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December 22, 2008

Pre-Holiday gatherings

 

AdventLessonsAndCarols

Fantastic weekend doing - as all Super Social Apes do at key points in the year - stuff with other people.

First, a great gig on Friday with the boys of the band. Lots of friends and friendly faces in the crowd. And wierdly, found myself being twitt'd as I sang. And twitpic'd too, thanks to Mark, Kirsty and Alex.

Then very pleasant pub lunch with a bunch of mates and a surprise visit from Santa (unbeatable, that).

Finally, to the extraordinary Festival of Carols and Lessons for the Godless, a humanist antidote to the Christian winter-festival-by-numbers, written and performed by some of the UK's leading humanists and rationalists. Inspired and coralled by self-proclaimed science geek, Robin Ince.

Quite an extraordinary parade of all that is best in humanist and rationalist thinking. To all but those of a fundamentalist mindset, this was a glorious experiment.

From comic Ricky Gervais deliberately offensive explanation of why giving an African family a goat is wrong to Jarvis Cocker's moving re-reading of Greg Lake's sole (Christmas) hit, standup Josie Long's bizarre debate with a heckler about whether or not the philosopher David Hume was an atheist or an agnostic, the passionate anti-quackery of Ben Goldacre and Dara O'Brian's anti-religious and pro-science rants (when was the last time you heard a comic ask an audience to do calculus?)

And of course, we also had an appearence from the indefatigable atheist, Richard Dawkins, who read 3 bits of his own beautiful prose to create a very different tone for the audience. While he can come across a bit hectoring in Q&A, his writing glimmers gorgeously.

But for my money, comic and co-creator of Jerry Springer the Opera, Stewart Lee had one of the best gags of the night, told with his flat, ironic delivery:

I’ve started to drift towards a belief in God, creationism and intelligent design. When I look at something as complete and intricate and detailed as Professor Dawkins I think, 'Surely that can’t just have happened by chance.’


Amen









Posted at 04:46 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.

Recent Posts

Herd book

How to work with HERD

There are three main ways in which clients tend to engage us

  • Speeches , workshops and seminars
    In the last year, we’ve spoken at many major events in the UK, continental Europe, China and North America.
  • Better Marketing Strategy
    We’ve developed a range of specific analytic tools (with Dr Alex Bentley) that help you understand whether social influence drives your market or not and how to shape strategies that are appropriate.
  • Change management programmes
    We’ve also been led significant C-level change programmes using both our knowledge of human behaviour (and its social roots) and current landscape for business. We often find in this context that the idea of purpose (as discussed in HERD) is a powerful lever for generating change.

About Me

I am a recovering advertising and marketing professional who has held Senior posts at big comms agencies (Ogilvy) and radical ones (St Luke’s) on some of the trickiest strategy challenges in behaviour change. I have long been committed to the industry bodies (I’m a Business Leader of the Marketing Society & I’ve sat on committees for the APG & IPA in the UK and taught for both these and the AAAA in the US) and society in general (I’ve helped organisations such as Arts & Business and The School of Life). I am a longstanding Fellow of the RSA.

The path to HERD is not hard to trace. Ironically, for someone who now preaches the ubiquity of social learning rather than independent choice, I was taught (at home, at school, at uni, at everywhere) to "think it through": in other words, not to accept what others told me to accept but to challenge everything until a more compelling, better-evidenced and more workable descriptions of how things work emerges.

It doesn’t always you popular or terribly rich but it is the most exciting thing – as my friend Russell Davies put it, standing at the front of the train with the wind in your hair, it’s such a thrill!

WHAT ARE WE READING

HERD: Mark Earls
How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature

Hear me speak (upcoming)

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