Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

Take London housing, for example. Logic would suggest that, as house prices in London continue to rise, many Londoners who do not need to live in the city would decide to buy houses further away, gaining from price rises and relaxing the pressure on the market. In reality it seems the opposite happens: when sitting on a rising asset, people who wou

After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the gr

And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act: this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start.* Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.

Does a tax rise cause you to work less because the returns for your labour are lower, or does it cause you to work harder, in order to maintain your present level of disposable wealth? It kind of depends. Logic requires that people find universal laws, but outside of scientific fields, there are fewer of these than we might expect. And once human p

Modern consumerism is the best-funded social science experiment in the world, the Galapagos Islands of human weirdness. More important still, an ad agency is one of the few remaining safe spaces for weird or eccentric people in the worlds of business and government. In ad agencies, mercifully, maverick opinion is still broadly encouraged or at leas

The psychological complexity of human behaviour is reduced to a narrow set of assumptions about what people want, which means they design a world for logical rather than psycho-logical people.

People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire.

We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.

Our very perception of the world is affected by context, which is why the rational attempt to contrive universal, context-free laws for human behaviour may be largely doomed.*