Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Why talk really is cheap

  

Pic c/o of the Fabulous Henry R

Yesterday, my old chum David C pointed a bunch of folk like me to this piece in Adage by Steve Knox, the guy who runs Tremor - the P&G WoM/sampling outfit. 

Now, first of all let me say the two central points of the piece seem unobjectionable:

1. the idea of disrupting shared assumptions in a marketplace by what you do and how you say has been around in various forms (not least Jean-Marie Dru's masterpiece Disruption) for nearly 2 decades now. If you haven't come across it til now, I'd suggest you check your feeds (and the calendar)

2. It's good to root our theory in contemporary science. Again, the idea behind schema - whatever you call them - is not exactly news - even to the determinedly ignorant of science.

But,.....[yes, I know, I'm always qualifying positive commentary]

....what is it that I feel uncomfortable about in the case that Knox makes?

Well, I think I've got two areas of concern:

First, it does seem a rather selective reading of cognitive science - a post-rationalisation, even, to justify what the company does post-hoc - a bit of scientific sticking plaster to shore up the intellectual credentials of a business that has shifted around between sampling, testing and advocacy objectives. Starting with the business practice rather than the science.

Specifically, and probably most importantly, is what I see as a lazy assumption that WoM - what people say to their peers - is what shapes their behaviour; when it's what we see others do and whether or not we choose to follow them.

As Grant and I and Faris have all made clear a number of times, most human speech is - as you'd expect from a social creature - phatic - that is more to do with the inter-relationships between speaker and listener than about any specific content. Most human speech and communication (in the traditional sense of words and thoughts) is content-lite and people-heavy. It's really cheap.

Even if you take a more enlightened view of influence and see influence as more a pull- than a push-phenomenon, it's far from clear how WoM is going to be a major force of behaviour. Sure, we can read excitement or despair into each other's talk and writing but this is not the same as our behaviour being shaped by the content of what other people say (except in extreme circumstances, like a Fire!).

Bit more science, Mr Knox, and a bit less assumption, maybe?

Very like a network

“Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that ’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and ’t is like a camel indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or, like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.”

Yesterday I had a repeat performance of familiar disagreement with someone who loves the Network Metaphor - someone who sees the big N as the most important lens through which to build understanding how things spread.

Now, what I don't want to do is rehearse the arguments at length again (go here or here or indeed read one leading network scientist's views on the misapplication of the central ideas of network theory to human behaviour) to get your head around the detail. Nor do you need reminding that it's a whole lot more interesting and complex than the influentials models suggest - human life is not largely constructed of hubs and spokes, our connections and relationships are more fluid and flexible and of course it's often not the stickiness or other characteristics of a thing (or meme or whatever) that determines how far that thing spreads: it's the people and how they choose to interact with each other.

Suffice to say our use of the Network idea is really a Metaphor: - a comparison highlighting certain similarities - human social structures and interactions often behave very much like what we call networks elsewhere. e.g. the physical sciences or in electronics

Unfortunately we often mistake the metaphor for identity; the map for the landscape. 

Wouldn't it be better to think about it as a simile (as Billy Shakes does in the quote above). No one imagines that Hamlet and Polonius are saying that the clouds are actually camels, weasels, whales or any other living thing, merely that for a moment, in certain ways, they resemble that kind of thing in certain ways.

"Like a network", indeed.

Don't panic

 

Saw this (above) lovely piece of detective work today on Buzzfeed (they picked it from giagantor who picked it up from...) about - well, let's call it the "Keep Calm Meme" (if your not a Brit or connected to Brits you might have to go check the links now to explain it. Good. Welcome back).

What the visuals (plus the comments on on the Buzzfeed page) seem to show is the history of how one little known WWII poster design spread and evolved over a short period of time (I've got a t-shirtGod, even my Dad has a mug with it on). Brilliant. Like the map of a "meme", it's suggested.

But...but, but, but...!

It's very easy to imagine that it must be something about the original design or the concept or the style of illustration that made it spread so wide (we talk of Stickiness in Marketingland or Fitness if we've got our evolutionary hat on) - something about the Keep Calm line that has an abiding appeal, something that plays to our nostalgic sense of duty or whatever. Or maybe something just plain different.

Unfortunately, this isn't a good default setting/working assumption: more often than not with the stuff of popular culture, the thing itself isn't that important in determining how far (or not) something spreads. On the one hand, most of our choices aren't that different from each other - it doesn't really matter which one we choose - and on the other hand, focussing on the successful item distracts us from the absence of the ones which didn't make it (which will often turn out to be indistinguishable from the winner). It turns out that many successful "memes" have only one characteristic that their unsuccessful competitors didn't have: luck...!

This has much broader applications than reading popular culture or a market's history. Looking back, we're all too ready to look to the thing to explain how something spreads and - following the 7 Lesssons of Successful People syndrome - use it as a template for success. Or an unhelpful straightjacket...when all the time it may just be chance that creates success.

Indeed, one of the things, I'm working on right now is a simple way to tell the difference between something that has chance and luck to thank for its success and something which has something about itself to thank. 

So next time you see something that's become popular - something that seems to fall into this "meme" category of items - why don't you try calling it "something that turns out to have been successful but might just be lucky but we don't know either way yet"?

PS What's your fave "Don't Panic"? I'm with Matt Jones' "Get Excited...". You?

How art affects the brain redux

Nice little piece here at the WSJ about work to understand how the neuroscience of exhibitions and to put it to work in designing better experiences for gallery attendees.

 
All well and good, I'm sure (indeed, I wish I'd had access to this kind of work when I was doing my Aesthetics paper for my Philosophy degree) but the piece itself (and the study behind it, if represented fairly) make two really important errors which characterise much recent application of neuroscience techniques to business and decision-making generally.

Error 1: it assumes it that the art (or the marketing or advertising) is a stimulus to the "subject"'s brain - that it does something TO or AT the brain, rather than (as we might more usefully suggest) what it does WITH the brain of subjects. It's the interaction of the two, not just one thing impact on the other.

Error 2: it seems to ignore the primary aspect for the context of most human cognition - the prime feature of the world we have evolved live in - other people. Certain (social) neuroscientists are on the case with regard to the neuroscience of the influence of others on individuals'  behaviour but this seems to me to be of the old school. Also, wondering big time what Hugh would make of it...

Of course, I could be wrong about this. What do you think?

Carnival in San Sebastian

 

Off next week to San Sebastian in the Basque country of Spain to do the keynote at the ABLA conference.

While out-of-season seaside resorts always hold a certain charm for me (well, apart from Cannes, that is) I'm kind of hoping that the trip coincides with the beginning of Carnival - a very HERDy time in the calendar.

A time when people get together and - enthused, as the Ancient Greeks would put (that is, possessed by the deity) - challenge the rich and the powerful. A time when that HERD part of our nature is nearer the surface than perhaps we/they'd like

Maybe I'll just be there for the TInkers' parade. How appropriate, either way!

PS if you're going to ABLA, do let me know and come and say Hi!

Friends and Facebook

 

Short piece in yesterday's Sunday Times trailling some upcoming work by the great Robin Dunbar that seems worth keeping an eye open for: 

"We may be able to amass 5,000 friends on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 friendships, a study has found.

Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history"

If he's right - and it seems plausible - then it's worth being careful with what we call these SM connections. "Friends"? Or "Connections"?

And reminding ourselves that while technology is incredibly powerful, it's the human stuff that tends to win out. 

Pic c/o Scienceblog

Memories of the future (5) Things or people?

 

A conversation last night with my new client (very late indeed even by Spanish standards) and a prompt from my chum Johnnie today (go here for Derren Brown's note on self-control and influence) brought this idea into focus again:

it's all to easy for us to get distracted by character of the things we make - by their stickiness and the contagiousness - and imagine that it's these kind of qualities (and thus ultimately our efforts) that determines the success of the things (i.e. how far and fast they spread through a given population).

While that is true in some cases - and it's not completely irrelevant in most (terrible products don't tend to win) - assuming it as a default setting, merely encourages you & me to ignore the underlying mechanism by which the things themselves spread: that is, through people.

And in particular largely through people following ("pulling") what others around them are doing (and not as is all-too-often suggested (e.g. by the diagram at the top of this page or this famous one)

Two obvious reasons why we tend to go this way: 1. it plays to what we want to believe about ourselves as masters of persuasion and manipulation of the masses 2. it helps us avoid all that messy human stuff that can so bog brilliance down & (last but not least) 3. because everyone else does it, too. 

The future of marketing and related disciplines is really about getting better at the people stuff and embracing the messiness of it and our lack of real control over the outcomes.

What really matters to you?

Unless you turn your business into a vehicle for your passions and beliefs, you'll end up with just another Vanilla enterprise. Just another whatever it is you do. It's not easy but, boy, is it worth it. Like the late great Ian Dury put it, "Don't do nothing that is cut price You know what that'll make be" Being sensible and measured and professional is all very well but it won't make you stand out or be valuable to your customers. Just let your passions and beliefs light the way

Memories of the future (4) You, me and everyone we know (again)

  

I really enjoy the debates that people have (with me and with each other) around the keynotes that I'm asked to give. I remember with particular fondness being told back halfway through the decade by one rather puffed-up marketing exec (as I recall, from the Blue Monster!) that all this social influence stuff is interesting but not that important as ultimately it is always an individual who does the buying - why bother particularly if technology was going to help us find and target them precisely?

2009 was the year that that this finally got to sound silly to most ears (not just signed up members of the HERD club).

And - no coincidence - it was also the year that 3 really important books got published on the science behind all this:

First, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's extraordinary Mothers and Others which suggests that the origins of our incredible social nature lies in the shared child-rearing habits (alloparenting) of our ancestors, rather than the more masculine "machiavelli" hypothesis (i.e. in order to gain social power and status).

[Watch her at the RSA here]

Secon, John Caccioppa's fantastic social neuroscience study of Loneliness which suggests that loneliness is an aversive adaptation - like pain - which if not acted on has real physical effects on our all-too-social selves.

[See John at the RSA here]

And finally, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's brilliant Connected which pulls together a really insightful review of what connectedness means - at the heart of which is their analysis of the famous Framingham longitudinal health study (not just a large sample but one which records social connectedness not just health indicators)

[Here they are at (hey hey!) Microsoft labs...reminding us that online social networks are a very recent version of much older phenomena]

I'm not sure I can pick a winner for you out of these three (you should read all of them) but I know that work about the science of social (even work of this quality and coherence) would not have found the mainstream audience it now commands just a few years ago.

What cheers me is that in many spheres of human life - politics, medicine , social policy, management & of course, marketing - it's no longer a question of maybe for the whole "HERD" Social hypothesis; it's a given (even if we're still only just beginning to work through the implications Download BrainJuicer Paper - Me-to-We Research).

There's one thing you can count on going forward - there's no going back. It's us - you,me & everyone we know.

I won't say that I told you so, but...

Memories of the future (3) Rethinking the human

 
Regular readers will know that a lot of the drive behind my work and my writing over the last decade has been the flood of insights about human beings & human behaviour that - over the last 10 years - the behavioural and cognitive sciences have unleashed. In fact, you might say, reading and making sense of the science has shaped

Far from being a marginal - oddball, even - pursuit, this is fast becoming mainstream and will continue to grow apace this year.

From the IPA's Behavioural Economics Initiative to COI's Common Good Research on Behaviour Change the newly-published RSA Social Brain Project - all of which I've found myself involved in shaping.

Many of our most strongly-held common-sense ideas about humans and human behaviour are challenged by the work aggregated and synthesised in these kind of proejcts: like (as we HERDies like to remind folk) the Anglo-Saxon assumption that we are a species of self-determining individuals or the related one that thought shapes behaviour...

Of course, this is not just a liberation (and a step towards universal enlightenment) but it also offers the potential for the kind of one-eyed pick-and-mix applications of science that previously characterised things like "neuromarketing".

Memories of the future (2) living off the exhaust

 
One of the ideas that I've bumped into again and again this last year in different forms is that the exhaust data is where the juice lies.

For example for too long, traditional market researchers have indulged themselves in a methodological arms race which presumes that new data is almost always the answer, rather than find new ways to analyse the datasets they already have.

For users and vendors alike the truth is the same - rather than look at existing datasets afresh or rethink how we manipulate them to see what we can glean, most of us instinctively rush to collect new - fresh - stuff.  Which is a shame because - given the right kind of analytic curiousity - we can all learn a lot from examining the "free stuff" that's all around us, using the kind of  [See for example the paper John Kearon and I wrote this summer Download BrainJuicer Paper - Me-to-We Research]

Also, if you're going to be at MRS this March, I'm pulling together a bunch of smart social scientists to share their [Darwin-based] analytic tools for understanding mass behaviour. Download Jan 8pp prog_low res-1 And - if there's enough interest - we'll organise something separate around the time to explore the subject in detail.

Equally, I've been struck how people like David Bausola and The Kaiser are experimenting with putting the "hosepipe" of exhaust data that e.g. Social Media creates to good use in for creative and entertainment purposes. And - as will be revealed in due course - for other purposes, too...

Think about it in terms of sustainability: rather than rush to new data or fancy tools, what can you do with the exhaust? With the stuff that everyone else (including you & me) throws away?

Memories of the future (1) Cinema with the backchannel built-in

I've managed to largely stay offline for much of the last month - off the blog at least.

But in the last day or so, I've been pondering a few things that seem to point up likely directions

Not that these thoughts are in any way predictions (precise and definite singularities)

Rather - as Swedish neuroscientist David Ingvar might suggest - they seem to represent pre-echoes of how things might well turn out...

So here's my first one:

 
Earlier this year, I was invited to a private screening of "Oy Calcutta!" - a fascinating documentary by young film-maker Saul Abraham about his grandfather's return trip from North London to the Jewish enclave in Calcutta he had left half a century previously.

What struck me strongly was not so much the quality of the film-making (excellent btw so watch that name) but rather the experience of watching a movie with the back-channel on: on the one hand, the key characters were known to many in the room, indeed, most of them were actually sat in the audience; on the other, the audience plain refused to adopt the expected passivity - they talked all the way through the movie, questioning and debating what they saw on screen.

My point here is not really about the movies or entertainment in the broader sense either - I'll be honest, I've seen better movies this year and I'm sure you have, too - but I've not had a more powerful and distinctive experience as this of what living with the backchannel is like.

I've talked and written before about how the connectedness which dominates our age encourages the backchannel to expand and spread into every corner of our lives* and I'm sure many readers will have experienced the joy of presenting to an audience when the twitterfeed on the screen behind you reveals all too clearly what your audience is saying to itself as you speak, but all too often we understand this idea of the backchannel in the context of marketing.

The truth is it's going to leach into every aspect of our lives - with some really interesting consequences all round. And not just for film makers (or marketing bods)!

*I'm sure you've heard the same old case studies from social media experts, so I won't repeat them here