Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

10 years of HERD insights

So it is 10 years ago this week that I first formally presented what I called the HERD hypothesis in written form (see above) at the Market Research Society in Birmingham (for which incidentally I shared the Best New Thinking Prize). Since then - together with a number of brilliant folk - we've managed to evolve and "operationalise" the basic insight at the heart of this paper, with 2 more books, prizes from the nice people at WPP, ESOMAR and Emerald Insight along the way, a host of well-liked articles and some fascinating conversations and experiences with people I'm not sure I'd have met otherwise.

It hasn't all been plain sailing - I have endured any number of pats on the head ("interesting but not really mainstream"), some strange challenges ("OK for kids marketing & poor people - maybe abroad?") and occasionally some hostile responses ("we don't believe that monkey shit round here" being my favourite).

But gradually, over those 10 years things have changed: not least thanks to the explosion of "social media" which has made arguing for the importance of social influence in shaping human (and consumer behaviour) so much easier (praise the Lord for Mr Z for this at least). 

And collaborating with brilliant people - especially Professor Alex Bentley - to turn the analytic techniques developed across the social sciences into practical tool for marketers and decision-makers has been an unexpected but wholly positive pleasure. Back in 2007, we first developed a 4 box map based on patterns to be found in

And now 10 years on, a number of folk have picked up and recycled the work we've been doing (which is exactly how things work and spread), mostly (but not always) attributing sources. So if for example you find someone presenting one of these* over the next few days and weeks,...

 

...you'll know what to think, won't you?  

Yes, the HERD effect is at play...

Thank you all - Alex, Mike O'B, Hugh, Jason, Ray P, Gareth K, Kevin K, Kevin D, Nick K, John K, Alex B, Susan G, Tom E, Audrey, John W, Graeme W, Wendy, Angela, Sair, Mark B, Mark H, John, Fiona, Stephen, Giles, Ben, Geoff, Paul, Liz, Judie, Colin, Chris, Roddy, Peter M, Gemma, David, Bob B, Bob P, Claire, Anne & Merry.

Sorry I can't be at MRS to celebrate the 10 years anniversary but I'm sure it'll be fabulous!

*BTW the version here first developed by Alex & I in 2010 with Anomaly & Sony Europe

 

 

 

 

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Be wonderful to each other, people.

Big Data, not Magic Data readers offer

 

Been thinking a lot about the Big Data thing recently and a. how reminiscent it is of the CRM goldrush (follow the money, as the man said) and b. how dubious much of the thinking being trotted out - about people, organisations and measurement.

And oh, little things about how advertising and marketing actually work - a clue, it's not like this...

So here's a piece that Alex and I wrote for the upcoming issue of Admap - free download for a while!

Let me know what you think Download Big_Data_not_magic_data

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Using {Big] data to reveal stuff about how we are

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Choosing wine: a people-thing or a thing-thing?

Pic c/o Fulldorm.com

Interesting post over at the Guardian about some research suggesting wine experts are not the best folk to turn to to help you choose wine.

Couple of things here:

1. It's not that surprising, given the difficulties in choosing from large and often indistinguishable wine options that regular people often follow the recommendations of those they see as experts - outsourcing the cognitive load, we call it, to those we imagine know better. In other words, that choosing wine is often a people-thing rather than a thing-thing. We equally use heuristics like a. what I recognise b. what I see other people drinking (I'll have what she's having), what's culturally appropriate (red wine with meat) or we might use price as an indicator (with all of the framing effects that Behavioural Economists love to talk about).

2. Nor is it surprising that the experts too find it difficult to choose, too. Or that they also defer to experts and expertise that they discern from others. The notion of expertise in any field tends to be much more culturally than empirically-based - i.e. it's a people not a thing-thing. There are lots of examples of how bad expertise advice can be; don't forget, Tversky & Kahnemann's early work on human inability to calculate probabliities was based on work comparing patients and medical professionals (and the latter proved just as prone to the cognitive biases described as those who looked to them for advice).

What strikes me is how odd it seems to us that experts don't know and can't tell products apart. And how disappointed or wronged we feel at the news that they don't know. We make sense of our use of copying experts in terms of some supposed expertise about the thingness of our choices and this seems to be undermined by experts' failure to deliver. (Tom Ewing's musings on how the role of chance in popular music are always worth a listen...

All of which serves to remind us that many more things than our default assumption that choosing is primarily done as a thing-thing is wrong; far better to assume it's a people-thing.

 

 

 

 

Suicide as a disease and the space between

Interesting piece in this week's New Scientist on the attempts by psychiatrists (particularly those with advanced neuromania) to explain suicidal behaviour through primarily biological means (in terms of brain abnormalities, genetics and epigenetics)

Shame really that the conversation starts off from such a poor premise:  "Until the 1980s, people who committed suicide were considered, by definition, to be depressed" (i.e. to be a function of individual pathology).

As we wrote early on in the history of this blog, the outbreaks of suicide that many populations see are often better explained by social means than as a function of individual agents.

In other words, by what happens in the space between us rather than the space between our ears.

Just striking how wilful psychiatrists and their like are in ignoring the social perspective. Shame - Durkheim is very beautiful and clearly written.

 

Related articles

Is Suicidal Behavior A Disease?

Teenage pregnancy and the HERD

Interesting piece here about what does and doesn't work to reduce teenage pregnancy in the UK - written from the perspective of the audience (or a recent graduate from teenage).

However, one of the things these personal accounts tend to miss is the higher level social mechanisms.

Daniel Nettles of Newcastle University classic work suggests that early onset of reproduction in human populations is something that is the result of the population (not an individual) feeling under critical pressure. His analysis suggests the variation in regional rates across the UK is simply explained by this factor.

A useful reminder: before you rush off trying to get an authentic "user" perspective on a problem to define your solution, don't forget to look at bigger and broader factors like this. How things are may be a result of "we" forces that "I" can't begin to see.

 

 

MMR revisited

Source: NIH

Very bad news today re the re-emergence of previously suppressed serious childhood diseases like measles in the UK - thanks to the middle-class mums who choose to ignore scientific evidence and listen instead to anecdote and speculation.

MMR is by any measure an extremely safe vaccine, not the toxin blamed by the discredited Andrew Wakefiled and the rumour mill.

This is a case when we're all in it together - "herd immunity"

 

How long should a ghostbike be allowed to hang around?

We've long collected examples of cellotaphs and ghostbikes - those popular floral tributes to the fallen that populate so many streets here in the UK and in the US.

I think they're particularly interesting social and cultural phenomena because they are examples of public-created art and monumental social artefacts (rather than stuff created by and for the great and the good for private consumption).

Today reveals an interesting problem: how long should a ghostbike be allowed to hang about?

Should it be a temporary monument? Should it be a permanent feature? Should they even be regulated? I've got my views but what do you think?

 

I copy, you copy, he/she/it copies

Source: flickr

Nice piece today in the Standard (prompted by the British Council "The English Effect" exhibition) elaborates on one of the questions we explored last summer in the run up to my School of Life Sermon: how English thrives through copying words from other tongues

Normally most of us would imagine there's some unique quality (its flexible grammar, maybe) that enables something to spread but maybe in this case is more it's ability to copy copy copy that works.

 

Paleonostalgia

Really nice interview in New Scientist last week with evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk about she calls "paleonostalgia"

"You see this attitude in what can be referred to as "palaeo-nostalgia" – the notion that we were all better off before agriculture, or civilisation or the industrial revolution. It's not to say life has been unmitigatedly getting better. But it's more helpful and accurate to see that all organisms are constantly evolving. There has been no point in our past when we were perfectly adapted to our environment.

I'm not dismissing the idea that you need to look at our evolutionary heritage to think about what's best for us health-wise. But when you start plucking out pieces in an oddly specific way, you can run into trouble."

Smart stuff and worth remembering: it's all too easy to conjure up some time in the reimagined past - on some open grassy savannah when things were ticketyboo and we were perfectly suited to the world in which we live (since when, we've lost something). Things were always in motion.

 

 

 

 

All ears? Outsourcing the cognitive load

Source: sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

One of the brilliant things about our super social species is our ability not just to learn from other people but to outsource the cognitive load to those around us (and those around them and out on beyond). We use the brains, the memories, the feelings, the perceptions and the know-how of others all fo the time.

Great talk yesterday at top Creative Social Sessions by Bertolt Meyer about how technology is increasingly enhancing our human nature and some of the dilemmas this introduces...

Here's a great little example of how technology is helping enhance and stretch our natural abilities. Is this a social-media enabled prosthetic?