Rory Sutherland Columnist I Failing to understand simple truths Of course, once asked, they will have an opinion and will care think Ive been writing this column long enough to owe you about it deeply, and will post-rationalise all kinds of elaborate a confession. So here it is. explanations for their preference but only because the very In all the years Ive been writing for Impact, and in the act of asking the question has made them think about it in the decades I have spent working in marketing agencies first place. beforehand, I dont think Ive ever read a book about market Its not that Im blind to the problem. Obviously, being focused research. Um, mea culpa! Soz! Awks! What can I say? on behavioural science means Im acutely aware of the wide gap I must have read more than 100 books about advertising, one between what economists call expressed preference and way or another some of them not written by Winston Fletcher; revealed preference. What I never realised until reading this and I must have read a similar number of books about book is how much of that disparity was created simply by the behavioural science or psychology. But as for books written about act of asking. Moreover, the very act of asking creates a kind of market research, or written by market researchers, I dont think forced comprehension, when it may be completely absent in the I can think of a single one. (Unless, of course, you include Ogilvy real world. on Advertising. We conveniently forget this, but most of David Ogilvys philosophies took root not in the advertising industry, levy on the tobacco industry had, ultimately, created a distinction but while working for Gallup). Gulp! Recently, however, Jon Cohen sent me a review copy of his But this distinction was really irrelevant, as what mattered was soon-to-be-published book called Asking for Trouble, which is the blinking incomprehension with subtitled Understanding what people which people first reacted in being think when you cant trust what they The very act of asking creates confronted with either. say. This naturally appealed. a kind of forced comprehension, What really mattered was the fact that Reading this excellent book has when it may be completely most people stumbled over the meaning suddenly brought me face-to-face with absent in the real world of the word levy, in some cases reading what an abominable lacuna existed in it as Levis, as in jeans, or levee, as in my past reading. Perhaps I should have American Pie. Then there was the chief executive of a company proposing rather than finally ending up here. to launch a super-premium adventure travel agency brand, The book led me to realise that the solution to so much of the targeted at uber-wealthy city workers. Quite simply, city workers dont go out at lunchtime to browse. The prospective indeed, false pessimism within the worlds of business and CEO heard this, abandoned the plan, and thanked the author public policy lies more in your world. If Id read this book, and for saving him a huge amount of money. As the saying goes, others, sooner, I could have wasted so much less of my life failing Yes, there may be a gap in the market but is there a market to understand a very simple truth, which Jon explains almost on in the gap? the first page. In this case, Im fairly sure that Cohen was right. That doesnt So much of what we do in marketing simply starts from the mean there arent plenty of other opportunities to invent new wrong place. For example (and this is obvious, once you give it ways of selling premium holidays; but a retail outlet probably isnt a moments thought) the very question what do you think about one. The book explained something that has puzzled me for ages this? is, in a way, absurd, because it starts from the presumption about the City of London, which is why given the inordinate that the respondent is going to be thinking about it to begin with. amounts of money earned there the retail environment is so Asking what someone thinks about something risks constructing extraordinarily dull. a castle in the air: In a slightly surreal parallel universe, where, for some bizarre reason, you think about this a lot, what might Asking for trouble: understanding what people think when you you think about our idea? cant trust what they say, by Jon Cohen, is published in May. 7 Impact ISSUE 33 2021_pp6-7_Rory.indd 7 26/03/2021 09:43