The Doorman Fallacy

Have you noticed that everything feels just a little bit… worse lately? 🤔

Not broken, not terrible, just somehow… off compared to how it used to be. Like the fancy hotel that feels generic, or the customer service that's technically functional but completely soulless. Even the brand you used to love that now feels like it's just going through the motions.

You're not imagining it, and there's actually a name for what's happening.

It's called the Doorman Fallacy, coined by behavioural economist Rory Sutherland. And once you understand it, you'll start seeing it absolutely everywhere. 👀

The concept is used to describe what happens when a business reduces a human role to its most obvious function — and then completely eliminates it.

The logic goes like this:

Someone looks at a doorman and asks what he actually does. Simply explained, he opens a door. Right? But it’s the 21st century. We now have a sensor for that. It’s cheaper, faster, more efficient — an easy solution. ✅

So you replace him, saving your business the costs of a few employees. Seems logical, right?

Except the doorman wasn't really a door-opening service. If you really think about it, he was security, familiarity, hospitality and reassurance all rolled into one person. He knew the regulars, he noticed when something was off, and he made the place feel like somewhere that gave a damn.

From a financial perspective, none of that fits neatly into a cost-benefit analysis — so none of it survives one. 💸

And that starts a cascading effect of things slowly starting to go downhill.

Air travel is the most universally relatable example. Flying used to be an experience — perhaps not a bargain, but something worth remembering. Today it's cheaper and more accessible than ever, and also somehow one of the most stressful, dehumanising things a person can do.

First class today essentially recreates what economy used to feel like — but costs a fortune for the privilege. We optimised the experience into the ground and started selling the original version back as a luxury. 🧳

There's a sister principle to this observation called Chesterton's Fence.

The idea is simple — if you see something and don't understand why it exists, don't remove it until you do.

The things that sometimes look pointless from the outside are often doing more than they appear. A process that seems redundant might be catching errors. Or the “unnecessary” human interaction that looks inefficient on paper might be the only thing making your brand feel different from every competitor doing the exact same thing. 🔍

Or worse, you can ruin your entire business essentially overnight, sometimes irreversibly.

These concepts are often forgotten but more relevant than ever for anyone running a business or managing a brand in 2026.

The replacement of humans by AI is the most obvious example — and we’re already seeing the damage with even big name companies like Meta seeing how it’s biting them in the butt. 😬

It’s even more visible in marketing, especially since modern marketing has more measurement tools than ever — and that's become part of the problem. When everything is trackable, you naturally start optimising for what shows up in the dashboard. Clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. 🎯

Meanwhile the stuff that actually builds a brand (genuine trust, word of mouth, the feeling that a company actually has a personality) doesn't produce clean data. So it gets deprioritized, underfunded, and eventually phased out in favor of another retargeting campaign.

And if you're thinking long-term, that's a problem worth taking seriously.

We've talked before about how Gen Z and Gen Alpha make purchasing decisions based on authenticity and genuine connection — not pretty and polished ad funnels. You can automate a lot of things, but the vibe that a brand actually gives a damn about you is not one of them. 🤝

As a result, every brand in a category starts slowly looking and feeling identical, because the parts that made them interesting have disappeared.

When you reduce every role, every touchpoint, every "unnecessary" human moment to its most measurable function — you don't just save money. You remove the reason your customers chose you in the first place.

Of course, efficiency is great and measurement is necessary. But the brands truly winning right now are the ones that had the discipline to protect things that don't show up in any report — and the wisdom to know that those things were never a nice-to-have. 💫