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Lots of grumpiness in the Telegraph today (HT Christophe) about the lack of talent in the latest Simon C primetime vehicle, the appropriately (as it turns out) misnamed, Britain's Got Talent.
Just because I've mentioned it before, doesn't make it less right: with popular entertainment (like pop music), the qualities of the thing have only a marginal effect on popularity. These kind of tv shows are unlikely to be about the quality of the participants and their acts (we wouldn't be that engaged tbh).
The really big thing shaping the outcome is what other folks are getting excited about - what those around you are doing and talking about...
Thinking this kind of thing is in anyway about 'talent' however you choose to define that is a category 1. error!
As Cory D might say, the quality of content is only important insofaras it prompts the conversation...
Nice piece here about an interesting neurological underpinning of conformity - how failing to conform seems to trigger an error function in our heads
...when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the "oops area" becomes extra active, while the "reward area" slows down, making us think we are too different.
"We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment," said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.
HT Derren Brown (how odd it is to write that)
Regular HERD-fans will know that I've been repeatedly critical of the way we use market research, particularly survey and qualitative research (some practitioners seem to think I rarely go a day without a good dissing of MR), normally because of the poor witness each of us is to our own lives which renders the evidence supplied by such activities less than helpful.
So here's a simple rule of thumb that you might like to use:
If the thing you're interested in (the behaviour or engagement with that kind of issue) is spreading through social influence then don't bother the punter with your questions.
It's only if - as classical economics and many of our 'commonsense' rule of thumb "I'm-just-a-practical-fella" kinds of models assume - individuals are actually choosing independently of each other that you might find asking them what they like about the thing or what they feel etc of some use.
In other words, sort the influence bit out first and then and only then think about whether anything like asking a questionnaire is appropriate.
Curious piece by Kevin Kelly in this month's wired about the re-emergence of socialism as a political and business idea (in the US and elsewhere in the developed world)
"[we] may not be politically immune to the rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. For the first time in years, the s-word is being uttered by TV pundits and in national newsmagazines as a force in US politics. Obviously, the trend toward nationalizing hunks of industry, instituting national health care, and jump-starting job creation with tax money isn't wholly due to techno-socialism. But the last election demonstrated the power of a decentralized, webified base with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialist institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system of North Korea is dead; the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of Sweden"
The last time I mentioned the S-idea here, I got a few hostile comments; KK seems to preempt this in his longhand version, wisely. But I'm not sure his comment box will escape - there are loads of angry anti-socialists here in Internetland e.g. here.
What strikes those of us like me who grew up outside the US is - the "s-word" aside - how natural these ideas of collaboration, mutuality and connectedness seem to be: how human "us" is in the light of our modern scientific understanding of homo sapiens and human nature and how commonplace they are in our webworld stuff; and yet, at the same time, how provocative they are to many other folk (this despite the long history of collective ownership of infrastructure in US agriculture and the sterling work done by US-based or funded scientists in the behavioural and cognitive sciences to populate and evidence e.g. the social brain idea).
It's not just simple errors like the conflation of State Communism with the s-word that irks me here; nor the poor grasp of historical fact that e.g. old ideas of central planning were an essential part of 's-ism' (curiously central planning seems to have been imported by Lenin and his gang to the USSR from Fordist USA); no, the S-word seems to reach deep into the heart of the story many of us tell themselves about what it is to be American or modern or just "one of us"; into what Durckheim might have called the "cultural ideology" of the developed world (those ideas about the world that have become so central to how we see things that they have become part of the world as we see it).
What KK's piece usefully does is show how the idea of 'us' rather then 'I' is being reinvigorated by the technology so central to our modern world: it's revealing homo sapiens as a "we-" rather than a "me-"species. A collaborative and "necessarily interdependent creature" as Gandhi put it.
And at the same time the tensions this causes with some of our other ideas. Whatever you call it.
UPDATE: and interesting to see how much of this is part of the world-view of the man who wants to be the UK's next leader
Very excited to discover that we (Alex and I) have won an Emerald Insight citation of excellence for our Admap paper last November
Essentialy, our paper was judged to be one of the top 50 articles published n 2008 in the 400 top business & management journals from HBR and the Sloan Management Review downwards
Really very very chuffed (more so to discover I also won one in 2004!)
Come on, now. All sing along: Championes, championes, championes....[repeat to fade]
You may remember I posted recently about how stuff passes through populations and in particular how this often leads to things changing (or being changed by the hands/mouths it passes through).
Ben Goldacre [via Twitter] points us to this great example of bad science posted by Aubrey
That's why the processes of science seem to be important - to stop us just choosing to believe what we want to believe (or, more probably, what the fella next us says is true)
Free gift: top interview with comedian Dara O'Briain about his love of maths and hate of the kind of pseudoscience that this all adds up to
"You can say anything about art, but science is cumulative and people say, 'I can't understand what's at the top of that, so I'm just going to scrabble around in the mud outside the castle and build my own shitty version of it out of reassuring platitudes and borrowed terms.' Terms like energy. The use of the word energy is one of the great scandals of pseudoscience. That anyone can grab the word energy and say "I can move your negative energy" or "grab this crystal'senergy" drives me up the wall. Up. The. Wall."
I've been a long-term supporter of the UK Account Planning Group. Indeed, in the old days when I was a planner, I actually ran the thing with the lovely Merry Baskin.
Their bi-annual APG Awards are upcoming and they've let it be known that they'd welcome more entries from er...non-advertising folk about non-traditional solutions.
You know, the kind of stuff that we're all talking about doing nowadays - whether it's the funky Faris kind of thing or one of Hugh's cube grenades...
And you can be working anywhere in the world I guess [correct]
The key thing is that you have to be able to write a short piece [less than 2000 words] which demonstrates why it was the strategic thinking that made the difference (and not the code or the latest bit of flash animation your creative director like)
Be assured - it's well worth it. One winner I coached went from our rather relegation-zone agency to one of the big 3 in a matter of months, on the back of her success
And frankly, it'd be worth it just to tell your mum how cool your work is thought to be by the great and the good of the industry (not the creatives' or the agency's work - yours!)
And the industry needs to know the difference that planners can make in the new stuff
So get busy. And tell them just how brilliant you and your thinking are. In less than 2000 words
NB Deadline June 1st
Odd piece here in the NYT that seems to suggest that the reason why individuals buy what they buy is to transmit some message to those around them.
Of course, the piece seeks out focus groups and "brand name narcissism" [sic] for a good kicking (probably rightly, I reckon) but the argument seems to rest on some pretty poor evolutionary Psychology of the very simplest sort: peacock's tail and sexual prowess, etc etc. [For a rather better view of that discipline go here]
Now seems to me that this piece is just the wrong way round: we don't buy what we buy primarily to do something to those around us but rather we do so because of what others around us are doing & buying.
i.e. it's PULL NOT PUSH
Not all the time and not exclusively, but more than any of us is really happy to admit.
Funny how easy it is for a journo's populist interpretation of proper science can make the scientist themselves look silly, isn't it?
Interesting time today at a corporate event - 200+ marketers from one big UK company, together with their agencies and suppliers, trying to be a high quality marketing community
One of the things I often slip into is talking about behavior change in terms of consumers or citizens or whatever (large numbers of folk anyway); I was prompted by a question from an internal comms lady to remember that the same ideas about change and our social HERD nature apply just as much to internal audiences as to external ones
Which links back to what Hugh's been doing recently around his brilliant Cube Grenade idea
I like this - it's a great handle for what it is that folk like us are doing and what our stuff is for
We don't send messages or make vehicles for the same
We don't fill tubes with them, either
We don't target or persuade or enforce compliance with some sets of behaviours
We make stuff that folk might interact around - stuff that they might find interesting enough to talk about or share or shout at or whatever - stuff that stimulates them to change together how they do what they do (and even what they do together)
We make things that change the way that folk interact and that is what changes the workplace
Of course, "grenade" may seem a bit violent if you imagine change is ever smooth and unruffled. Maybe that's the story you have to tell but then....
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.
Seth's ability to ask the right question continues to astound me - what difference would membership make to your organisation.
Certainly folk like Matthew & co are having to think very differently about how they go about things...
TBH I've never like the idea of "customers" and "consumers" because it puts at a disadvantage to the organisation and its interests and not the other way round.
You see this kind of thinking everywhere - while football [soccer to our American chums] clubs are owned by shareholders, the real owners of the brand are the punters who stand/sit on the terraces, who travel to watch 0-1 away losses in the rain, whose day is brightened/darkened by the latest result: the fans.
Certainly, non-commercial bodies could learn a lot from this. My friend Theo (a catholic missionary) puts it this way:
"If we (the Church) don't serve the people freely, what on earth are we for?"
(though my Mum's parish priest - like too many businesses I come across - seems to think that his service-delivery should be on terms that suit him)
UPDATE: Helge makes much the same point as Seth here (HT Gareth)
Just had a bizarre exchange with someone about my underestimating the power of technology to shape our world. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from anti-technology but.....
This little story I like because it reminds me that it's not the technology itself - the thing we make - but what we choose to do with the technology that counts: not the printing press but the book; not the canvas or the paint but the painting.
Human, all-too human, maybe...
We humans are unreliable witnesses to our own individual lives.
We have a distorted view of our what we do, how and why: our memories are far from being photographic and our consciousness is far from the continuous stream it seems to be. Thinking is much less important in shaping our behaviour than it seems.
And yet much market research - thanks to its roots in our individualist 20th Century culture - assumes that things are otherwise: we ask folk what they do, what they've done, what they might do and why; we listen to what they say about their lives on the assumption that they might know.
So we've been playing around recently with a (new?) kind of research approach, which plays to human strengths, rather than this well documented human weakness: "We-research", we call it.
While we may not be very good at ourselves, we turn out to be much better at other folk and what they do (and why)
Grant talks very well to this and Fiona's Mesh product is a great start.
While the boys and I are busy continuing to polish our prototype [more soon], Russell pointed me to this great US initiative, Storycorps, which gets individuals telling each other their stories.
Regular readers will remember that I've been on a bit recently about how we've stopped seeing things having any other value than an economic one: it's become all about the benjamins
Jon reminded me today of this great sketch from the glory days of Monty Python.
If find yourself repeatedly translating stuff into economic value (like this "merchant banker"), then you might want to go have a lie down. The other kinds of value - social, cultural etc - are turning out to be just as important...
Well chuffed about the cover story that Alex and I managed to get for our piece on how certain Darwinian ideas can shed light on how behaviour and ideas spread through populations:
"...in focussing on the particular individual or network, we often miss out on social influence. This is why evolutionary science can prove so useful in describing and explaining dynamic changes in populations.
On the one hand, evolution is all about dynamic change. It's about how things change in a particular interacting population of creatures (such as humans...). On the other, it's about change without much in the way of external levers: individual agents interacting with each other, repeatedly over time within a dynamic environment, which gives rise to phenomena...
What evolves does not have to genetic codes or biological species - culture can be said to evolve in the strict sense as well.
So just as changes in the physical features of Darwin's famous Galapagos finches pass through their populations from parents to child, so too ideas, behaviours and cultural practices spread through populations by individuals copying other individuals..."
And so on.
Get hold of a copy if you can (or use your magnifying glass here) and let us know your thoughts back here
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