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November 27, 2008

Businesses in need of a purpose-idea (PI)

g04_13_6---Woolworths_web
Pic c/o freefoto.com

Odd that today we get the news that the UK retailer Woolworth's has gone into administration. I have fond memories of the long, wide and curiously empty aisles of this jumble of a store near where I grew up in North London.

Apparently the cause of the collapse is a sudden removal of their trade credit insurance  which meant that the business had to pay cash for any goods it wanted to sell and it simply ran out of road in cashflow terms; the death-knell seems to have been sounded by Camelot (the UK lottery operator) pulling its services out of the business.

But the problem goes back decades: having worked with Woolies in the past, it has always seemed the business' real purpose was to allow the competing buying departments to carry on doing what they wanted: video, music, pick-n-mix, household, kids clothes, toys, paint etc. The store assortment never really made any sense, the staff didn't seem to be driven by any particular passion and the marketing largely was forced to flip-flop around without ever really expressing the beating heart of the business.  In the end, I suspect the business was - like all too many retail chains who lose their way - a business driven by the property division.

Unlike Superdrug (once a sister retailer at Kingfisher plc) which we repurposed to be about sharing the fun of Health and Beauty (without the orange-faced salesgirls of rival Boots).

So here's the question to ponder while Gordie does his bit to protect staff and suppliers: what do you think Woolies' purpose idea should be? What idea would you suggest to drive it's revival?

Posted at 04:14 PM |

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WHO IS HERD?

Originally, HERD was just me, Mark Earls, recovering account planner and all-round opinionator. But increasingly, as I’ve discovered more and (importantly), learned from others, the community has grown.

Working with a range of collaborators and clients, we developed tools to give these HERD ideas practical application. Collaborating with likeminded folk such as Dr. Alex Bentley (deputy Director of the Leverhulme Tipping Points grant at Durham University) and Grant McCracken (anthropologist and author of Chief Culture Officer), we’ve attacked differents kinds of problem and found different kinds of solution, thanks to the power of the social perspective on humanity.

We’ve also worked with some fantastic partners – Anomaly London, Brainjuicer, Modernista!, Naked , Protein, People Ideas & Culture and Hide & Seek to adapt our thinking to specific client problems. We’ve advised large corporations (such as Unilever, Bacardi-Martini, Channel 4 Television, The Edrington Group, Sony), UK government departments (HM Department of Health and Central Office of Information) and not-for-profits such as the Gates Foundation, Greenpeace & The School of Life.

WHAT IS HERD?

HERD started as a label for everything social about human behaviour - a research “bucket” if you like - for the “hidden truths“* of fundamentally social nature of our curious species and the fundamentally social context that shapes our behaviour.

In essence, HERD is a synthesis of the work of social scientists in a number of different fields (primatology, anthropology, archaeology, network theory, sociology, economics & cultural evolution) mixed together with management and marketing science and my own professional experience of more than two decades, trying to understand and shape mass behaviour.

I first used the term HERD publically in March 2003 in an award-winning conference paper which challenged many of the core assumptions of advertising, marketing and market research professionals way of seeing the world and proposed a realignment of these disciplines around the idea of humans being fundamentally social creatures.

Soon enough, HERD was a book (John Wiley & Sons 2007/2009) which a lot of people read (and many said nice things about) then more articles, more speeches and more prizes. But in the last few years, it has become both a consulting business and a mainstream way of thinking about human behaviour for many marketing, advertising and research professionals as well as for those working in politics, public policy and security.

HERD started in the pre-Facebook world (Mark Zuckerberg was still in High School) but has only become more relevant in our attempts to make sense of the human behaviour in the modern post-Facebook world.

*well, not so hidden, more ignored really.

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