Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Piracy, digital or otherwise

When will those in the music and film industry learn that the old models are falling into the sea? Has no-one been listening to what's happening in the real world? It's like the owners of Pre1914 Russian Imperial Bonds in 1919: your money's not coming back!

And whose stupid idea was it to get ISPs to be the watchmen of rights owners? Is this a real proposal or is it just a sop to keep the rights owners schtumm? Because - let's be clear - this isn't going to get the the money back

And finally: calling it Piracy is a great way to encourage the thing you want to discourage....

Think it was Steve Jobs that said "why join the navy when you can be a pirate?"

What teenager/digital native doesn't want to be one of them?

Reputation: yours or theirs?

Interesting conversation last week with ol' chum during which we reduced the b-word (with all its problems) to 'reputation'.

Not entirely novel but much less ad-y and much more linked to what your business does to create it (rather a guide to what to do - the right way round, I think)

But with this comes another obvious problem: whose reputation is it?

Is it yours? In the sense that it's about you, your products and services, yes. In the sense that one of the main drivers of it, being what you do to earn the reputation that you have.

But more importantly, it's theirs - your customers', your employees, your partners and any one else who has a view on it. They make your reputation; they share it; they own it. Not you.

So don't go "moneytizing" it like it's yours...

PS talking of reputation...

 

So how does influence work then?

Lots of debate still around this really important issue.

Lots of half-baked ideas popping up in the blogosphere, also. Most of them variations on the Green Giant Theory (Johnny will explain, I'm sure - but enjoy the pic)

So when the gig at which we were supposed to talking about it got cancelled  Johnny, James and I hatched a plan to explore Influence in real 3 D human interaction (we knew we'd all be free at least one day in the foreseeable future)

Roland and the lovely people at NESTA are hosting it: February 9th

It's free, should be a lot of fun and - frankly - I can't think of a more important topic right now for any marketer, policy bod or manager, so it also might just be worth investing a morning of your time in.

Hope to see you there

Brain scams (revisited): a rush of blood to the head

Just when you thought that the neuro-nonsense gang might be retiring to lick their wounds, here's another pretty worrying technical challenge to many of their findings:

Seems that blood flow (the proxy used to indicate activity in a region of the brain) isn't quite so good at indicating brain activity after all

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news again...

PS for those of you who like perusing brain scans, you must visit this flickr group

[Hat tip Bioethic]

Participative purchasing

 Nice piece of John's that drew my attention today which serves to pull a few of my posts this week together: the neanderthal thinking that dogs the mainstream music industry, doing it for more than the money as well as the usual, Social Object stuff

In it he recounts his experiences as a minor 1980s music sensation, how in particular he watched as the fans created merchandise for the band (including recordings) unprompted, because they enjoyed doing it together around the Social Object of the band.

Sure the band played music (and they ended up having recordings and stuff to sell) but at heart they merely provided a number of opportunities for people to gather together, interact with each other and do stuff together.

Belonging is one thing - participating is another.

So when you think about your business or a business you are advising, how much of the purchasing is economic and isolated? And how could you make it participative and social?

Because if you're saying it's just about the money, well....

As the Man In Black Say....Suey! (what is that about?)

Good ideas

(Don't know where I found this pic, but I like it)

If you haven't signed up for PSFK's great day in London next Friday, what are you up to?

All these brilliant and stimulating folks sharing their ideas and their ideas about ideas: it's got to be the best way to spend your shareholders money this month!

Kevin Anderson \ Blogs Editor \\ The Guardian

Mike Butcher \ Journalist \\ Mbites
Richard Banks \ Interface Designer \\ Microsoft

Coralie Bickford-Smith \ Designer \\ Penguin
Matt Brown \ Editor \\ Londonist

Pat Connor \ Vision Executive\\ BBC

Mark Earls \ Author \\ Herd
Jeremy Ettinghausen \ Director of Digital \\ Penguin

Piers Fawkes \ Trends Analyst & Founder \\ PSFK
Paul Graham \ Partner \\ Anomaly UK

Amanda Gore \ Trends Consultant \\ PSFK

Terry Guy \ Founder \\ Monorex\Secret Wars
Matt Hardisty \ Founder \\ Analog Folk
Dan Hon \ Founder \\ Six To Start
Sophie Howarth \ Founder \\ School Of Life
Matt Jones \ Founder \\ Dopplr
Cameron Leslie \ Founder \\ fabric\matter

Jonathan MacDonald \ Senior Consultant \\ Ogilvy

Kate Moross \\ Designer

Colin Nagy \ Partner \ Attention
Colin Nightingale \ Creative Director \\ Punchdrunk \ Founder \\ Gideon Reeling
Jenny Owen \ Founder \\ Ruby Pseudo
Christian Nold \\ Artist
Justin Quirk \ Associate Editor \\ FHM
Nicolas Roope \ Founder \\ Hulger\Poke
Taryn Ross \ Founder \\ Urban Junkies

Eva Rucki \ Founding Partner \\ Troika Design
Jeff Squires \ Trends Consultant \\ PSFK

Simon Waldman \ Director of Digital \\ The Guardian
Paul Andrew Williams \ Film Director \\ Steel Mill Pictures

And by then I will have worked out what I'd like to say, I'm sure (I'm loving all the suggestions, but Dan/Badger has nosed it so far, IMO). Keep 'em coming!

Giving folk something to believe in

Of course, if you're asking people to do something for you and you frame it so that the reason why is either you want their money (customers) or they are after yours (employees, suppliers) then you're losing out two times over:

1. you make the interaction less interesting and valuable to you (you get less from it)
2. you make your business less interesting valuable to them (which means in the end it becomes less valuable to you)

Everytime you miss the opportunity to build on your PI, you make the world a bit smaller and a bit less interesting and - maybe this might stir you to action - your footprint on that world shrinks a little and becomes a little less distinct

As Hugh's genius cartoon says, the "market for something to believe in is infinite": what do you believe that drives you business?

If you make it only about the money...

Poor old Man City - they finally find someone with really deep pockets to buy them a world-class team - but nobody wants to go and those that do, only do it for the money.

It's the same in any business: whether it's with regard to employees or customers or suppliers, if you make the interaction only about the money, then you get greed and selfishness and, frankly, you don't get what Lord Browne [formerly of BP] called the 'volunteer' margin - that is high performance because the business really excites people, it touches what they believe or want to believe, it gives them more than money - a sense of purpose, even.

It is able to do this because of what I've called the Purpose Idea.

Maybe this is where the financial services world has gone wrong; maybe this is where we all go wrong.
As I sit here looking at my personal finances for the next year, of course I need to think about money, and how to make it but I know how miserable I'll be if I just do stuff for the money or do the stuff that pays the most

If it's only about the money ask yourself, once, twice and a third time: should you really be doing it?

My Day with Johnnie Moore

Great day today, bookended by time with the ever thought provoking Johnnie {pic}

First, a great long rambling conversation with J and our mutual chum, Rob Poynton, whose great book [on how the practices of improv can change your work and your home life] I've raved about before

From complexity to Zen koans to the value of trying to do less, we covered lots of exciting ground but somehow still managed to come up with a few great ideas to do in the next few months. Watch this space

Then, one way and another onto NESTA's webank session (during which J was unusually quiet!): great debate between the Old and the New guards of consumer finance - James Gardner from Lloyds group and Giles Andrews of Zopa

Slightly false dilemma posed by the format: it's not whether or not P2P will destroy contemporary retail banking (although the industry has done its best to drive us from its arms); rather, how will the introduction of P2P to personal finance stimulate further changes? Clearly, Zopa is not the only way the mechanism of P2P interaction might be harnessed (James pointed us to Caja Navarra
which is now Spain's no.4 and the two other P2P financial businesses took a different angle on harnessing P2P)

No, the real issue that emerged is that the old market sees money as a commodity (and sees everything as ultimately reducible to money), whereas this is by no means a given: Zopa sees borrowing and lending as some kind of entertainment and as something more human than the likes of Lloyds could ever see. Part of my frustration with a long line of financial service clients over the years is their inability at a deep - organisational model - to take a different pov from their competitors. They all see themselves as bankers - the introduction of modern marketing has (just like management science nonsense like benchmarking) merely served to reinforce the lack of real differentiation in the sector.

So the P2P revolution in personal financial services is a really classic case of rethinking the rules of a market to create new kinds of value - as the delightful Anne McCrossan and I vigorously agreed over canapes, kiwi juice (wierd but true!) and talk of Tribes & Herds

Think Adam and co at EATBIGFISH would agree - is it in the new edition of the book, mate? Should be.

Social Objects in the Music Biz

Nice post here from George @ 9Giantsteps

Good build from Gerd's ruminations...

[For the definitive stuff on the ol' Social Object, go here]

Where my politics come from

Don't normally blog about these things, but prompted by events in DC today, I started thinking about who most shaped my politics.

Curiously for a nice white Welsh boy exiled in the relative comfort of the North London suburbs, this man, his struggle and his death did it for me

Makes me wonder how why I gave up trying to change things I felt so strongly are wrong about our world. "Now is the time", MLK said. Maybe now is the time to get back to work and make things better, together?

What about you? Who shaped your politics?

Where is your mind?

 

Many Ancient Greeks, for all their love of reason, thought that the mind rested in the breast but for most of the modern era we've assumed that it lies inside the head (except for those who still insist that mind is made of different stuff from body).

Which is jolly good for neurofolk because it gives them a place to look. But is even this an accurate description?

2 new books reviewed in this week's New Scientist that challenge this "brainbound" position. Nice additional weaponry for wrestling with the neuro guys who think grey matter (and the fMRI scans that colour it) is the modern equivalent of the homunculus - the little fella in charge, the nerve-centre of everything.

Cognition certainly happens beyond the individual skull - think of the distributed memory that every family or friendship group displays when it gathers together or the wisdom of crowds-type collective guessing that John & Co have used to such good effect; it also clearly works in other parts of the body (the nervous systems for example) and in things attached to the extended body (which these books deal with). Consciousness is a little harder to pin down, but maybe the example of the Greeks serves to suggest that what goes on in the skull is far from a given as the location of our experience of it.

Either way, it's not just between your ears that we find the mind.

So please PLEASE PLEASE if you want to understand thinking, please stop looking at pictures of what is supposed (erroneously) to be the "control room"?

The shock of the old & the shock of the new

Back from Midem in shock at quite how far away the music world is from what's going on else where (will writing to parents of serial filesharers really be hold back the flood of free?). Answers on a postcard, pls

Meanwhile looking forward, v v excited about hearing Punchdrunk talking at PSFK salon on the 30th of Jan

Truly one of the most inspiring theatre groups in the world

Have you booked your tickets yet?

BTW Great suggestions for why paying attention to new ideas is important - keep em coming!

Big question for anyone who neuro-anythings you

New Scientist refers to a recent review by Hal Pashler and co at the University of California, San Diego of 50 neuroscience papers which try to claim areas of the brain to specific emotions and behaviours.

Pashler and co suggest that the method used to identify these kind of links inflates the probability of them being more than noise in data...

Nice provocative language like "voodoo correlations"

At the heart of the matter is the problem of using the same scan to both:

i. identify brain regions in which the correlation between voxels and the emotion being considered is above expected levels
ii. assess the strenght of the correlation

It's not yet clear how much published work in modern neuroscience falls prey to this error, but
As the wise owls of NS put it:

"It is two centuries since the birth of Charles Darwin, but even now his advice can be spot on. The great man attempted a little neuroscience in The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, in which he discussed the link between facial expressions and the brain. "Our present subject is very obscure," Darwin warned in his book, "and it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance." Modern-day neuroscience might benefit from adopting a similar stance."

So next time you some vendor or other promises to offer you neuro-economics, neuro-marketing or neuro-anything, and talks about specific parts of the brain "lighting up" ask their basic claims are based on Pashler-proof methodology?

NB New readers might care to consider why we are looking inside people's heads to understand the behaviour of a super social ape, anyway...

Hey but I always loved space-age stuff

Any any any old irony (aka Napster do the Midem bags)

Can't just be me who thinks it a bit ironic that the bags at the music biz gathering here in Cannes - which is so concerned about enforcing usage rights - is sponsored by Napster...

And that's not ironic but ironic

The excitement of the empty slideshow

Here in Cannes to speak at Midem Net c/o Gerd

We're doing a sesh tomorrow with David Smith on futures which I've been very much looking forward to

Particularly after a very pleasant evening in some olde worlde Provencal restaurant with delightful folk from the music world (no names, no whatever) and I seemed to have changed my mind entirely about what I'm going to say tomorrow.

In a good way, that is: while I'm sure some of what I say will be based on familiar riffs, it's the empty page that always excites. The unknown possibilities...

At least it is for me

So what would you tell the music industry about tomorrow? In a nice way, mind you. So that they might want to embrace the idea...

Where we've gone wrong with "Social Media"

pic c/o brandi.org

Top conversation with Jon Mac this morning (hope to be able to join his Every Single One of Us meetup tonight - a really laudable attempt to stimulate substantive change in our little world)

But it prompted me to repeat something that I've been trying to say around the "social media isn't media" posts recently: that the old ideas about communication involving the sending and receiving of messages, transmitted down channels/media/tubes or whatever are just plain wrong in trying to think about the new world.

Russell touches on in his latest brilliant New Schtick posts

"the assumptions about how advertising works we're baking into our media tools are wrong. And so we're making bad media tools. Things that will piss people off. I think that's largely because while Google and the rest of the clickonit scientists were relentlessly implementing a mechanistic, message and relevance based model of how advertising works the thoughtful bits of the advertising business (admittedly not large in number) had their head in the sand denying the existence of anything digital"

The thing is about the new technologies is not that they provide new, more efficient - better targetted or more relevant - messaging opportunities for businesses to exploit, but rather that it connects people to each other and that allows us to see each other (which you will hopefully remember allows us to emulate and thus drives the spread of behaviours and ideas)

(Also - as Russ points out - increasingly the technology is bringing people and objects into new kinds of connections (which leads us into a whole other set of things)

Maybe it's just another one of those examples of Mcluhan's adage that we use new technology as if they were old technology

Falling off the b-word wagon

Pic c/o Uncovertheinternet

To all of you who are taking part in our little game to spend January without using the Bword, I think it's only fair to fess up that I fell off the wagon today.

Only once, and by mistake, in front of some new clients but it still happened.

A slip of the tongue was all it took. Remarkable how lazy I felt. How clumsy it seemed.

Of course, just the once is human, isn't it?

How are you getting on?

Deep in the data mines

pic c/o jeromeprophet

Nice post by Seth about how

"We don't have a knowledge shortage. Far from it"

All too often we fall for the old Information = Knowledge Fallacy

Sure we can always sweat the data a bit more than we do but frankly the answer is to be found neither "in the data" (hence the mining metaphor) nor in the analysis itself; but rather as Seth observes, the trick is bothering to do something and seeing what happens.

Anyway the data mines are dark and dangerous place that no young person should be sent to...

 

What's to come in 2009

Still wading through predictions for this year, but happened on this piece of film by Eirik via tumblr

A reminder that a. the only constant is change b. one of our greatest cognitive gifts is awe

Enjoy

Because they set our money on fire

 

Pic c/o Big Lep

Lovely bile-ridden piece on schadenfreude by the always brilliant Marina Hyde which captures what many folk all round the world feel about bankers and the super-rich.

"According to several research studies, those who experience strongest feelings of schadenfreude tend to have lower self-esteem. Yes, I'd tell my notional psychiatrist. We have low self-esteem because they set all our money on fire."

Go girl!

Future thinking - competition time

Very excited about Piers' London Good Ideas salon coming up on January 30th.

Just like the brill Good Ideas book, it'll be packed full of goodies.

Great list of speakers (including Sophie from School of Life ). Loads of really great ideas. A nice relaxed atmosphere to discuss what emerges.

Very flattered that Piers has asked me to do the upfront piece on why following these kind of emergent ideas is important and how to use them. Ed's SF speech was great and I loved Niku's but I've got my own thoughts which I'm keen to share.

But before I wondered what you thought: Why is it so important to do engage with new ideas?

As a reward, I'll send the person who makes best suggestion my copy of the book. 

Another angle on the B**** Bubble*

 

Pic c/o Admiral Cod

Nice thought from my chum Peter York this morning on the radio, countering the general wailing and gnashing of teeth at the passing of great British/American (delete as inappropriate) icons in the current economic storms.

Talking about Viyella's demise, Peter points out that the current Viyella business is essentially a mix of faux-nostalgia for the age of Empire and the cheap finance of the last decade rather than real vibrant things really creating value today

How many of the moribund giants limping towards the graveyard - the Fords, the GMs and the like - are similarly relics of a past we look back on fondly, kept alive by cheap money....

Maybe one way of looking at what John's book draws our attention to is not the failure of marketing to do the great stuff which he rightly says creates real value, but the oversupply of cheap finance...? [NB John we'd still love to hear your response to the comments from Herd readers here]

*if you're wondering why I'm avoiding the b**** word at the moment, please join the rest of us here, here or here.

The B****-free January - sharing experiences so far?

Pic c/o Reuters

For those who've not been paying attention, a number of us have been trying not to use that b-word - in written or spoken formats - at least for the month of January. If you haven't joined us yet, please do! [It's all for fun and just a little bit of geeky learning]

Been watching the emails and tweats over the last few days and intrigued by how folk are doing. Mark for example is struggling daily; Libby seems to find it liberating and Kirsty has noted how often everyone seems to use the darn thing.

What's your experience been like? What tricks have you used to avoid tripping yourself up with a B****? What have you discovered about yourself and others? What do you want to tell others about it? What is the learning so far? Just let us know in the comments below...

Congratulazioni

...to my chum Domenico and and his collaborators who've been first out of the gate in responding to the darkening economic climate with significant innovation: they're bringing new ideas to what has become a rather dull sector, the so-called "creative agency".

People Ideas Culture (initially based in NYC) looks to build interesting and different clouds of collaborators for each project across a huge range of projects. While other folk have set off in this direction before, reality seems to drag many back to what clients (and I suspect the 'countants) feel happy with. Only a handful escape the gravity of how things have been, most notable amongst them Anomaly whose obsession with changing the financial models is now paying off bigtime...

Of course, I could be biassed about D's business (he's a mate and they explicity embrace my thinking about our Herd nature) but what strikes me is that rethinking the big stuff is the way forward.

It's what we tell our clients - innovate your way out of difficulty. Innovate or die.

But be honest how often do people like us do this?

Naughty thought: I wonder if this is the kind of thing WPP's mass brainstorm came up with?

Yay! Go Domenico...

Free gift: Another tricky dilemna

Experts, chimps and prediction

Don't know about you but I like a good expert: someone who knows stuff and can tell you what's going to happen

Sadly, as Philip Tetlock's study of several thousand specific predictions over a period of years by 284 individuals who make their living as experts shows, expert predictions are rather less valuable than we generally assume:

"The experts were less accurate in their forecasts than a control group of chimpanzees choosing entirely randomly would have been. Even specialists in particular narrow fields were not significantly more successful than reasonably informed laymen. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly," Tetlock suggested. "In this age of academic hyperspecialisation, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals - distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists and so on - are any better than attentive readers of the New York Times in 'reading' emerging situations."

Further, the more certain the forecaster was, the more likely his judgment would be awry, scientific proof that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of a passionate intensity""

                [from this piece in the Observer]

via Ian @ Marbury

Top tips for keeping January B-word free (Updated)

Ok so we've now got more than 25 folk participating in this little game of avoiding the b-word for the next few weeks, I thought it might be useful if we share our tips for playing.

As a starter, here's my top 3:

1.take a deep breath whenever you feel the need to b****: count to 5 and only then speak/write
2. substitute another bword - ideally something silly like BNARD (silly encourages you to avoid)
or, of course you could try...

3. Saying more precisely what you mean...

What are your thoughts?

UPDATE: David has set this up to help us nobranders keep in touch with each other

http://individurls.com/myfeeds/nobrandjan/

If you'd like to join us just leave your URL here in the comment boxes

Way to go!

Welcome Also:

Simon 

Mike

Detox nonsense

Are you planning to spend the next few weeks "detoxing"?

Have you got your milk thistle/nettle extract etc elephant pills to take 3 times daily? Are you using a special "detox" brush (as above from Boots the Chemist)? Are you avoiding wheat and dairy to "give your body a chance to rest?"

You are?  Because you do know that the popular notion of detox is b******, don't you?

"‘Detox’ has no meaning outside of the clinical treatment for drug addiction or poisoning"
[download the Sense on Science  dossier on dodgy detox marketing claims]

This really is the kind of thing that gives marketing a bad name: pseudo, nonsense, worse-than-the-magic-man science.

If you want to detox, the best things you can do are to cut out the fags and booze, drink tap water, eat a bit better and take a bit more exercise: you see, your body naturally detoxes itself. It has a detox mechanism of its own: your liver and kidneys. There is no reliable - scientifically robust - evidence for any of the other things working...

If you're in the mood, it's worth having a listen to the lovely Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre on BBC Radio 4 orning challenging a snakeoil salesperson from Detox in a Box over her deceptive claims

While you're at it, you should take the time to scroll through the 80 or so comments on badscience.net generated by Ben's post in less than 12 hours. More interesting info from the Bad Science Posse...

[BTW What is this, if not a community of purpose forming itself as folk gather together, collaborating and achieving much more together than they might apart?]

UPDATE: Hadley Freeman - fashion editor at the Guardian - has this to say

Sign of the times?

Seen a lot of propositions over the years, but never this one...

Dino and Capra on the HERD

Nice post by Dino on how It's a Wonderful Life demonstrates many of the HERD ideas we talk about here

Also, a nice comment from the man himself:

my folks would always repeat this greek adage to me, "show me who your friends are and i will tell you who you are"

A Brand-free January? Appeal for volunteers (update)

Pic (and tshirt) from the lovely people at howies

A number of folk have signed up to this simple pledge: not to use the b-word for the month of January.

Sure it's useful and sure it makes you feel (and seem to others) like a proper marketing bod, doesn't it? Not least because everyone else likes to use it because...well,...everyone else likes to use it because etc etc etc.

But the word itself is a sloppy metaphor for a whole bunch of stuff (much of which isn't entirely true) with the power to distract you from precise thinking, expression and action, (why 'build the brand' when you could be doing something really amazing with the service/product etc...?) so let it go...

I reckon this experiment is also going to be interesting because it'll show you the place where willpower, independent action and social influence meet: to start with it'll seem like you're alone foreswearing it and excluded from the game that everyone else is playing but after a while you'll see not only the benefits of precision but also that other folk are also foreswearing it, too

The latest roll of honour includes: Mark, Helge, Anthony and Alex (fine gents, all)

UPDATE (1-3): welcome

Chris

Daria

Kirsty

David

Charles

Charles

Gavin

& Katie, too

& Adriana

Dino

Gareth

Paul

& Andy

& David

Eaon

Asi

Anjali

Chris

And...

Jon

Dan

Acclimedia

Charlene

Neil

Adam

Kate

Katie

Libby

Welcome all!

Come on, get in there!

Herd Instinct in the headlines

So after the shock of New Scientist's lead article on what I  have been banging on about here and elsewhere for the last few years - i.e our herd instinct and the primacy of social influence in shaping human behaviour - today's Guardian editorial goes one step further (see pic)

In a robust discussion of the UK government's new Change4life programme, the editorial highlights the newfound importance of "harnessing our herd nature" (as my subtitle put it) to change people's behaviour:

"Mockery is an oblique way of enforcing social norms, but it can be done more directly. American social psychologists have done experiments in hotel rooms where they have alternated signs asking guests to reuse towels for the good of the environment, with others simply pointing out that most visitors reuse their towels. The second, observational, notices were 26% more effective."

And again, it underlines the relative importance of the gestural/behavioural rather than informational in shaping change:

"Rather than make injunctions, public service announcements can be more effective if they play on our herd instincts. This is a kind of normative judo, using the human desire to fit in for good. Cigarette packets could swap the signs about how smoking kills for ones that point out that three out of four people do not smoke at all. It is time public officials added peer pressure to their portfolio of persuasions. The private sector has found it helpful enough. What was that about eight out of 10 cats ... ?"

An odd feeling this: not so much I told you so, but well....

It's great to see these wierd and crazy notions of ours become mainstream, isn't it?

Think this year might be even more interesting than I thought...

100 more reasons why the B-word must go

So straight after the last post comes a fantastic piece on the radio (rightfully) ripping the p*** out of the Interb**** Best B**** list: BBC's Now Show points out the stupidity of measuring our "trust" in the Royal Albert Hall (26 in the UK), Royal Doulton China (16?) or even in Microsoft (whom most of us "only trust to freeze when [we] press send..."

Just shows what nonsense the b****monsters deal in. B******* indeed

Let's say they go quietly and nobody gets hurt, eh?

Giving up on the brand idea

It's now almost exactly two years since I quit smoking (actually, I prefer the 'stopped' version of this: 'quit' makes it seem like I've done something heroic).

I know all too well that smoking's not big or clever (what part of "Smoking Kills" didn't I get?); I know how tricky it is to stop because I used to be really good at it and I did commit a lot of my life to it (as most photographic records of my adult life suggest).

If you're going cold-turkey yourself as you read this, then my thoughts are with you...just remember to steer clear of friends and situations you've learned to associate with the weed - while the physical cravings become shorter and shorter and less and less frequent, the other prompts are much harder to avoid. And the madness doesn't last that long...

Prompted by this I thought it might be a good time to try to give up something else: the BRAND word. To do without it for as long as you can.

Of course, "brand" is nice, it's floppy and flexible, it makes you seem professional, it's popular - it's widely recognised in all kinds of circles - but is it really that useful?

Does it help as much as it seems to? Isn't its 'fatness' - the many different things folk mean by 'brand' - actually a weakness? Is it perhaps more "phat" than just 'fat' - more about our relationship with our conversation partners than about the thing itself?

So here's a thought: why don't we just try to make January Brand-free ?

We could just try to be clear what we mean by the shorthand...

Who's in?

Unreliable witnesses (again)

The opening line of Nobel Laureate's Gunter Grass first novel [Die Blechtrommel or The Tin Drum] is emblematic of one of the most important stylistic features of the post War novel, not just in German literature, but for that of much of the developed world, the "unreliable narrator":

"Admittedly, I'm an inmate of a mental health institution..."

proclaims the narrator, Oskar (as portrated in Fassbinder's brilliant film adaptation), before proceeding to tell the story of his life (and his parent's conception), twisting and turning, confabulating and confusing, telling and retelling the same events differently over several hundred pages.

You can't trust the little b******, however appealing (or by turns) monstrous you find him: just as you can't trust other unreliable human witnesses to tell you "what really happened" in the real world.

I was thinking about this the other night watching some terrible documentary on TV which involved regression therapy to find the "real memories, hidden in your subconscious".

"Real"? "Hidden"?

Nonsense: individual memory is not a data-retrieval system as this way of thinking suggests; it bends and twists itself in the retrieval - inventing as it seems to recall - even if you remember being a cathar priest in the great anti-heretic purges of the Middle Ages, the vividness of what you recall is not evidence for the "reality" of what you remember. We are not aware of what we do or how or why: our minds are meant to give us good reason but largely to make us feel better.

Equally, was struck today by the more prosaic stupidity of yet another survey asking the general public about which media influence their purchasing behaviour most. They out there can't tell you reliably what they did, what they do now or how any of it is influenced or shaped. Again, it's clear that memory - however credible it seems to the witness and however well you correlate and cross-check it - doesn't work that way.

We are all unreliable witnesses to our own lives.

Why would it change for survey respondents?

The year that everything changes

"The early 21st Century. That's when everything changes. We've got to be ready" [Captain Jack Harkness]

I'm going to risk a prediction: this year is the one when everything is going to change (at least, that's how it will seem in retrospect)

The year when the collision between our experiments with new technologies, the cold bite of the economic realities and the rush of our new insights into ourselves and our profoundly social nature will together force us to rethink and rework everything we do.

IMHO it's not going to be a matter of evolving: we're approaching a discontinuity, a singular moment, after which everything will be different.

Not one of us knows quite how things will be on the other side, nor can we hope to til we get there.

So what can we do?

Travel hopefully? Remain open-minded? Watch and learn from each other? Try lots of things & back lots of horses? All of these and more.

More indeed: let's not fall for any old ideas that we bring with us from the past - old ideas arising, like most marketing science, out of Mid Century Midwest USA and thus far from eternal and unchanging.

Let's test our ideas and practices against the simple measure: is this just the old map re-written? is it just "evolved"? Changed a little in form but not in substance?

If everything changes, then shouldn't your ideas and map change, too?

Happy New Year, everybody!