzzled me for ages about the City of London, which is why – given the inordinate amounts of money earned there – the retail environment is so extraordinarily dull.

Asking for trouble: understanding what people think when you can’t trust what they say, by Jon Cohen, is now published.

This column was first published in the April 2021 issue of Impact.