Why Illogical Works (Often)

In his book on why ideas that don’t make any sense yet often work in real life, Alchemy, Rory Sutherland, marketing guru at Ogilvy & Mather, gives away the reason very early:

“If you expose every one of the world’s problems to ostensibly logical solutions, those that can easily be solved by logic will rapidly disappear, and all that will be left are the ones that are logic-proof.”

Most political and foreign policy problems are “logic-proof”! Half tongue-in-cheek, Sutherland goes on to add:

“This isn’t the Middle Ages, which had too many alchemists and not enough scientists. Now it’s the other way around.”

He clarifies his book isn’t an assault on “logic or reason”; rather, it is an “attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale”. Statistics is the butt of a lot of jokes, and rightly so. No, not because the field is flawed, but because it is all too easy to draw the wrong conclusions:

“Bad maths can lead to collective insanity… a single dud data point or false assumption can lead to results that are wrong by many orders of magnitude.”

 

The workplace only reinforces the worship of logic:

“It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative.”

While it may seem obvious, we are loath to admit the following:

“Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.”

Believe you are immune to it? Ok then, when was the last time you gave credit for the success of a product to, er, marketing?

“When (marketing) generates magic, it is more socially acceptable to attribute the resulting success to logistics or cost-control.”

 

And yet, there are innumerable instances through history of the generation of value illogically. Frederick the Great tried hard to persuade his peasants to grow potatoes, as an alternative source of carbohydrates. Threats and fines didn’t work. So he tried reverse psychology: he declared the potato a royal vegetable, that could only be consumed by royalty or with royal permission. Voila! Suddenly the Prussian peasant was all for the potato.

 

Or take a menu. Give the dish a French name or Italian origin, and you can increase its price! Or as Sutherland says:

“There seems to be more money in adjectives than nouns.”

 

Does branding sound pretentious and a non-value add? Sutherland narrates the interesting example from the anti-brand communist world. With the manufacturer not allowed to put his name/mark to the item, the Soviets soon found that “no one had any incentive to make a quality product”. After all, if nobody could identify your product against someone else’s, why would they pay more for yours? The problem wasn’t about items like cars, rather, it even happened even for the humble rivet (nail/screw). They were anonymized (no brand), and thus the buyer couldn’t know which factory it came from. Production quality inevitably fell through the floor.

 

Ironically then, economists, who want their field to be rational and maths-y, “hate advertising” (it’s illogical). Whereas biologists “understand (advertising) perfectly”! Remember the peacock’s tail et al?

 

An interesting read throughout, even more so if one comes from a logical/rational field…