Dazzle Ships

The 'C' word

This is Ferdinand Tonnies.

Ferdinand Tonnies was a German sociologist, who made "perhaps the most important distinction in modern sociology".  Or at least that's what Francis Fukuyama reckoned in The Great Disruption.  And who am I to argue with him?

The distinction was between 'gemeinschaft' and 'gesellschaft', or, if your German's a little rusty, between "community" and "society".

The shift between these two ways of ordering society are what Tonnies was interested in, and forms the basis of the Great Disruption that Fukuyama was discussing.  In social terms, this shift occured in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution which saw mass migration from rural to urban areas and a consequent breaking of the more informal social ties that existed within smaller, rural communities.  As we've talked about before, this period also saw the rise of what we call 'brands' in a modern sense.  This was due to advances in industry, which made mass production possible, but what is also often forgotten is that social disruption also created a social need for brands.  In smaller, rural communities brands are unnecessary - everyone knows where to buy the best bread, meat and so on.  Indeed, anyone trading substandard goods is soon put out of business.   By the power of the community.

It is this word, 'community', that I wanted to talk about.  Communities, it seems, are making a comeback.  We have a Secretary of State for Communities, Hazel Blears.  Inevitably, it's something that has become fashionable in media and advertising circles - target audiences are talked about as communities, rather than individuals and building communities has become as common a campaign objective as growing value share.  (Whether or not this is a good thing is a post for another day, though we definitely covered it on the old blog).

What to make of all this?  Well there are some interesting theories out there.  Fukuyama, for example, believes that we are going through another 'Great Disruption' now, as we move to a post-industrial society or a Knowledge Economy.  He also notes that such a society is based around networks rather than hierarchies.  A shift back to more of a community-based approach to organising our social and working lives.

But enough of this high-falutin' sociology.  How are we to start using these ideas to inform what we're doing.  Well a great start point is here.  It's a section from John Suler's book, The Psychology of Cyberspace, which talks about what makes 'virtual communities' work.  The following nine guidelines feel obvious, but are a great sense-check on some of the, shall we say, 'irrational exuberance' that seems to characterise a lot of the discussions about this topic:

• Define the purpose of the community
• Create distinct gathering places
• Create member profiles that evolve over time
• Promote effective leadership
• Define a clear, but flexible, code of conduct
• Organise and promote cyclical events
• Provide a rnage of roles that couple power with responsibility
• Facilitate member-created groups
• Integrate the online environment with the real world

All good and sensible stuff.  Especially interesting, I thought, was the last point (which Suler actually goes on to discuss in more detail).  We shouldn't be silo-ing different 'communities', based on the channels through which people form and maintain them.

(For more discussion of some of these topics, see the post here, on Clay Shirky's excellent Here Comes Everybody)

-- Toby

The democratiser

Tomorrow brings the election for Mayor of London. Quite a bit of chat of late has been around how Londoners are going to be making their decisions based on gut-feel rather than any true understanding of the different candidates' policies.

No real difference probably to any previous election, to be honest.

In case you're gut is leading your voting hand and you fancy a bit more head-involvement, the internet comes to the rescue. Here's a handy interactive vote matcher that asks you some simple questions about your leanings on different policy issues, then spits out who you should vote for.

Thanks God for the internet and its ability to boil things down for us!

Thanks to Anna for the link.

-- Alex

Cracked it!

Thank you Sally Dickerson, El Presidente for Life of Brand Science, for sending us this article on the future of online measurement (or 'measurology' as it's now called).

We all know digital is different.  Good to see new metrics being developed to really measure the impact of these exciting new opportunities.

My personal favourite :

Zengagement (ZE)

A form of engagement -- a supposed measure of depth of consumer interest in a given site -- in which visitors are so anesthetized by an editorial gimmick that they slip into hyper-relaxed, coma-like states, causing them to linger an unnaturally long time. ZE is commonly prompted by slide shows that progress only with repeated clicks, as well as by listicles (see below), thereby padding page views and time-spent stats.

We need to start building some of these metrics into our planning immediately.

I don't want us looking like we 'don't get it'.

-- Toby

2 minutes of Football Glory

The new NIke Football ad is a great example of creating an extended experience online, without the quality issues of YouTube etc.

Stephen

Flighting, Frequency and Forgetting

Thanks to the excellent folk at Adlab, who drew my attention to this article in Wired. 

It is, nominally, an article about SuperMemo and it's inventor, Piotr Wozniak.  SuperMemo is a software learning programme, usually used for learning languages, and it works on the basis of creating an algorithm for forgetting.  By plotting the forgetting curve, the software can optimise learning by prompting you to practise what you know just before you forget it.  Like so:

Now, I'm sure you've spotted the similarity between the above diagram and an adstock or awareness curve.  Though clearly this is rather more sophisticated.

The article goes on to talk about theories of memory, the sort of thing that Alex often talked about on our old blog.  Two things in particular caught my attention, in terms of how memory works.

The article draws the distinction between 'storage strength' (the depth of memory, if you like) and 'retrieval strength' (the ease with which something is recalled).  It strikes me that largely as an industry we concentrate on the latter - retrieval strength.  Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with this.  It's logical culmintaion being the media idea of recency with which I'm sure you're familiar (if not the link will take you to the master himself, Erwin Ephron). 

If you're unsure how true this is, ask yourself this:  When was the last time you used the term 'top of mind' in a meeting?  Thought so.

But what about 'storage strength', does this have a place in what we do?  Or is it the preserve of client marketing departments and branding agencies?  Or, worse, brands that have spent many years, and, probably, millions of pounds, building that elusive metric, brand equity?

Well, the answer is of course it has a place.  And, actually, you don't need millions of pounds anymore.  Let's go back to that word 'depth'.  If retrieval strength is dictated by coverage, frequency, recency and the like, the storage strength is dictated by what are now referred to as the 'new' metrics of interaction, stickiness, pass on potential etc.

But, as any psychologist will tell you, you need both strengths to really make an impact.  Let's make sure we don't forget that.

-- Toby

The agony of choice

Just about every presentation we do these days talks at some point about the explosion of choice available to consumers, particularly in media but also in brands. We've talked before about how the human brain can't really cope with too much information and therefore adopts strategies to deal with such situations. Large amounts of choice is one such situation. And the strategy often adopted with too much choice is to avoid choice altogether.

I'm pretty sure we've mentioned the classic Iyengar & Lepper 'jam' experiment before. This basically showed that, given large amounts of choice in a shopping situation, customers were less likely to purchase than when given smaller amounts of choice. Have a look here if you've not read the piece (skip to the General Discussion if short of time). Wide choice precipitates choice deferral, or even total avoidance.

More experimental evidence has come about showing how greater choice messes up our reasoning and decision-making processes.

Put simply, we have a tough time choosing. Which is why there has been all the talk around 'brand lighthouses' and the like for some time. If a brand can build a relationship with consumers so that it can be their guide in making choice decisions (by simplifying choice - i.e. being the default) then it can occupy a strong position in this choice-rich world.

But it's not only choice between brands. Now we see massive amounts of choice within brands too. When was the last time you tried to buy a branded shampoo? Suddenly you're faced with fifteen options according to hair style, colour, condition, occasion...aaargh, stop it, I'm running away!

Consumers need guidance. Now the internet is great for that kind of thing. I came across this interactive guide from Olay that advises which skincare routine to use. It's quite a supportive, soothing experience, which does a good job in leading you to an Olay-packaged solution that you could be quite likely to take up. See what you could need.

All well and good, but the purchase pathway for FMCG can be pretty short, so what about when I'm losing the will to live in Tesco's power aisle? Well, P&G have been pretty neat in this regard in the US by taking the interactive tool for Olay into the instore environment itself. So now you can find out your needs directly at point of sale and make your selection accordingly and immediately.

This kind of technology is unlikely to be the simplest to implement, given the muscle of the retailers, but it's a great way to help consumers manage their choice and manage them into your brand.

-- Alex

Reality mining

   

No, this is not a post about anyone setting up 'New Yorkshire' in Second Life.

In the 'future of communications' presentation that we produced a little while back, we talked about how technology is driving us to a new phase in communications where we will get all behavioural. Developments in mobile technology in particular, driving more and more convergence of utilities, will mean we are able to contact individuals with messages tailored to where they are (from GPS), what they're interested in/researching (from mobile content viewing) and where they might be in the path to purchase (from mobile usage history). We can get more and more exact with our message and therefore (hopefully) more and more useful to consumers and more effective in influencing their behaviour.

Well, it appears this trend in behaviourism is hot. It must be, because MIT are talking about it. And they know about stuff.

One of MIT Technology Review's top 10 trends for 2008 is called 'reality mining'. This is basically mining the data in normal human behaviour in order to elicit information about people's relationships to one another, social heirarchies and even personal state of affairs. The article discusses work from the academic Sandy Pentland, who used data from mobile phone conversations (such as speech patterns) and GPS information to build predictive models of human behaviour. I'll not go into the detail, have a read about it here.

Some interesting, and some quite frightening, possibilities come out of this. Monitoring everyday behaviour through these simple and ubiquitous technologies would allow identification of members of social groups who are connectors - an interesting prospect within bringing Influence thinking to life. On the scary side, the monitoring of speech patterns in conversation could be used to diagnose personal issues such as onset of depression.

It's this kind of ongoing and 'under the radar' monitoring that has people worried in this area. Issues of privacy would be central to this, much as they are already with behavioural data online.

You can start to see the potential for ever more behaviourally targeted messages through innovations in analysis such as this. How ethical this is, and how comfortable we'd be employing and being subject to such data collection are issues we'll have to come to terms with.

-- Alex