https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/64849045/sutherland-moonshots-and-marketing
Podcast Introduction
Invest Like the Best was chosen as one of the top five podcasts rated by the Wall Street Journal. Its host Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. The host speaks with investors, founders, and CEOs willing to share some of what they've learned in their lives. The podcast is now expanding its horizons to cover personalities from different fields like Politics, Journalism, and Media.
Guest Introduction
Rory Sutherland is the Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, one of the world's largest and most renowned advertising agencies. He's also the author of one of the loved recent books called Alchemy: The surprising power of ideas that don't make sense. In this conversation, Patrick explores many of Rory's counterintuitive ideas about business.
Being Mechanical isn't Magical
Evolutionary Progress has rendered humans to make decisions based on simple, easy-to-understand frameworks like a spreadsheet or a google map. Going from "data to decision" is driven by more such deterministic models. Reality is shaped more by complex, probabilistic agents like human behavior.
Rory opines "Magic" - which in this context would mean disproportionately high returns - happens when the deterministic model is used in conjunction with some intuition or perception to arrive at decisions. As an instance, Rory mentions the conversion funnel of a call center could be improved by providing some free information like "Most People Choose Option B." It would help undecided customers who would otherwise drop off. Sheer Imitation of what the general population is doing protects us often against catastrophic results.
Regular Moonshot vs. Psychological Moonshot
<aside> 💡 Google defines a moonshot as a 10x return opportunity. Moonshots can be achieved not only by building a superbly engineered product but also by one that solves psychographic needs. This means going beyond the first-order effect of a product solving a "need." Instead, solving psychographic (second-order) needs can help innovators break free from technological constraints and establish a deeper connection with the users.
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Psychological Anomalies
Marketing is regarded as almost chesting by the engineer centric Silicon Valley. Rory feels the Silicon Valley ecosystem fails to acknowledge the role of marketing in a digital product's success.
In general, the consideration set of solutions become larger and varied if innovators add psychological elements while brainstorming. These can be smart promotional, or pricing plays. He cites a few examples: