Renaming a fish saved it from being thrown back
Advertising executive Rory Sutherland has spent decades collecting cases where changing a story changed the sale — with nothing else touched.
The Patagonian toothfish is an ugly, deep-sea creature nobody wanted to eat. American restaurants started serving the exact same fish under a different name — Chilean sea bass — and it became a menu staple. No recipe changed. No new fishing method. Just the name.
Ogilvy vice chairman Rory Sutherland collects stories like this to make a case he calls psycho-logic: businesses obsess over optimizing the product itself, while some of the biggest jumps in value come from changing how people experience or interpret it, for almost no cost. A delayed flight announced honestly feels worse than the same delay explained with a reason. A slower but scenic driving route often beats the fastest one, because people aren't actually optimizing for time — they're optimizing for how the trip feels.
Sutherland's point isn't that logic is useless. It's that logic already got applied to every obvious problem decades ago. If a frustration is still unsolved today, the fix probably isn't more analysis. It's a story someone hasn't tried yet.