Rory Sutherland looks to disrupt “tidy” marketing with new consultancy project

Ogilvy vice chairman Rory Sutherland has teamed up with other marketing luminaries to launch a consultancy, or in his words, a “concatenation of dissenters”.

The project, titled Illuminari after the Latin for “to bring into the light”, aims to “diagnose and solve the problems that others have failed to fix”, according to Rory.

Co-founded with Uncensored CMO and System 1’s Kerry Collinge and Ogilvy’s Anna Cairns, the group focuses on disrupting what it sees as an overly metric-focused approach to marketing.

Other marketing experts involved in the project include Jon Evans, also of the Uncensored CMO podcast, Edelman’s former Chief Creative Officer Emma de la Fosse, and Les Binet and Peter Field, who launched “The Long and Short of It”.

“When every marketer ends up using the same metrics, the same dashboards, the same models and frameworks, something bad happens – everybody starts to see the problem in the same way, and when everyone sees the problem in the same way, you tend to get the same answers every time,” Rory commented on LinkedIn.

“One of the principles I’ve always liked comes from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett: the notion that, to make good decisions, you need a suitcase full of different mental models – not one model, or one framework, but a whole suitcase of them.”

He added: “Illuminari is, in essence, a slightly mischievous gathering of dissenters. People who think marketing occasionally benefits from the counterintuitive, the contrarian, and the awkward question that everyone else is slightly afraid to ask.”