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Rory Sutherland. The added value of advertising

Second Year Students. Culture and Leisure. 

First Lecture. Advertising 


Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.

You will need: 
  • Introduction to Rory Sutherland's task. Power Point presentation (for the teacher)
  • Script of the talk with vocabulary (for the students) 
You can download the Introductory Power Point, and  script and vocabulary  HERE
  • Video of the talk: provided below to watch on-line or downloadable from the original Ted Talk site HERE.



    Questions 



    Read the following statements by Rory Sutherland.

    Do you agree with them? Can you provide examples that support or contradict his ideas? 

    1. Once you have reached a reasonable level of wealth,  most of the problems we have are problems of perception.
    2. Education does not work by teaching your things; it actually works by giving you the impression that you have a good level of education, which gives you a sense of confidence, which makes you successful in later life
    3.  Persuasion is usually better than compulsion
    4.  There is general misconception that  real value involves making things, labour, engineering, limited raw materials and what we have on top is just propaganda but the creation of intangible value is a unique opportunity to modify people’s behaviour for the better.
    4. People tend to enjoy red wine more when they know it is expensive. We should drink our wine blindfolded in the future .
    5. Intangible value teaches us to appreciate more what already exists.


    9 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    Thanks for your nice experience to share with us. Really awesome article with plenty of informative things to be known for us.

    Maien Rabassa said...

    I do believe that this applies to today, specially with all the mediums we have to get information. ads are just everywhere!

    Anonymous said...

    I do think that this video is applicable now a days. Specially when Rory Sutherland talks about how Prussia managed to get people to eat potatoes by making them a royal food. I think this can be applied to today in terms of when you see someone wealthy wearing a piece of clothing, accessory, or overall have a possession that is expensive, you immediately want to have it. Not because it's necessary cute, or nice or something you would actually wear, but because to have it would mean that you would create the image of being wealthy, when in reality that may not be the case.
    I also really liked what he said in the end, to "appreciate the things that already exist, and less time agonising over what else we can do" is very true, because we see many examples of this in the daily. I think companies now a days seem to be in a rush to create new and improved things, to the point where you buy a possession that is supposed to last 5 years, but in the next year this same company has already created a new possession that's supposed to be better than the last one. So you don't even have time to enjoy what you already have, because you're too busy wanting something else which is slightly better than what you already have. A perfect example is Apple with the ¡Phone's.
    -Lola McIver

    Júlia Pareja said...

    It was a really interesting TED talk. I do agree with him. Most of the times, when we have enough already, most problems are created because everyone has a different perception of things. It's because of this that we can talk about trivial things and even choose between which food we want. If we didn't have enough to live, we wouldn't be like this.

    paco said...

    I think what is said in the talk is still very relevant/valid nowadays, I really enjoyed it.

    Andrés Villamizar said...

    This was quite an interesting listening, I see how this video represents our society and agree with his ideas; it is interesting since he talks about goods, which can be greedy many times, and sadly no one is 100% happy with what they have; I like how he is trying to teach us to be more down to earth and trying to understand and accept what we have

    clara said...

    It was an enjoyable listening, pretty funny. Referring to the question, absolutely yes, this talk could perfectly be given and applied nowadays, maybe the way of receiving publicity is different (social media, etc.), but the human mind works the same way. I found it really interesting because most of us complain about advertisements (I mean, we get thousands of ads everyday), but he gave a good point about the purpose of publicity, and I really liked the comparison he made with poetry.

    Ingrid Masip said...

    This listening was pretty interesting, and yes! I do believe what Rory said is still relevant today and will probably be for quite a few more years. In my opinion medium-class people tend to copy what the richer class promotes/uses in order to unconsciouly feel closer to that status therefore closer to a "happier" life.

    Ingrid Masip

    Ingrid Masip said...

    This listening was pretty interesting, and yes! I do believe what Rory said is still relevant today and will probably be for quite a few more years. In my opinion medium-class people tend to copy what the richer class promotes/uses in order to unconsciouly feel closer to that status therefore closer to a "happier" life.

    Ingrid Masip