Alchemy

Flowers are just weeds with a larger advertising budget

This book is unexpectedly hilarious. If you like the psychology behind marketing strategies, you’ll love this. It’s easily digestible and doesn’t contain any waffle. There’s an abundance of genuinely perspective changing ideas, and it’s peppered with humour that catches you off guard and makes you ugly laugh. A few of my favourite parts: * When caterpillars don’t use camouflage and instead are brightly coloured, it’s a power move, as it makes the predator question “if it’s not trying to hide, it’s probably for a reason. Probably shouldn’t eat it” * Manual car drivers control the gearbox, but automatic car drivers seduce it. You can prevent an automatic car from shifting down gears on a hill by slowly releasing the accelerator, in the same way the only way to control your sleep is to lower the light in the room, minimise noise and lay down. I keep doing unnecessary errands as an excuse to keep listening. So far I’ve, done all the washing, deep cleaned the fridge and reorganised the silverware drawer.

15 people found this helpful

Superb

If you’ve ever wondered why your ideas don’t work in business (or life even), this is likely to explain why. It gives hope for entrepreneurs to create their own magic without a boardroom killing their ideas – and it’s a challenge to fusty, rational corporates to change how they approach business problems. I liked this book so much that I recommended it to a random stranger on the train this morning who coincidentally was reading a book on nudge theory. That’s quite an uncomfortable thing for a Brit to do in a public place, so hopefully, that shows you why it’s a worth a buy.

7 people found this helpful

Solid gold

Best book I’ve read for a long time. Rory in his unique charming and witty way shares brilliant stories, insights, and ideas on how we can all solve problems and come up with better ideas if we just look at the world in a different way. Super smart, very entertaining and easy to read. Marvellous.

5 people found this helpful

Press pause, not repeat

Sutherland is always an engaging, entertaining public speaker. His insights are valuable and thought provoking. But... The book is too long because it's repetitive (it feels a little padded, perhaps trying to justify it's gold packaging and price). The text - printed and audio - would have benefited from an editor. Half the length would have been twice as good.

3 people found this helpful

Interesting but padded out

Well written and well read by the author, but there's a lot of padding to get a relatively simple message up to book length. the basic premises are all pretty standard behavioural economics, and perpetuates the fashion in that sub branch of economics of pretending indignance that 'classical economists' believe their models are literally true. They don't; they're not idiots, their models are only designed to model things at a high level of resolution. There's nothing special about suddenly taking psychological factors into consideration, except that the people who do so have a brief to do so, whereas others have that of positing a rule that's right more often than not.

2 people found this helpful

Don't think twice, just read this book.

“When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic”. It's great to hear the thoughts of somebody who genuinely thinks differently. This book is really entertaining, funny and thought-provoking. It gives some great perspective on advertising, business and life.

1 person found this helpful

Fun and inspiring look at the benefits of irrational thinking

The world of people and their behaviour often doesn’t follow simple logic. The benefits of solving problems through seemingly non-logical thinking is discussed, with many interesting and enlightening examples. However, it is not obvious how to actually go about thinking in a different way as encouraged in this book, accept for taking time out to think, and not being afraid of stupid ideas.

1 person found this helpful

Best book i've read this year

Cannot recommend highly enough! I read a lot of books on this topic. Rory is insightful, the book is interesting and relevant and everything is applied and real rather than being abstract and theoretical. Loved every page! Oh and fantastic sense of humour too! When he talks about his wife putting dozens of pillows on the bed nd dropping the F bomb haha Rory thanks for this book. I hope you read this review and feel proud of your output and i do hope you will publish more. I will pre order anything you release next!

1 person found this helpful

Most excellent book!

I loved this book. It is one of those rare reads that makes you immediately feel more intelligent! Particularly interesting to get an insight into how the psychology of advertising works and to hear the thoughts of someone who genuinely thinks differently! Brilliant

1 person found this helpful

Find out why using only logic in decision making can be a load of bollocks

This is a brilliant and insightful book on the limits of using only logic in human decision making. Rory presents a spectacular re-frame on our so called ‘irrational’ or ‘emotional’ decision making behaviour caused by cognitive biases or ‘blind’ spots. Turns out they are not so blind after all. Evolution has made some of these baffling behaviours extremely useful in specific contexts and is what Rory terms ‘Psycho-logic’. He explains these counter-intuitive discoveries with the aid of a list of fascinating stories and vignettes from the world of advertising, marketing and consumer behaviour where the use of logic alone would lead you to think that we are all crazy. For example the use of soap and better hygiene prevented cholera outbreaks, and the addition of a scent makes no difference to this outcome. Scentless soap should make no difference to purchasing behaviour. People did not buy the soap for this purpose or for hygiene initially though - they bought it to signal social status and attractiveness to the opposite sex. The scent is critical for this purpose and useless in the fight against cholera. On a more serious note - a better understanding of the oddities of our psycho-logical behaviour may considerably improve human decision making processes in the future. Even if we are not aware of why it works!