When marketing works its magic

Have you come across Rory Sutherland's talks? He's the advertising veteran and vice chairman of multi-national marketing agency, Ogilvy. What I love about him is his knack for showing how marketing, done well, can genuinely transform a business. His habit of questioning the rational, the everyday, the accepted norm is very much my kind of thinking. When you start digging down, looking for the actual problem, new solutions or directions bubble to the surface.

Here's what Sutherland says. In most businesses, being rational is treated as the gold standard. Sutherland argues it's actually the bronze. Ingenuity is silver. Gold is what he calls magic: solutions that work because they understand how people feel, not just what they logically need. If you don't believe magic exists, you'll never look for it — and you won't recognise it when it lands in your lap.

A few examples make this click.

A solution that was 99.92% cheaper

Britain spent £6 billion on a new railway line to shave 30 minutes off a journey. The shorter the journey, the better quality the experience. The happier the customers, the more business you get. Sutherland's point: there are many ways to improve an experience. You'd get almost the same "wow" for £50 million spent on brilliant Wi-Fi. Same time on the train, completely different quality of time. There's a number for quantity. There's no number for quality — so the number always wins the boardroom argument, even when it's wrong.

Electric vehicles show the same trap. Billions go into extending battery range to fix "range anxiety." But notice — range is engineering, anxiety is psychology. Nobody's petrol gauge ever announced a drop from 87% to 83%, and nobody needed it to. Sometimes the multi-million-dollar problem has a five-figure psychological fix sitting right beside it — if you're willing to look.

A map moved zero trains — and usage rose 400%

London had rail lines sitting barely used for decades, simply because nobody realised they connected. Someone added those lines to the Underground map. No new track. No new trains. Just pixels and ink. Usage quadrupled — on day one.

We can't use what we don't understand. That's not a technology problem. It's a communication problem — solved by the thing too many businesses treat as a "nice to have": clear, well-designed marketing.

Reverse benchmarking: find what your industry does badly, then own it

Most businesses benchmark against competitors, matching what everyone already does well. Sutherland argues this is backwards — it quietly makes whole industries blander, because everyone converges on the same offer.

Instead: find the thing your industry does badly, that customers grumble about but expect, and become spectacular at exactly that.

A top New York restaurant did it with coffee and beer — usually fine-dining afterthoughts — by appointing dedicated "sommeliers" for each. A middling detail became what people remember years later. A hotel chain did it with petrol station restrooms, one of travel's most reviled experiences, and built a loyal following on the back of it.

What does your industry do just adequately, that everyone quietly tolerates? That's not a weakness to shrug off. That's your opening.

Leave room to explore, not just exploit

Sutherland contrasts two ways of shopping. There's the Briscoes trip — you know exactly what you want, you wait for the sale (oh, that’s right, there’s a sale everyday) you go in, you get it, done. And there's the op shop wander, where you've got no fixed list, just curiosity, and every so often you stumble onto something brilliant you'd never have gone looking for. Interestingly, that’s also the difference between men and women. Men shop to get something. Women shop to find something.

Businesses that only exploit what they already know get very efficient at one thing, until the environment changes and they're lost. Even bees keep this balance: roughly 20% of a hive ignores the reliable food source and explores at random. It looks wasteful. It's what stops the hive starving when circumstances shift.

The lesson isn't "abandon your plan." It's: leave a little room — in budget, time, or ideas — for the thing without a provable ROI yet. Some won't pay off. The one that does will more than cover the rest.

Never underestimate the person on the phone

Royal Mail once found customer satisfaction bore no relationship to actual delivery performance. Areas with terrible service had happy customers; areas with excellent service had indifferent ones. The deciding factor, almost entirely, was whether people liked their postie.

As AI absorbs more transactional interactions, a genuinely good human moment — a phone call, a face-to-face conversation, someone using their judgement to do right by a customer — only grows more valuable. That's not nostalgia. It's a competitive edge.

The takeaway

This isn't about abandoning good sense. It's about noticing where good sense has narrowed your thinking down to the one "safe" answer — and asking whether the more interesting one, the one that doesn't fit neatly in a spreadsheet, is sitting right there waiting to be tried.

That's the craft of marketing, properly understood: not decoration on top of a good product, but the discipline of understanding how people think and feel, and using that to make good business decisions.

Already turning over the one thing your industry does badly that you could do brilliantly instead? I'd love to hear it. Get in touch, and let's find the magic in your business.