Rory Sutherland

Why organisations work with Rory Sutherland

• His Alchemy argument, that businesses leave their most valuable opportunities untapped by optimising for logic rather than psychology, is built on 30 years of commercial practice at Ogilvy, not academic research.
• He founded and runs a dedicated behavioural science practice inside one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, where small contextual changes have produced large, documented commercial results, including tripling a call centre’s conversion rate through script changes alone.
• His concept of “psycho-logic” gives commercial teams a named, usable framework for the decisions that resist rational modelling: pricing, positioning, and customer experience chief among them.
• His two TED talks have passed seven million combined views, meaning his arguments are already part of the strategic vocabulary of many senior audiences, any conversation with him starts further ahead.
• He founded Nudgestock, the annual festival of behavioural sciences – making him an institutional builder in the field, not simply a commentator on it.

Biography highlights

• Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK; co-founder and leader of Ogilvy’s Behavioural Science Practice, established 2012
• Author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (Penguin, 2019); co-author of Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? (2021)
• Two TED Talks – “Life Lessons from an Ad Man” and “Sweat the Small Stuff” – with over 7 million combined views
• Former President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising; former Chair of Judges, Direct Jury, Cannes Lions
• Fortnightly “The Wiki Man” columnist, The Spectator; founder of Nudgestock, the annual behavioural sciences festival
• Studied Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge; joined Ogilvy as a graduate trainee in 1988

Biography

In 2012, Rory Sutherland did something unusual for an advertising agency: he built a team of psychology graduates inside Ogilvy and pointed them at commercial problems. The premise was direct. Most organisations optimise for the logical version of what customers want, not the psychological reality of how they decide. Three decades of commercial practice have made that premise difficult to argue with.

His 2019 book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense sets out the argument in full. Human decision-making, Sutherland contends, follows a “psycho-logic”, a coherent but non-rational set of rules governing what people buy, how much they’ll pay, and how satisfied they feel. Richard Thaler and Robert Cialdini both appear in its pages; Nassim Nicholas Taleb described it as “a breakthrough book.”

The Behavioural Science Practice he founded at Ogilvy tests these ideas commercially. Small contextual adjustments – changes to a call centre script, a reframing of a product’s positioning, a tweak to the sequence of a customer journey – have produced measurable results. It is the kind of evidence that makes his argument practical rather than purely theoretical.

He served as President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and as Chair of the Judges for Cannes Lions’ Direct Jury. His two TED talks have passed seven million combined views. He writes a fortnightly column in The Spectator and founded Nudgestock, the annual festival of behavioural sciences.

Key speaking topics

• Behavioural economics and commercial strategy
• Consumer psychology and decision-making
• Perception, value, and pricing psychology
• The limits of data-driven marketing
• Creativity and non-rational problem-solving
• Behavioural design and customer experience
• Nudge theory in organisational contexts

Ideal for

• Chief Marketing Officers and marketing leadership teams rethinking growth strategy
• Commercial strategy and innovation leaders exploring alternatives to pure data-led optimisation
• Senior executives and boards examining how psychological insight can improve pricing, product design, and customer experience
• Conference audiences in financial services, retail, consumer goods, and technology where customer behaviour directly drives commercial performance

Audience outcomes

• A named framework, “psycho-logic”, for identifying where logical optimisation is producing diminishing returns in marketing and commercial strategy
• Specific, documented examples of small behavioural interventions that produced large commercial results
• A clearer understanding of why the most effective growth moves often look counterintuitive, and how to make the internal case for them
• Practical grounding in behavioural economics principles applicable to pricing, customer experience, and product design
• A more honest audit of where data-driven approaches reach their limits and what to reach for instead