Tap into the herd instinct

One line of explanation is that each flower is the result of an independent decision based on some cost-benefit trade-off, or is driven by a desire to express an individual's grief. This is what we assume when we conduct marketing research: we ask individual consumers what they do now, why, and what they might do in the future. We also work on the basis that individuals decide what they do independently of others and can tell us about it.

Another approach is to look beyond individuals and consider the possibility that a powerful phenomenon is making them fall into line. This could take the form of a cultural-psychological shift - a 'sentimentalisation' or 'femininisation' of Britain, triggered perhaps by some traumatic external event, such as the death of Princess Diana, or the triumph of working-class culture. However, this does not explain how the behaviour arose, nor its changing nature.

The truth is that mass behaviour - such as the creation of cellotaphs - is not the result of people acting on their own, or of powerful irresistible external forces acting on those individuals. It is instead the product of interaction between individuals, who copy, react to and reinvent what others have done or what they think they will do. In short, we do what we do, largely because of other people.

This simple insight into our herd nature has major implications for the way in which marketers should think about mass behaviour. While it may be news to most marketers, it is not a novel concept. Economist Thomas Schelling described nearly 40 years ago how human lives consist largely of individuals reacting to a context that consists of other individuals and so on.

Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists are still discovering just how much of our brain-power is devoted to interacting with others. All primates show a close correlation between brain size and social-group size, and many experts see humans' relatively large brains as necessary to deal with the big groups we live in. From the primatologists' point of view, homo sapiens has taken the core primate evolutionary strategy of sociability, and moved it on to new heights.

Almost everything of worth in our world - including the power we have over the future of the planet - comes from this herd nature and our ability and passion for social interaction and collaboration. The same is true of the technologies that are reshaping the media environment: SMS and the internet are built on our species' inherent desire and need to interact with others.

Our obsession with the individual is also curiously Anglo-Saxon and is viewed by other cultures as a little odd. The African notion of 'Ubuntu', for example, sees humanity as necessarily interdependent, rather than independent. As one Zulu proverb states: 'A man can be a man only with and through other men.' Ubuntu shapes much of African life from everyday social structures to bodies such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to investigate the crimes committed during the apartheid era in South Africa. Similar ideas persist in Asian, Indian and Latin cultures.

Recognising the herd instinct has important consequences for marketers. For a start, it explains why mass behaviour is so hard to change. Most public-policy initiatives struggle to demonstrate any long-lasting change in citizens' behaviour, while most change programmes within companies fail to produce the radical alterations in employee behaviour specified in the objectives. In addition, for all the hoopla around mergers and acquisitions, it is now generally agreed that about two-thirds of all such deals actually reduce shareholder value, largely because management overestimates its ability to implement the changes in employee behaviour required to achieve the promised synergies driving the deal in the first place.

In theory, marketers should be experts at changing mass-behaviour: after all, we have the experience, analytics and practical tools to understand, describe and reshape it. Putting the consumer at the heart of business is supposedly our raison d'être. And yet, despite the rightly-praised exceptions - Tesco, Dove, Innocent and iPod - most marketing activity struggles to demonstrate the kind of significant sustainable change in customer behaviour that we imagine is our right. Moreover, this has been the case for as long as most of us can remember; marketing scientist Professor Andrew Ehrenberg once suggested that keeping things the same would represent a reasonable success for most promotional campaigns.

We may have become better at managing things well at the edges in the short term. After all, much of the appeal of the revolution in one-to-one marketing over recent years seems to lie in harvesting marginal opportunities - the ‘low-hanging fruit'. But in the main we are no better at creating sustainable changes in mass behaviour than our peers in other disciplines; the changes we do create are minor and fleeting.

Nonetheless, we can make improvements. The first step is to know your herd. Marketers need to stop thinking about individuals acting on their own and throw out the notion of ‘the' consumer. They should recognise instead that human beings are first and foremost social animals; what they do, they always do in the company of others (real or imagined). Study their behaviour in social contexts, recruit samples and define audiences on this basis.

The next step is to look at marketing as consumer-to-consumer, rather than business-to-consumer. This means recognising that the most important relationship is not between the company or brand and any given consumer, but between the latter and other individuals. What matters in real life is what matters to or between them. Marketers should focus on creating social meaning and social utility - things that help real-world social interaction or support the group's interests - rather than forcing meaning on individuals through brainwashing or bribery. Products or services could be devised to be interesting enough to become talked about in the first place.

Marketers should also change how they think about targeting. Forget the concept of individuals who can be reached by certain media channels; instead think of connected, social beings and social groups.

The acceptance of our herd nature is changing the way some media players are evaluating media channel options. While most of the media world is getting excited about moving on from counting audiences and weighting them according to their wallets, to counting them according to how 'engaged' they are with the medium, agencies such as Naked have proposed that the real currency of the media world should be the extent to which an audience passes messages on to others beyond it; the ‘propagation' value. For example, in terms of sales or readership a brand may only reach half the number of people through an ad in The Guardian than in The Daily Telegraph, but each Guardian reader might influence several times the number of people their Telegraph-reading counterpart does.

This is significant, and represents the first major shift away from thinking about media as 'channels' down which we tip messages and information; media become important only in so far as they serve and help advertisers access and harness the power of the social networks which lie behind them.

At the same time, the dubious idea of exploiting the most valuable customers must be ditched. This kind of micro-targeting has no impact on the mechanisms of mass behaviour and risks letting the market move away, suddenly and rapidly.

Instead, marketers should focus on the most influential customer; that is the consumer who holds the greatest sway over the majority of his or her peers. Marketers must understand the types and sources of influence that shape customers' behaviour both positively and negatively (see Influence Mapping case study) and think about how their opinions, and more importantly, their actions, can fuel this.

Finally, marketers must learn to live with uncertainty. As mass behaviour is the result of human-to-human interaction, it is complex and adaptive, but also inherently unstable and difficult to predict. Finding ways of accepting this, rather than pretending to know precisely, will save a lot of time, energy, wasted research budgets and red faces. There are tools for understanding complexity and tools that help predict outcomes better because they harness complexity in human mass behaviour. Just don't expect one individual to get it precisely right, whether expert, consumer or researcher.

The rise of online social networks has created a great deal of interest among marketers in harnessing consumer interaction. But these efforts should not be mistaken for a digital-age phenomenon; mankind has always instinctively acted as a herd species. The brands we consume and the way we consume them are due more to the people around us than the messages we receive now. It is time for marketers to learn how to harness this herd nature.

Case Study: iPod
All too often, marketers worry about what goes on in individuals' heads. These concerns revolve around what consumers remember of advertising, how accurate that recall is, what impressions or associations each has of the brand or its advertising and the extent to which that reflects what marketers, want it to be.

However, it is now clear that what really matters is the degree to which brands help consumers create social meaning in their interaction with other consumers. 'Badge' value, which we aspired to in the 80s, is the simplest example of this, but the phenomenon goes far deeper.

The iPod signals 'badge' through its instantly recognisable white accessories, while its 'Silhouette' launch campaign created the impression of people we aspire to be using the device. Despite the largely private nature of the product's use, it is a social brand.

Skin and haircare brand Dove, meanwhile, has created social meaning in another way. It set out to challenge the beauty industry by seeking to spark discussion about beauty, to reflect the brand owners' underlying commitment to an issue of social importance.

A brand does not have to be 'serious' or 'political' to achieve this social end, however. Nike created a social event through its 10-kilometre ‘Run London' race, which is intended to encourage Londoners to interact around the sport of running and its apparel.

Mark Earls is a planner and is the author of: Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, published by John Wiley & Sons.