Knowing and Making

Rory Sutherland's new book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense  continues his 10-year campaign against the traditional, logical pursuit of business advantage, through a scientific lens that includes several cognitive economics themes. As ever, a curated series of amusing anecdotes about people or companies who took an unusual angle on marketing or product invention, fuel a philosophical wander. That philosophy could be summarised as: if it makes sense, someone's already tried it. So try something that doesn't . The ideas that underpin the book are broadly based on behavioural economics and cognitive science, with bits of evolutionary theory, statistics and old-fashioned advertising intuition thrown in. At first it doesn't look like a behavioural science book as such: the theoretical backbone takes a while to show. Rory's style is discursive: an after-dinner-talk of anecdotes, dismantling of conventional wisdom, ever-so-slightly outr

Below is an article by Leigh published in INsights magazine. The magazine published by the Neuromarketing Science & Business Association. See the article in its full glory here or just the text below. Behavioral pricing has been used for many years but is essentially based on changing customers' behavior without creating new value. Cognitive pricing is a new paradigm in which the customer's positive mental experience can be given a monetary value. The ability of companies to earn premium prices for their products and services is under threat. The rise of the Internet in general, and price comparison websites in particular, makes it easier for consumers to compare products, harder for brands to stand out from the competition, and risks turning many categories of product into commodities. And being commoditized usually means lower profits and less innovation. The emergence of behavioral economics gave marketers a new set of tools to maintain an edge: the techniques of