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Pic C/o Timesonline
Just a bit of a headsup: am joining an interesting bunch of people over here at the Spectator's new Culture blog, Cappuccino Culture
Think it could be a lot of fun. Never contributed to a group blog before. Wonder how much we're going to respond to each other....
First post from me is up there now - on cricket and our social selves. Natch....
Go on. Stick it on your feeds...
Just about to head off to spend an afternoon with folk particularly interested in behaviour change.
Thought I'd share these few brief thoughts about the existing models
1. most start from the assumption that the individual is the right level of granulation for studying behavior (and thus behaviour change). Fine, if we were a solitary species of independent agents but (as we argue here regularly) this doesn't appear to be a good characterisation of Homo sapiens. We are a social species - more so that most of our relatives - and we do what we do in the company and under the influence of others (real or imagined). Most of human life is - as Oscar put it - a quotation from the lives of others.
2. most of the fancy models touted aren't behaviour change models at all but rather "how to change people's behaviour" models: in other words they presume that change is something generated largely by external ("exogenous") forces and (hate the word) "levers".
3. as a result most ignore the changes in behaviour that arise without external interventions (such as marketing), assuming that this cannot amount to much. Yet these changes are happening all the time in all aspects of our lives.
4. Few admit the enormous failure rate of attempts to change people's behaviour - in marketing, in public policy, in (change) management and in our daily lives. It's really hard to set out to change behaviour - far better to help the behaviour change itself, don't you think?
Love Wordia - human dictionary, offering personal definitions of chosen words alongside the official ones.
Chuffed that HERD is cited by my old chum (and IPA topdog) Rory Sutherland on his list of must-read books on the new behavioural sciences, along with Ariely, Thaler and Sunstein, Moran, Cowen, Alerkof, Miller, Lehrer,Litman & Frigo, Kay.
NB not sure that "behavioural economics" is strictly appropriate but what the hell...
Prompted by a question from Dave Cushman, I thought it'd be interesting to find out which other books on the new behavioural/cognitive sciences you think marketing folk should read...
Here's my starters for ten
A great primer on cultural evolution from Richerson and Boyd, Iacoboni's great book on mirror neurons, Ormerod's masterpiece on complexity & this great old scourge of information/message based theories of communication.
Your call?
Alfie D's got this fab project shortlisted for the Cultural Olympiad in the UK .
More here.
This is the original pitch which got him & Paula shortlisted.
"Bus.tops – a city wide canvas for sharing the art of our streets, our communities, our London, our experience.
Marika jostles back and forth as she struggles up the stairs
to the top of the 242 bus. There are seats below but she likes the
view, she likes the feeling that she is seeing a different London. A
London of gargoyles so high up no one can see them from the streets, a
London of facades so old no one knows what lies under the grime, a
London of adventures and characters. Today, a story begins to unfold.
From bus.top to bus.top Marika follows a visual adventure as she sits
on the top deck of the 242.
Amir clicks on the web page to his favourite bus.top. Every
Wednesday at 2.30pm, someone called J1ll posts a collection of her
housemate’s favourite memories from the week to her local bus.top in
Hackney. One of them always has something to say about the
football..usually a great laugh. Amir reckons he could do something on
bus.tops. He and his schoolmates play hockey at school...wouldn't it be
wicked to play a game of hockey across all of London. Hackney could be
one goal and Harlesden is the other...Amir takes another look at the
bus.tops website...
Bus.tops provides the canvas that allows London to tell its
stories. These can be small, intimate stories of a neighbourhood or
citywide adventures that draw us into a London we never imagined; or
simply moments of beauty, wonder, questioning, critique, comment and
exploration. These stories unfold on a canvas made up of networked
panels of programmable LEDs situated on the roofs of bus stops across
London.
As well as the canvas, Bus.tops provides the tools and
platform from which both publicly recognised artists and the public we
recognise as artists are empowered to create a truly public art
experience. Bus.tops will work with established artists to create a
“curated” collection of works distributed across the bus.tops canvas.
These will be celebrated as being at the vanguard of artistic
innovation and exploration. However these works will also be the
foundation from which a new generation of authors and artists will be
inspired create their first piece of public art.
Bus.tops provides a window for the world to experience and
explore the cultural richness and diversity that makes up Greater
London. But critically, it will also provide the means by which we
within London understand and value that same cultural richness and
diversity across our communities.
The potential of bus.tops is only limited by the imagination of 8 million Londoners"
I love it but am not one of the judges.
So why don't you go tell the folks who make the decision what you think. Please!
This is Tim. Outside American Apparel (LOL)
Best bit of copywriting I've seen in a while, don't you agree?*
Anyway, fingers crossed to be back soon
*If you think you've got something, share it and we'll have a vote!
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Pic from flickr
If you've read the HERD book, you might remember the interview I did with David and Claire of howies (aka Cardigan Bay's third largest clothing company).
One of the things that these guys get is the importance of action - and of encouraging those around you to take action. So they set up the "Do-lectures" - an inspirational happening for those who want to change the world to well,...get together and work out how they're going to do it.
The guys are determined to make it work as a sustainable but financially independent operation so they need a few more sponsors for this year's gig - folk like me and you who believe in giving other people the tools we already to make things better.
Go on, do it now. Contact David and the gang here to make your donation.
Don't do nothing.
Pic from fab post on Father/Son forehead tatooing fans...
Regular readers will know the importance that the behavioral sciences are increasingly placing on mimicry in human behaviour and the spread of technologies, cultural practices, ideas, opinions and even feelings - hence the suggestion to rename our species Homo mimicus (as opposed to "sapiens" - the wise one)
Today's update on this is this piece Download Call&Carpenter_Mimics_2009(3)in Science which explores the widespread use of mimicry in other primates - our evolutionary cousins
HT Alex
Here (courtesy of Adage) is a nice little clip of me in NYC at the 4As Summer of Planning event explaining a little of why the idea of the Big Idea is really...well, NOT such a big thing to worry about anymore
Sure it's useful for agencies - and sure it's easier to manage complex organisations to produce and deliver against them - but frankly, in a world in which social influence reigns, it's less and less relevant. Do more stuff, place more bets, light more fires, give yourself more chances that one at least of your ideas takes off.
Who'd have thought it, eh?
Of course, charging for this is a whole other game....
PS The green walls are those of JWT's lovely bar area but the haircut is my own unfortunate choice.
Oh, and Flickr feeds for NYC and SF - thanks AAAA for having me!
Nice Adage piece (HT Tash) re Richard Fine's excellent HELP brand
Pic c/o Vanity Fair
Couple of thoughts immediately strike me: good ol' familiar ones...
1. The importance of not complying with the how the existing industry does stuff
2. Being interesting
3. Doing interesting
4. Recognising that it's how you get folk to interact around with you that matters most - that Ol' Social Object stuff again...
Pic c/o Infobrasil
A really delightful last day in SF today (not just time with the awesome Craig Newmark of Craigslist and lunch with the ever stimulating Mark Lewis), but kicked off by breakfast with someone I've emailed but never met before, Mike O'Brien.
Of these, I guess many readers will know Mike least but you shouldn't: he's one of the world's leading anthropologists and an expert in social learning (one of our species' core skills as I'm sure you've heard before ). Also, as I discovered today, he effectively invented that behaviour cascade modelling which Duncan et al use to understand how things spread through populations. And he's a really nice fella, too.
But here's the thing: over a very pleasant breakfast in the Cafe de la Presse (my new home from home in SF, it turns out), he gently pointed me to our obsession with Big Men in our thinking about social phenomena and social influence - the chiefs, the warriors, the warlords, the experts, and...oh, yes...the Influentials.
Made me think of Alex's recent observation that while most evolutionary anthropologists (being male) had taken the Machiavelli hypothesis to explain the growth in human brain size relative to our cousins (i.e. that our brains evolved for understanding and plotting power and prestige advantages for our super social ape), Sarah Hrdy points to thereproductive advantages of being (uniquely among apes) an alloparenting/parented species (that is where more than mother/father protect, nurture and provide for infants) which would require a huge brain for social interaction from birth.
The Big Man thing is big amongst the men. Go figure!
So next time you leap on an influentials strategy ask yourself are you just falling in with the boys or are things really working that way...?
Pic c/o @calexico
Had an awesome time here in SF. Even the wierd U2-ness of presenting down onto the hundred or so folk who gathered at Goodby's last night. Thanks to all who've made me so welcome - Ed, Gareth, Michael, Derek & Kare (and thanks to David for trekking down from Portland for it).
I'll be back....
Pic c/o Prospect.org
Nice lecture here about an analysis of Facebook phenomena which demonstrates what Duncan, Paul, Alex and I have all been saying for a while:
[Mostly] things don't start with special individuals - it is the rest of us and our willingness to adopt something that we see around us that really matters in the spread of behaviours and ideas through populations.
Counter-intuitive I know (and not something very flattering to us self-styled innovators and influentials) but that's what the data suggests. And whatever you'd like to believe about the world and your role in it, it's always good to look at the data to check these ideas out.
Footnote: nice anecdote last night from Goodby's on the same subject The famous Sasquatch dancing man youtube vid was recently sent by a creative director to a planner as if it were an example of "here's to the crazy ones!" (or some such) - a celebration of brave creative heroics, ie. as if what mattered was the first couple of guys.
As we've repeatedly said, the lecture above confirms and Black Swan underlines, it only seems like they're important after the fact - but few of us work backwards through time (Timelords, excluded). Most of us would not be able to tell that these guys - as opposed to any of the other bolloxed groovers around the festival field - would be the seed of a great congregation....
Pic c/o Prospect.org
Nice lecture here about an analysis of Facebook phenomena which demonstrates what Duncan, Paul, Alex and I have all been saying for a while:
[Mostly] things don't start with special individuals - it is the rest of us and our willingness to adopt something that we see around us that really matters in the spread of behaviours and ideas through populations.
Counter-intuitive I know (and not something very flattering to us self-styled innovators and influentials) but that's what the data suggests. And whatever you'd like to believe about the world and your role in it, it's always good to look at the data to check these ideas out.
Footnote: nice anecdote last night from Goodby's on the same subject The famous Sasquatch dancing man youtube vid was recently sent by a creative director to a planner as if it were an example of "here's to the crazy ones!" (or some such) - a celebration of brave creative heroics, ie. as if what mattered was the first couple of guys.
As we've repeatedly said, the lecture above confirms and Black Swan underlines, it only seems like they're important after the fact - but few of us work backwards through time (Timelords, excluded). Most of us would not be able to tell that these guys - as opposed to any of the other bolloxed groovers around the festival field - would be the seed of a great congregation....
Flying coast to coast today - across the full extent of the North American landmass - to share some HERD goodness with the fine folk of San Francisco
Led me to ponder, the huge scale of the country, the extremely long distances between places and the huge number of communities that people have built - all on the very Enlightenment ideas of individual self-determination and individual rights that so fired the Founding Fathers.
The generosity of spirit and the mutuality that has built all these dreams....
Like they say in these parts, "awesome"
Simply "awesome".
Great infographics work from the NYT
Like the man says, maybe this marks the end of that really selfish buy-to-own model ("it's mine, all mine") as opposed to pay-for-access?
After all, music as a selfish thing - something we buy and consume on our own - is more than slightly wierd, isn't it?
What the industry needs is more ways to make money from folk's ability to interact with each other around music....
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