Killer marketing secrets that always work (ft. Ogilvy Adman, Rory Sutherland)

July 27, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Psychology of Making Things Desirable

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and author of Alchemy, argues that most businesses pour resources into improving their products when the real leverage lies in changing how people perceive them. "There are two ways of making money," he says. "You can either make desirable things, or you can make things desirable." The laws of physics are largely fixed, but the laws of psychology are "magnificently malleable"—and that malleability is where the biggest opportunities hide.

The Horsepower Lesson: Marketing Units Over Engineering Units

Sutherland tells the story of James Watt and Matthew Boulton, who in the 1770s needed to sell steam engines to mine owners. The engineers wanted to talk about boiler capacity and piston stroke. The mine owners wanted to know one thing: how many horses they could stop feeding. So Watt invented the "horsepower"—a marketing unit, not a scientific one. "The reason it's not named after a famous scientist like the Ohm or the Newton," Sutherland notes, "is because it's a marketing unit." It let mine owners do the math on the back of an envelope and say, "We'll have two of those."

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What you'll learn

1 Killer Marketing Secrets That Always Work (ft. Rory Sutherland)
2 (00:00) **Two Ways to Make Money** - Rory opens with the core thesis: you can either make desirable things or make things desirable, and psychology is far more malleable than physics
3 (01:46) **The Horsepower Marketing Story** - How Watt and Bolton invented a marketing unit, not a scientific one, to sell steam engines
4 (06:14) **The 1350 Tax Audit Hack** - The Danish crown solved cargo tax evasion with a brilliant psychological trick
5 (07:31) **Modern Day Horsepower for AI** - Why AI products need their own translation layer instead of benchmark wars
6 (09:34) **Range Anxiety Is Psychological, Not Physical** - Rory's personal story about electric car range anxiety reveals a massive misallocation of resources
7 (13:16) **Reverse Benchmarking** - Find the metric everyone neglects and dominate it

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

$1M Attention Guide: 15+ ways to get eyeballs on what you're building https://clickhubspot.com/tkwc

Episode 845: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to marketing legend Rory Sutherland ( https://x.com/rorysutherland ).

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Show Notes:

(0:00) Intro

(1:44) Horsepower

(12:15) Reverse benchmarking

(17:38) Pay attention to what irritates you

(21:47) Ogilvy secrets

(27:28) Marketing hacks used by Apple, UBER, McDonald's

(36:35) direct response marketing 101

(1:08:50) Recommended reading

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Links:

• Alchemy - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F1HOAWA

• Illusion of Choice - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0857199749

• Nassim Taleb books - https://www.amazon.com/stores/Nassim-Nicholas-Taleb/author/B000APVZ7W

• Ogilvy on Advertising - https://www.amazon.com/dp/039472903X

• Writing That Works - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060956437

• When More Is Not Better - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1647820065

• Scientific Advertising - https://a.co/d/0ixEJA1B

• The Choice Factory - https://a.co/d/0ixa769O

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• Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm

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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:

• Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com

• Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents.

• Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/

Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., Members FDIC

• I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to