2022 Book Report #1 - Alchemy (Rory Sutherland)
So, in 2021 - I went on a quest to read 12 books in 12 months. It didn't happen. A new job and a third baby caught up to me. But I set out on the same mission for 2022.
These “book reports” could either include simple thoughts I highlighted throughout the book or organized frameworks, depending on how the book was laid out.
1/12 — ALCHEMY by Rory Sutherland
"The dark art and curious science of creating magic in brands, business and life."
Around 90% of people have no idea what sort of aircraft they’re on, but will infer a great deal about the safety and quality of the experience offered by an airline from the care and attention it pays to on-board snacks
“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think & they don’t do what they say.” For a business to truly be customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say and instead concentrate on how people feel & what people do
Part 1 - The Uses and Abuses of Reason It doesn’t always pay to be logical if everyone else is also being logical If you look at the history of great inventions and discoveries, sequential deductive reasoning has contributed to few of them
Part 2- An Alchemist’s Tale (Or why Magic Really Still Exists) The best way to improve air travel probably lies with fast airports, not faster aircrafts Innovations come when you remove features, rather than the addition (Google is Yahoo... without the ads)
Part 3 - Signaling The ads which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an ad budget
Part 4- Subconscious Hacking Since the only purpose of a ‘door close’ button is to make impatient people relax, perhaps it makes no difference whether it achieves this end through mental or mechanical means (The use of placebo buttons is more common than we realize)
Part 5 - Satisfying We buy brands to satisfy
Part 6 - Psychophysics The Ikea Effect and how we value the fruits our labor over instant gratification (read more here)
Part 7 - How to be an Alchemist - Find different expressions for the same thing - Be unpredictable - Dare to be trivial
Other “book reports” from 2022:
