Alchemy

The Drink That Should Have Failed

Imagine you are asked the hardest question in the soft-drinks business: what product could ever rival Coca-Cola as the world's second most popular cold, non-alcoholic drink? Every logical instinct points the same way. Make it taste better. Make it cheaper. Make the bottle bigger. Give people more of what they already like, for less money.

Now look at what actually happened. The drink that pulled it off did the exact opposite of all three. It was expensive. It came in a tiny can. And it tasted, by most accounts, faintly medicinal. When the company behind it ran pre-launch research, the specialist agency reported that in its entire history it had never seen a worse reaction to any proposed new product. People did not politely shrug. One typical comment was that the respondent wouldn't drink the stuff if you paid them to.

That drink was Red Bull. Today it sells something in the order of six billion cans a year, and the profits are healthy enough to bankroll a Formula One team. Here is the uncomfortable lesson at the heart of Rory Sutherland's *Alchemy*. Red Bull did not succeed in spite of breaking every rule of rational product design. It succeeded, at least in part, *because* it broke them. A small can implies potency. A high price implies value. An odd taste implies that something serious is going on inside. The logical version of Red Bull, the cheap, large, pleasant one, would have been just another soft drink, and you would never have heard of it.

Sutherland spent his career at the advertising agency Ogilvy, and his whole book is an argument for taking that Red Bull lesson seriously. The opposite of a good idea, he says, can also be a good idea. We have built a world run by logical people who only ever discover logical things, and in doing so we have quietly outlawed the one thing that creates disproportionate value: magic.