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May 11, 2009

Chinese whispers, Darth Vader and the meme thing

DarthVader(Medicom)_03 I still haven't got round to writing down why it is I don't feel comfortable with the meme idea so popular round these parts.

Part of my discomfort comes from the obsession it creates with 'the Thing' (the idea or behaviour you want to spread) and its qualities (stickiness etc) at the expense of the people that do the heavy lifting - ie. the spreading.

But before I call down the wrath of meme-freaks everywhere on my head, just consider this piece: misquoted movie lines (like misheard song lyrics). Surprising how easy it is to get ol' Darth wrong, isn't it?

From one point of view, the population who are passing these misquotes on is getting the quotes WRONG: the quotes are inaccurate, plain and simple. Certainly this is what most tracking studies will tell you.

From another, the people through whose hands/mouths the incorrect version is passing is actually doing something with the quote - making what it (collectively) seems to want it to be.

Which is what always happens with social transmission - inaccurate copying or 'random drift' as the geneticists call it.

So you'd better get used to it: what humans touch, they change...

You might as well design with this in mind.

Posted at 04:42 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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