The Behavioural Science Secrets Every Tech CEO Must Know (Based on 10 Hours of Rory Sutherland
After diving deep into Rory Sutherland’s recent podcast appearances and content, I’ve uncovered five game-changing insights that could transform how tech leaders approach their go-to-market strategies. As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and the founder of their behavioural science practice, Sutherland’s contrarian wisdom cuts through the noise of conventional marketing thinking.
For tech leaders struggling to scale, these insights reveal why your rational, data-driven approach might be sabotaging your growth.
- Your Perfect Product Is Your Biggest Problem
Sutherland repeatedly emphasizes: marketing should be seen as essential R&D, exploring unknown facets of consumer behaviour and testing hypotheses in realistic scenarios. Most tech companies obsess over building the “perfect” product but completely misunderstand how humans actually make purchasing decisions.
In his conversation with Rick Rubin, Sutherland explains that great marketing ideas are often built around a core that is profoundly irrational. Your beautifully engineered solution means nothing if you can’t change perception.
Take Uber: They didn’t revolutionize transportation by building better cars. They transformed the experience of getting a ride by removing the awkward payment moment and adding location tracking. The pain point of a taxi ride is waiting and hoping one will turn up. If you are able to track on a map where it is and when it will arrive, even if that taxi takes longer on average, the customer is happier knowing the visibility of the arrival.
For tech leaders, this means your GTM strategy shouldn’t start with product features. It should start with understanding the psychological barriers preventing adoption. Stop asking “What does our product do?” and start asking “What story does our product tell?”
- The Fame Game: Why B2B Brands Are Playing It Wrong
Sutherland’s insights on “fame” reveal a critical blind spot in B2B marketing. The current focus on speed, journey times and efficiency…are aimed at Homo Transporticus, an idealised, naturally selected transport user, but real humans value different things entirely.
Most tech companies optimize for rational metrics while ignoring emotional ones. Your prospects aren’t spreadsheet-wielding robots, they’re humans who get fired for making bad decisions.
This creates what Sutherland calls the “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” phenomenon, where safety and recognition matter more than superior functionality.
Smart tech leaders are now investing in “fame-building” activities that seem wasteful to CFOs but are psychologically essential: thought leadership, conference speaking, and visible partnerships.
These create the social proof that makes buying decisions feel safe, even when your product is objectively better than the incumbent.
- The Efficiency Trap That’s Killing Your Growth
In his infrastructure podcast appearance, Sutherland challenges the fundamental assumption driving most tech scaling strategies. Designers need to bin our current siloed thinking and avoid what he describes as a “quantification trap” of cost benefit analysis.
Tech leaders obsess over optimizing conversion funnels and reducing friction, but Sutherland argues this misses the point. Sometimes friction creates value. Sometimes inefficiency signals quality. Sometimes the longer path builds more commitment.
Consider how expensive enterprise software often sells better than cheaper alternatives, not despite the price but because of it. The high price signals enterprise-grade quality and justifies the procurement process. Strip away that “inefficiency” and you might strip away the psychological markers that make your solution credible.
For scaling tech companies, this means questioning every optimization. Are you removing valuable friction along with wasteful friction? Are you solving problems that actually matter to humans, or just problems that are easy to measure?
- The TikTok Revelation: Why Your CEO Needs to Become the Product
Here’s the insight that will blow you away. The 58-year-old advertising executive has become an unlikely TikTok influencer, approached by young people on the street familiar with him through his social media content.
Think about this for a moment. A 58-year-old advertising executive is getting recognized on the street by Gen Z because his ideas are so compelling they’ve gone viral. This isn’t about dancing or trends, it’s about the power of personality-driven thought leadership in an attention economy.
For tech leaders, this is a massive wake-up call. Your company’s growth ceiling might not be determined by your product roadmap or sales process, but by whether your leadership team can articulate ideas that people actually want to share. In B2B, people don’t buy from companies, they buy from people they trust and want to be associated with.
Sutherland’s accidental TikTok fame happened because fans started uploading clips of his talks and interviews. The lesson? Your insights and perspectives are potentially your most scalable asset. Stop hiding behind corporate messaging and start building your personal thought leadership platform.
- The Psychology of Problem-Solving: Why You’re Optimizing the Wrong Things
Throughout his appearances, Sutherland reveals a fundamental flaw in how tech companies approach growth challenges. Most problems aren’t clear until we try to solve them, and we only solve the problems we’re asked to solve.
This explains why so many well-funded, brilliantly engineered startups fail to gain traction.
They’re solving clearly defined problems with logical solutions, but humans rarely experience problems logically. They experience them emotionally, irrationally, and often unconsciously.
The most successful tech companies don’t just solve problems, they reframe them entirely. Slack didn’t solve email overload; they reframed workplace communication as conversation. Zoom didn’t solve video calling; they reframed remote meetings as face-to-face experiences.
For tech leaders struggling with GTM execution, stop asking “How do we solve this problem better?” and start asking “What if this isn’t actually the problem?” The breakthrough might come from solving a completely different problem that your target market didn’t even know they had.
Final Take away – The Annual Report Insight That Changes Everything
Here’s Sutherland’s powerful observation that you can never unhear: annual reports are written for shareholders, not customers, which creates a fundamental misalignment in how companies communicate value.
Most tech companies fall into this trap without realizing it. Their messaging, positioning, and even product development gets filtered through what sounds good to investors rather than what resonates with users. You end up with feature lists that impress VCs but confuse prospects.
The fix? Create two completely separate narratives: one for the people funding your growth, and one for the people actually using your product. Stop trying to make one message serve both audiences, it serves neither effectively.
Conclusion
Rory Sutherland’s insights reveal why so many technically superior products fail in the market while inferior alternatives thrive. The problem isn’t your product, your pricing, or your process, it’s your fundamental misunderstanding of human psychology.
For tech leaders struggling to scale their GTM efforts, the path forward isn’t more data or better optimization. It’s embracing the beautiful irrationality of how humans actually make decisions. Stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a psychologist.
The companies that win in the next decade won’t just have better technology—they’ll tell better stories, create better experiences, and understand that in a world of infinite choices, perception really is reality.
Sources:
https://howtoacademy.com/podcasts/rory-sutherland-how-to-be-less-rational-and-more-brilliant/
https://www.infrastructure-podcast.com/episode-42—rory-sutherland
https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/rory-sutherland/
https://shows.acast.com/on-brand-with-rory-sutherland
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4urQcetVd4nQE0mAg6lTnM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiMIEv2BaXs&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD
https://www.codefinery.com/podcast_episode/1-rory-sutherland/
