Sutherland is a vice-chairman of Ogilvy in the UK and has spent a career arguing that businesses systematically over-value the rational and under-value the psychological. His central point is that the cheap change in how something is perceived often beats the expensive change in what it actually is.
The worked example he is best known for: rather than spending enormous sums making a train journey twenty minutes faster, you could spend a fraction of it making the journey more pleasant, and passengers would rate the improvement higher. Both are real improvements. Only one is affordable.
Most owners cannot outspend anyone on product. They can nearly always change how the thing is framed, ordered, packaged, explained or timed — and those changes cost close to nothing. That is Sutherland's whole territory.
His test for whether something is genuinely strategic. If the reverse of your positioning would be idiotic for anyone to adopt, you have not chosen a position, you have stated a hygiene factor. 'High quality and good service' fails the test. 'Cheap and cheerful' and 'expensive and exceptional' both pass it, because a competitor could sincerely choose the other one.
Waiting is a good example: people mind uncertainty more than delay. A countdown, an accurate estimate or a visible queue position changes the experience without changing the wait. Ask what your customers actually dislike, which is often not the thing you have been trying to fix.
Because psychological effects are hard to predict from first principles, the way to find them is to try things. That suits a small business far better than it suits a large one, and it is one of the few areas where being small is a genuine advantage.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Anyone who has to compete without the biggest budget, and anyone in marketing, pricing or customer experience.
If you want a checklist or a process to implement on Monday, this is not that. It is a way of thinking, and you have to do the translating to your own business yourself.
