Using the Herd to Promote Your Ideas
Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.
Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.
While the talk in the video above is about and for commercial brand managers and marketers, there are considerable lessons to be learned by the NGO, non-profit and governmental agency communities. This primarily includes how to inject ideas into the public sphere, have them take hold in the collective imagination and develop a life of their own.
It’s certainly true that the Apple Logo on the back of the screen is for others to see, not the computer owner. I hadn’t thought about the white earphones having a similar purpose. Sharfstein and Stein (American Economic Review, 1990) have an important paper on herd behavior in the financial industry. Earls applies many of the same thoughts to marketing and consumer behavior.
good to know about the Apple Logo on the back of the screen. I’ve always been curious why the logo on the back. I am the one of people who bought a macbook when I saw the other people’s macbook or the Apple logo on the computer.