If you're in London Tuesday next week, here's a great event from the lovely people at Creative Social built around some really stimulating folk who "probe" the future for the rest of us...[like memories of the future]
People like the lovely Grant McCracken
Do yourself a favour and get yourself some...
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.
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".
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
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