Herd

How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature

Mark Earls

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780470744598, 9780470060360
• eBook ISBN: 9780470685488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

"...fascinating. Like Malcolm Gladwell on speed."
—THE GUARDIAN

"HERD is a rare thing: a book that transforms the reader's perception of how the world works".
—Matthew D'Ancona, THE SPECTATOR

"This book is a must. Once you have read it you will understand why Mark Earls is regarded as a marketing guru."
—Daniel Finkelstein, THE TIMES

This paperback version of Mark Earls' groundbreaking and award winning book comes updated with new stats and figures and provides two completely revised chapters that deal with the rise of social networking.

Since the Enlightenment there has been a very simple but widely held assumption that we are a species of thinking individuals and human behaviour is best understood by examining the psychology of individuals. It appears, however, that this insight is plain wrong. The evidence from a number of leading behavioural and neuroscientists suggests that our species is designed as a herd or group animal. Mark Earls applies this evidence to the traditional mechanisms of marketing and consumer behaviour, with a result that necessitates a complete rethink about these subjects.

HERD provides a host of unusual examples and anecdotes to open the mind of the business reader, from Peter Kay to Desmond Tutu, Apple to UK Sexual Health programmes, George Bush to Castle Lager, from autism to depression to the real explanation for the placebo effect in pharmaceutical testing.

Part One

A ‘We-Species’ with an illusion of ‘I’

1

The Super-Social Ape

What this chapter will cover

The true nature of mankind is that of a super-social ape. We are programmed to be together; sociability is our species’ key evolutionary strategy; we feel happier with others; our brains develop through interaction with others and when our brains don’t develop normally this often robs us of key human skills. When they develop properly we have the most amazing capabilities to live together and create things together.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

Mahatma Gandhi

Tea and kindness

Danny Wallace is an unlikely cult leader. He’s of average height, wears glasses, has no track record of ambition or fantasies of world domination and - by his own account - little or no charisma; his speechifying is anything but riveting or rabble-rousing. And yet he has created a cult (or ‘collective’ as he prefers to call it) of thousands of smiley people around the world who willingly pursue an agenda which runs right against contemporary mores. What’s more they all seem to share a kind of sickening niceness that conjures up the brainwashed of Waco, Texas.

How did it all start? Back in 2001 Danny attended the funeral of a great-uncle he barely knew, Gallus. As he flew to Zurich to attend the rites in a language he barely understood (Danny’s Swiss-German had not really thrived as he grew up in London), he did not suspect that his life (and those of people he’d never met) would change. During the course of the endless reminiscing about the life of the lately departed, all conducted in the local dialect, he thought he heard something really strange. Did somebody mention Uncle Gallus and a commune?

Yes, his grandmother confirmed, a commune. But a failed one.

It turned out that Great-Uncle Gallus, stout Swiss burgher that he was, once became so disillusioned by the small town politics of Monzwang (population 1,000) that he decided to set up his own town on a patch of land he already owned. Idealistically he hoped to start the perfect community from scratch. Unfortunately, only three of his fellow citizens saw the attraction of the idea and Gallus never pursued it beyond the initial invitation. That said, from the reaction of the family gathered at his funeral, everyone seems to have thought Gallus mad and still felt more than slightly embarrassed by the whole situation: ‘Another one of Gallus’ crazy ideas.’

Now this is the sort of anecdote that all of us would like to be able to tell to our friends down the local pub or bar - ‘I can top that last story. My great-uncle (yes, that mad Swiss one . . .) well, he tried to start a cult . . . but failed.’ If the social value of this story crossed Danny’s mind, he was careful not to make too much of it. Indeed, Danny didn’t really do much with the thought at all, apart from telling his long-suffering girlfriend on his return to London. And then he pondered a bit more, while hanging out in his flat. And then on a whim he acted.

Advertising works

He put a simple text advert into Loot, the newspaper that consists of nothing but adverts for second-hand cars, sofas, house-clearance services and accommodation for rent. This is what it said: ‘Join me. Send a passport photo to . . .’

And then he sat back and waited to see if he would garner the same level of indifference as his great-uncle. Probably, he thought to himself. After all, he hadn’t actually said what people might be joining or what they would get out of it.

The first response was telling; it came from someone in my own London Borough of Camden. A very normal-looking fella from his passport photo. Who enclosed a menu from a local Indian takeaway restaurant. Fair enough. Nice thought. Someone prepared to be friendly and share at least one of his favourite things in whatever this new movement became. Maybe the whole idea of building a different kind of community wasn’t so bad. Then, on examining the menu more closely, Danny noted a curious niceness in the restaurant that made the gesture slightly spooky (but still nice).

We are proud of our chefs (!) and our management (!!). We are proud that you the customer choose us to satisfy your appetite.¹

So the restaurant people must be quite nice, too. Not many companies are both truly proud of their people and grateful to their customers (at least not until you’ve given them a lot of money and even then rarely so, certainly if Anthony Badouin’s Kitchen Memoirs are at all accurate).

Even more advertising works

And from there things sort of snowballed. A flimsy little website and lots of personal recommendations soon led to some 4,000 passport photos on Danny’s dining table. As with many things in life, success brought stresses and strains. Soon Danny was feeling that he ought to give the organization some purpose, some meaning. More and more joinees (as he called them) were happy to join in, but more and more of them wanted to know what Danny as Leader wanted them to do.

This was tricky, as Danny hadn’t really thought about the answer to this question. But he had to work it out quite quickly. As he comments:

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever started a cult, but one of the first things you have to do is decide whether to use your powers for good, or for evil. You will already have realised that I decided to work for good. And it was working.²

Following Danny’s decision to get the collective to work for good, cups of tea and pints of beer were bought for strangers, biscuits offered, heavy shopping bags carried. All across the country.

Join-me was born. And with it the Karma-army, an army dedicated to tea and biscuits and RAoKs (‘random acts of kindness’). Danny was overwhelmed again and again by the power of the idea - a simple email led to hundreds of joinees turning up on London’s Oxford Street for ‘Karmageddon’ (a meeting of the collective which included folk from all over the country and - as seems to be required for these kinds of things - one rather jolly Dutchman. The Belgians went ape for it - the Leader found himself on prime-time TV - the Norwegians, Australia and even the USA have felt the power of tea and niceness; and every day at www.join-me.co.uk new joinees are welcomed and electronically hugged by old hands. Try it and see the reception you get.

We want to be together

The curious thing about this phenomenon is not the story of Danny’s great-uncle; nor is his stumbling into a leadership role for which he feels himself most unsuited. No, the curious thing is that all of these people were so happy to join him. And are still keen to join and take part in this little community.

Equally odd but just as heart-warming is the ‘guerilla gardening’ movement. Originally a form of political activism³ for those fighting against both big business and state neglect of the poorest areas of New York City (the Chico Mendes Garden in Little Puerto Rico, NY, is perhaps the most famous), guerilla gardening activities have taken both a hard-line approach (on 1 May 2000,⁴ thousands of guerilla gardeners descended on Westminster’s Parliament Square as one of many protests against global capitalism that took place that year - you may remember the green Mohican that Winston Churchill’s statue developed), and much gentler, less confrontational ones.

One such group is Britain’s own Guerillagardening.org - a loose collective, which shares much the same enthusiastic niceness as Join-me. This jolly crew - all shapes, sizes and ages - identify rundown sites around the UK and descend on them in the dead of night to clear, dig and replant ‘dead’ areas in Britain’s cities. From building sites to central reservations, from communal gardens in rundown estates to planters on derelict streets, the motley crew that are the British guerrilla gardeners transform - for free - the urban world around them. Partly, of course, because they just love gardening; partly, of course, because they enjoy the challenge (it feels kind of heroic). But most of all because other people enjoy it, too. It’s good to do this kind of thing together. It’s great to be together and have something to do together. Together.

These kinds of communities run directly counter to what we tell each other about the modern world. We are individualists now, my client Pat reminds me when I tell him of my herd theory. We all want to be recognized for ourselves, we don’t want to belong, he avers. The modern world is fragmented - the old ties and structures that held our lives together are crumbling. Family, church, states - all of these seem to have much less influence on us than ever before. And the Henley Centre seems to confirm the trend is getting stronger if anything. It has asked a simple question for over 20 years:

Do you think the quality of life in Britain is best improved by:
a. Looking after the community’s interests instead of our own?
Or
b. Looking after ourselves which ultimately raises the standards for all?

From 1994 to 2000, the overwhelming majority of British respondents chose option a; but since then, things have changed. This year, for the first time in a decade, the majority chose option b.

A few years ago one of the USA’s leading trend spotters wrote a book called Bowling Alone based on this very thesis. In magazines and on TV, we are encouraged to believe that everyone is seeking their own unique happiness, their own customized life, the way of living that works uniquely for them. In our private lives, the self-help/amateur therapy voices encourage us to do so in hundreds of kooky ways.

And in marketing, we’ve fallen for this hook, line and sinker. As Roderick White puts it in Admap:⁵

For the last 20 years or so, virtually every commentator on marketing, advertising and consumers has been saying that, along with their media habits, today’s consumers are more individualistic, more fragmented, less easy to categorise.

We all know that customers are more picky and more demanding than ever before - everything needs to appear to be tailor-made to suit each individual and as a result, the notion of mass-customization in jeans, trainers and skincare have all taken off in management meetings and marketing plans. In the last few years marketing has been passionate in pursuing (with the help of computer software vendors and the management consultants) the illusory goal of the one-to-one relationship with all its customers or all the customers it wants to have (see Chapter 5 for more details on the illusory notion of one-to-one). Everywhere you look in the modern world it seems we hear the same message: We are all individuals pursuing our own interests. But is this correct?

Say what you see

When anyone in business or government thinks about the Internet, they tend to see a set of channels through which messages can be sent or products sold. This is wrong. The Internet was founded on the basis of sharing and community; that’s why we users like it. While it is possible to intervene in the online world and indeed send messages to individuals from some central source, it is fundamentally not a ‘channel’ in the sense that TV or newspapers are - it is not a conduit between us and them. In their enthusiasm for all things ‘e-’, commentators and vendors pretend to us that it is, or that it will replace other channels. This is also wrong. (That’s spelt w-r-o-n-g.)

Their excitement also leads such folk to make an even more fundamental error in talking about the Internet (the same is true of mobile telephony fans and their technology): they talk as if this kind of technology has changed us - half-human, half-mouse-pad or some such. ‘Cybercitizens’ or ‘digital consumers’ or the ‘digerati’. Or some such nonsense.

On the first Goldie Lookin Chain album,⁶ the Welsh Rap Collective satirize this fantasy in their song ‘Half man, half machine’ - Eggsy believes he has transformed himself into a robot. But there is one human in Britain who has made himself at least a bit cyber. Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading has had microchips inserted in his body to monitor his physiology and to enable him to interact automatically with his environment at the university. For most of us the truth is very different and will continue to be so, even for Kevin. Whether or not we are heavy users of the Internet, this technology is revealing us as who we have always been: a species whose prime feature is its social nature.

Danny and all his Joinees demonstrate this. So do the other similar force-for-good communities (like www.pledgebank.com on which individuals pledge to do something like write letters to MPs or give up chocolate but only if say 10 others join them).

A we-species

We are programmed to be together. We will move mountains to be together; albeit not necessarily within the old forms and structures but do it we still do. At heart, Join-me and Pledgebank and guerilla gardening and the whole of the Internet tells us we are a ‘we-species’ and not an ‘I-species’. We are community-minded and not selfish as certain political thinkers would have it; community-minded in this most important sense - we are a community species: we want to be together; we are made to be together; we are made by being together and we are made happier by being together. Most of the enormous achievements and technologies that continue to shape our world are the result of our ability to co-operate together. Indeed, without this we would be just another evolutionary curiosity.

Even when we think we are being most individual in the way we present ourselves through the fashions we wear and the way we cut our hair, we are conforming to this same truth. Exactitudes is an ongoing photo project started by Dutch photographer Arie Ver...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One - A ‘We-Species’ with an illusion of ‘I’
• Part Two - The Seven Principles of Herd Marketing
• Part Three - Making Sense of the Herd
• Postscript
• Endnotes
• Index