Disruptive strategies work – and minimise envy

If you want to lead a sane and well-ordered life, do not marry someone who has worked for any time in the creative department of an advertising agency. For good and ill, the job instils in you a lifelong fear of the obvious: the urge to question every orthodoxy and to rail against every consensus.

This is tiring. Especially for people around you. A few years ago, we decided we needed a new toaster. Our old toaster was not only prone to producing alarming sparks and occasional outbursts of flame, but its slot was far too narrow, meaning that every slice of bread thicker than industrial-sliced white was liable to get stuck between the elements.

“Why don’t you buy one of those new wide-slot toasters?” my wife helpfully suggested as I set off. An hour or so later, I returned carrying a massive box. Once I had maneuvered this through the door, I explained to my wife that it contained not the toaster she had asked for, but a breadslicing machine.

“I rewrote the brief,” I declared proudly. “We don’t need a wider toaster. What we need is narrower bread!”

For a time, we tried slicing bread thinly to fit in the old narrow toaster. It wasn’t altogether hopeless, but the bread slicer occupied about half the available surface area in the kitchen, and generated crumbs in spectacular volume. Then we had children, and the blade had to be put away and out of reach.

Today, it sits in a cupboard unused. Above it on the countertop sits a pretty good, wide-slot toaster, just as my wife originally suggested.

This is a simple testament to the fact that creative ideas can be kind of stupid, and should often be suppressed.

But they should not be killed at birth. I forgot to mention that the cupboard in which the bread machine sits is found in the kitchen of a four-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building constructed circa 1784. The house was built for the personal doctor of King George III by the architect Robert Adam. It sits among a few acres of communal grounds landscaped by Capability Brown.

I got all this for free.

I didn’t get the flat for free, obviously. It cost me £395,000 in 2001. Its market value now is perhaps £690,000 – although that does include a free bread slicer, which will be left behind by the previous occupants. But, if you buy it, you will get the architecture and the landscaping for free.

The building is Grade I listed. Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England, only the best 2.5% are Grade I, half of which are churches. Many are otherwise uninhabitable – Nelson’s Column, say, or the Royal Opera House. There are probably only 2,500 Grade I listed buildings in England in which you can live. These include Buckingham Palace and the Sutherland gaff.

And, as I said, I pay nothing at all for this privilege. Whereas a Picasso costs perhaps 100,000 times more than a picture bought on Bayswater Road, a Robert Adam house costs no more than an identically sized house in the same area by an indifferent architect. (Recently, I saw a flat by the Bauhaus School founder Walter Gropius for sale in Notting Hill. Because it was in Notting Hill, it was insanely expensive: but it was no more expensive than the crappy apartments in the house next door.)

The reason I enjoy this spectacular architectural artistry at no cost at all is because I deployed exactly the same perverse reasoning to buying a house as I did to buying a bread slicer. I rewrote the brief.

“What do most people do when they move house?”, I wondered. Because, if I choose a house the way most people choose a house, I will end up competing with a lot of people for the same houses. On the other hand, if I buy a house using wildly divergent criteria from everyone else, I should find a place that is relatively undervalued.

In rivalrous markets such as the property market, it pays to have (and to cultivate) eccentric tastes.

When most people buy a house, the order of search goes: (1) set a price band; (2) define location; (3) define number of bedrooms; (4) set other parameters, e.g. garden size. Architectural quality comes very low on the list. But if you can convince yourself to value highly something which other people don’t factor in at all, you can enjoy a fabulous house for much less.

This is merely a self-administered version of a disruptive marketing strategy – where you get people to attach higher importance to the areas in which your product has a comparative advantage. (Apple is relatively weak on most objective measures, but it has taught people to stop caring about MHz and start caring about design.)

I have to say it works. Well, it certainly minimises envy. Occasionally, I get to visit insanely expensive houses. “What did you think?”, my wife asks as we drive off. “Well it’s certainly big,” I reply. “But I couldn’t help thinking the architecture was a bit shite.”

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of OgilvyOne.