Rory Sutherland: Wordle, The New York Times’ Behavioural Masterstroke

One of the most genius business moves, I think, in terms of being behaviourally informed in the last sort of five or six years, was the decision by the New York Times to buy Wordle.

Normally in publishing it would be absolutely standard to say "how can we improve our news coverage in order to get more readers?" However, the sensible behavioural question is how can we get people to open our app every single day? 

Buying Wordle was a way of buying footfall because it was focusing on the part of the behaviour where the friction lay and where the bottleneck lay.

I often ask businesses to rethink the problem. It’s not that people visit their website and don’t buy, it’s that people only visit when they already have something in mind. They’re capturing customers with clear purchase intent, but missing the opportunity to create the online equivalent of window shopping. 

My argument is simple: start with behaviour and work backwards. You’ll uncover fundamental business insights and new opportunities that you’d never spot if you didn’t begin by looking at how people actually behave.