The Average Customer Doesn't Exist: Rory Sutherland On Why Marketing Has To Aim

What happens when the vice chairman of Ogilvy sits in a wooden caravan and starts talking. Spoiler: bring a notepad.

I spent thirty minutes with Rory Sutherland backstage at BizX 2026 for the ActionCOACH Business Growth Podcast. I came out of it needing a sit-down and a strong coffee. Here's why.

Rory Sutherland is sitting inside the Max Media podcast trailer at BizX 2026 and he is delighted with it.

Not politely delighted. Genuinely, properly delighted.

The trailer is a wooden caravan - somewhere between an Airstream and a boutique cabin - and Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and arguably the most interesting brain in marketing today, immediately has a theory about why it works. He calls it "reverse benchmarking." His argument: secretly, everybody wants a caravan. In the same way every man secretly wants a shed or a canal boat. What stops most people isn't practical. It's image.

Then he says something only Rory Sutherland would say.

"This is what Steve Jobs would have had if he'd decided to become a caravanner."

He means it as the highest compliment he owns. And he's off. Before Jony Ive redesigned the computer, he says, any beige box you put in a room turned that room into an office. The iMac had a handle nobody needed - put there for one reason only: so it would feel like something you were allowed to touch.

I told him, honestly, that I can't listen to him without my thinking changing. He seemed pleased. Then he got serious.

Your Finance Director Finds Marketing Uncomfortable. There's A Reason For That.

Sutherland credits the Canadian business writer Roger L. Martin with an observation that stopped me cold. Boards of directors are comfortable with roughly 70% of what a business does - because it sits within their control. Marketing and innovation are the two functions that touch real human beings. And customers, however much a spreadsheet might wish otherwise, are not controllable.

That's why finance people find marketing so uncomfortable. As Sutherland puts it: "it isn't clear what you'll win on a single hand."

His answer to that isn't to make marketing more measurable. It's to reframe what marketing actually is. Think of it, he says, as a casino with good odds rather than a science with guaranteed answers. Probabilistic, not deterministic. A business that wants to be resilient has to get comfortable placing intuitive bets in exactly the territory that makes the finance function nervous.

I suspect quite a few business owners reading this just nodded. Because most of us have been in that room. The one where someone asks you to prove the ROI before you've spent a penny. Where the safest decision is always the one that looks safest on paper. Sutherland's point is that safe-on-paper and actually-safe are not the same thing. Not even close.

The Average Customer Doesn't Exist

Here's the story that will stick with you.

The US Air Force once tried to design the perfect cockpit seat by building it around the average pilot. Average forearm length. Average thigh length. Average frame. Almost nobody found it comfortable.

When researchers dug into why, they found that plenty of pilots were average on any single measurement. But the number who were average across all of them at once? Vanishingly small.

Sutherland's conclusion: average the customer across enough variables and "you're actually ending up designing for a customer that doesn't exist at all."

He credits the marketer Mark Ritson with the line that nails it: "the average is the enemy of the marketer." The moment you compress a customer base into a single figure - a mean, a percentage, a number smoothed out over a year - the detail that would have told you something useful is the first thing to disappear.

Now, Sutherland studied maths to A-level and is quick to add a caveat here. He doesn't want this mistaken for anti-data sentiment. Averages work fine for some things. Setting the height of a door handle, for instance. The problem only shows up when you stack enough variables on top of each other that the "average" customer stops describing anyone real.

Which, he points out, is most of the time. Because most company data gets collected for the convenience of the finance function. It was built to capture transactions. Not emotions. Not hesitations. Not the reason someone picked up a bottle of shampoo they wouldn't normally touch.

Aim For Failure

If averages flatten the customer, short-termism flattens the business. Sutherland's answer is a framework some media agencies already use: 70-20-10.

70% of activity is business as usual - doing what already works. 20% pushes for incremental improvement on it. The remaining 10% is pure experimentation.

And here's where he gets precise in a way I wasn't expecting.

"You don't accept a high degree of failure. You aim for it. Because if you're never failing, you're not being brave enough with what you're testing."

He backs this with a finding from someone he knows in performance marketing: businesses that ran eight tests weren't marginally more successful than ones that ran four. They were disproportionately more successful. The reason is simple. Test eight things and there's room for a couple of genuinely silly ones. The marketing equivalent of asking what happens if you put a green aardvark in the advert.

Most breakthroughs, in Sutherland's experience, carry a streak of illogic. "Because if there were a logical solution to your problem, someone would already have found it."

He adds something here that I found quietly brilliant. Testing isn't a modern indulgence. Direct marketers were running randomised trials on rival newspaper adverts roughly seventy years before medicine adopted the method - simply because printing presses happened to interleave their output and gave admen an accidental control group. The discipline is old. We just forgot it was ours first.

Solve The Psychological Problem, Not Just The Practical One

By this point Sutherland is warming up nicely and the examples start coming faster.

Timotei became a disproportionately successful shampoo largely because its green-and-white packaging was the only one on the shelf that didn't read as feminine. Men who'd normally avoid the shampoo aisle picked it up without a second thought. Nobody briefed that in. Nobody researched it. Somebody just made a packaging decision that quietly removed a bottleneck that would never have shown up in the data.

Same thing in watches. Jaeger-LeCoultre and Cartier punch above their market share because both men and women buy them. Rolex sells overwhelmingly to men. Half the potential market, gone - not because of price, not because of quality, but because of a signal the brand sends that nobody sat down and decided to send.

As Sutherland puts it: "these factors generally don't come out in research, but they're incredibly strong emotional drivers or emotional brakes."

The trailer, by this point, is starting to look less like a curiosity and more like the whole argument in miniature. Something that works better than it should, for reasons that aren't entirely rational, because somebody solved the psychological problem rather than just the practical one.

The 180-Degree Flip

I asked Rory what he'd want people to take away from our conversation. He didn't reach for a case study.

He reached for a warning.

Marketers, he said, have let themselves be "bullied by the financial rationalist establishment" into justifying their value by what they produce - when the real value is in how they think. The discipline Mark Ritson calls the 180-degree flip: looking at a business from the customer's side of the counter rather than from inside it.

Lose that habit of mind and a board with no marketer in the room will keep making decisions that look perfectly rational on a spreadsheet and turn out to be foolish everywhere else.

His example was self-checkout. He thinks it's one of several factors - not the whole story - behind the recent rise in shoplifting. A cost saved cleanly on one line of the accounts. A systemic problem growing somewhere the same accounts never think to look.

Somebody usually pays for the friction a business decides not to notice.

The only question is whether you removed it on purpose. Or by accident.