Of science and sandwiches: two takes on context

Brian Carruthers

Context is becoming ever more important in today’s marketing and Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland believes a fuller understanding of this area can lead to big gains in marketing and business.

‘Context’ is a word that covers a lot of ground, from ad placements to marketers’ choice of language to data interpretation. Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland comes at it from a behavioural science angle and is in no doubt about its potential for making a difference. “Looking at context experiments is genuinely the biggest future gain we can possibly imagine – in terms of behaviour change, in terms of marketing, in terms of business,” he declared at Nudgestock 2018 (Folkestone, June 2018).

Introducing Ogilvy’s annual festival of behavioural science, Sutherland remarked on the struggle social sciences have with replicating experiments. But, he...

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