Parting is such sweet sorrow

Parting is such sweet sorrow…

…which doesn't make it right necessarily. It does, however, require (almost by definition) more effort.

Staying, on TheOtherHand, is normally easy. It requires no positive action other than doing what you're already doing. It comes across as a bit lazy. It's passive. Sure you can 'stay the course', 'Stand your ground'... 'Stand tall' was the latest version I heard the other day (more of which another time), but each of these iterations requires a back story, some imagination. Simply staying, or worse remaining, is passive.

And this, at heart, is the problem of communications for the EU referendum 'in' campaign. It lacks a direction of travel. And because it lacks this movement from something - to something better, it lacks emotion.

'What do we want?'
'More of the same!'
'When do we want it?'
'Ummmm...'

Let's dial back a bit.

The 'In' camp in the EU referendum have decided to concentrate on the economic argument, and have done so for what they consider to be sound, rational reasons. I won't bore you with them here, but put briefly, they think economics will win them the vote. It won't.

What will win the in camp the vote (if indeed they do win), is the great big element they've completely ignored so far. The moderately good news for them is that they are slowly (and ham-fistedly, waking up to it). Namely, Emotion. Or more specifically passion.

The in campaign is lacking the emotion which bridges the gap between numbers and people. Between economics and aspiration. I'll say it again, passion.

'Leave' naturally entails passion. You have to leave for a reason, you must have a cause.
'Remain' doesn't.

And passion isn't something we Brits express very well, particularly when we are a bit embarrassed.

The other week, I came across #hugabrit - a response from some of our Euro chums to make us Brits realise that they love us and want us to say, (in the absence of a vote a hashtag has to do). The problem of course is that we Brits (on the whole), don't like to be hugged (except by our nearest and dearest of course), and certainly not by the French (that is a joke, please don't write in).

The point here being that if the 'in' campaign wants to secure all the votes it can get, then it needs to find its mojo… some real homegrown passion, and be quick about it.

I honestly have no idea why this obvious lack hasn’t been picked up by ‘in’ strategists and planners. Maybe it’s because the ‘in’ camp is so divided across party lines, and maybe this division leads to interest groups doing their own thing rather than focusing their effort (this is definitely a problem – though maybe not merely concerning the point above) on clear agreed messages.

I’ve worked in communications for a long time now, and fairly early on was taught that if you want to sell a drill bit, you don’t sell the hole in the wall… you sell the joy of having your painting on your wall or maybe the satisfaction of using a power tool (it depends on your audience. The same is true of the EU… cold economics don’t cut it.

Theresa May, the other day, told prospective voters to ‘stand tall and lead in Europe’… and this is exactly the type of half-cocked waking up to the need for emotion I was talking about earlier. It says I’m passionate… but not about being European (presumably because that would be unpopular with voters), it says I’m passionate… because Grrrrrrrrrr… hope and glory… Fair enough, it does say I want to stay in Europe and we should lead the way, but it’s still missing the point.

Here’s the question. Why do you Theresa May (insert any other name you wish), want to stay in the EU? Why are you passionate about it? What delights you about being European? What wonders are we missing out on if we choose to #Brexit.

That, in short, is what’s missing.

So here’s my own personal view, and many people will disagree with me but its true and I think it’s worth saying. I should also say that I’ve considered the economics, the defence issues, the freedom of movement problems, the impact on the Union of the UK… but that is not what I want to say. Here’s me:

I was born in 1975, I was born a European. I’ve lived in Europe all my life.
My God-daughter is Belgian, my wife is Welsh. I love being European.
I love exploring my continent. I love its food*, I love its cultures, I love the people… I wish I was better at speaking its languages.
I am also British. I was born in England, Britain and Europe - there is no contradiction in this. I love exploring my country, love its food, its nations, cultures, foods and peoples.
And, I will be really unhappy if we vote to leave all this behind.

 ...Oh and if you don’t agree with me, fine. Just don’t tell me you’re more passionate about your view than I am mine. You're not.

 Whatever we vote later this year… Fine. We’re all grown-ups**, and we made up our minds. I just hope that we can find a way to move forward together (the UK and the EU), that we are not bogged down by continuous neverendums on either side, but that we knuckle down and start to deal with the huge issues this country and continent are currently facing.

Fin.  

(as they say at the end of European films - which I generally quite like).

 

(*except croissants – I’ve never understood them)

(**except the 16 and 17 yr olds  who weren’t allowed to vote on the single biggest political decision to impact on their lives:))

The only interesting Jubilee advert in Britain

I was wandering through Vauxhall bus station this morning when I saw this:

It’s an advert taken out by Muslimsforpeace celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee. For me it is the most interesting use of the Jubilee for advertising I’ve seen.

My first reaction was to feel touched. My thinking was - isn’t it nice that British Muslims want to demonstrate their feelings of pride around the Queen. And to an extent I still feel this.

On closer inspection there is more going on here than may first appear:

• Why should British Muslims feel they have to advertise their support for the Jubilee?
• Equally, why shouldn’t they?
• What right do I have to feel ‘isn’t it nice that British Muslims want to demonstrate their feelings...’? And what does it say about me (and British society) that I felt this at all. After all they are as British as me – why should I feel like that?
• Muslimsforpeace is an interesting concept... As far as I know we’re not at war with muslims. Though I get the need to support worldwide efforts for peace in general.
• Alternatively, is this a Trojan Horse – is it a religious magnet to draw us in with a message of peace and unity. And in fact, is there anything wrong with this approach?
• Finally, could the money have been better spent on a ping pong table for the local mosque? (I have, in fairness to attribute this view to a muslim colleague).

Whatever the thinking behind, and outcome of the advert, for me it is the only piece of Jubilee based communications which has made me think more deeply than ‘She’s been around for 60 yrs, isn’t it marvellous.'

 

Certainly beats the run of the mill ads and products I’ve seen around all month.

 

 

 

What do you think?

Schelling points and football chants

Communication, Schelling points and the football.

I go to the football. I go regularly and like to sing and jump up and down.

When I was a child I would occasionally go to the football with my step dad and brother . From my seat I can still see the space where we used to stand as a kid and happily (for I am a Norwich fan), I can still hear the same songs we sang all those years ago (for those not in the know Norwich has the oldest football song in the world - the glorious ‘On the Ball City!’ – containing reference to having ‘a little scrimmage, a practise which disappeared from association football many many many years ago). I digress.

At the beginning of each match, an echoey voice crackles over the speaker system and counts the faithful down into their fortnightly rendition of ‘On the ball’ – it is one of my favourite moments in life.

Like many people I wonder in awe at football songs. Where they come from, how they spread, how it is that an individual can be singled out and a song composed in their honour (or detriment) within seconds of an incident. Football is a wonder.

Thomas Schelling is also a wonder, though he is not a football.



Thomas Schelling on the cover of his book



Thomas Schelling is a Nobel winning economist, strategist and game theory guru, after whose work is named ‘the Schelling point’. For those not in the know, a Schelling point is really useful. It describes a position which people will tend to adopt in the absence of communication. A Shelling ‘moment’ is the instant where a group of people act as one, in the same way without overt communication.

What in the world is Tony on about, I hear you cry (it’s not an uncommon sound).

There is a moment in every football loving adolescent’s life when he decides to hitch up his trousers, lower his voice a few octaves and start his (or her) own chant. Without the right conditions, this process is almost certainly doomed to failure. I know I’ve tried.

Chants I have failed to start:

·         ‘Your team’s irrelevant’ – to some Italian opera tune that is impossible to describe if you are typing and don’t know its name

·         ‘Come on ref that’s preposterous!’ – To the tune of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’

Chants I have joined in with and quite like:

·         ‘We’ve got more salt than you’ – aimed at the 30 or so Cardiff fans who were able to make the treck from Wales in during the big freeze a couple of years ago.

·         ‘It could have been you (oh Sammy Klingan!)’ – which the other three Norwich fans out there will get, aimed at a player who left Norwich upon our relegation to league 1 two years ago… sung on the final day, two years later, of the season that saw us promoted back to the Premier league.

·         ‘We shoot bur-ga-lars, say we shoot bur-ga-lars’ in reference to Tony Martin, a Norfolk farmer imprisoned for shooting burglars. Usually sung at Liverpool, Hull or West Ham fans.

·         ‘Ooo, arrrgh lets be avin yer!’ sung in honour of our delightful patron Delia, and her bibo centric activities.

·         Numerous, far from savoury anti Ipswich numbers which I will not repeat here.

The point is that they are all funny, clever (I think), erupt spontaneously, and suddenly spread to engulf a crowd. Their inception is a Schelling moment, where unbidden 26 odd thousand supporters suddenly erupt into song unbidden by pre-training or communication. It is, as I say, a wonderful thing.

 Why am I talking about this?

Firstly Schelling didn’t develop the theory to describe football songs, he was (amongst other things) talking about riots…

Why a riot kicks off is a difficult thing to say, but it is usually set aflame by a Schelling event. This is normally a window being smashed (since they are visual, potent symbols of rebellion and make a lot of noise – which means crowd members not in the line of sight hear about them).

Now for a Schelling event to take place, there are normally any number of other factors in place. All of which add up to people being primed. I offer two examples:

In a riot:

·         People turn up with the expectation that something will happen.  (Expectation)

·         There are generally far fewer authority figures than crowd members. (Empowerment – or a sense of it)

·         Signals are given off between crowd members (nervousness, defensive clothing, common/group language etc…)(Behavioural cues)

·         There is an underlying sense of dissatisfaction (not always about the target of the action) (Emotion)

At the football

·         There is expectation that there will be a good singsong (Expectation)

·         The crowd assumes authority (Empowerment)

·         Common clothing, commonly understood banter, nerves, posturing  etc are shared (Behavioural cues)

·         A prevailing sense your relation to the team e.g. D0isappointment, Excitement, Pride (Emotion)

I think this is interesting.

When we plan campaigns that encourage people to influence each other, or indeed when we plan a campaign that needs a bit of added oompf, we often look for a hook to build them round… something people do naturally.

Summer holidays, pre-Christmas, the football, the great British Sunday roast, Big brother…

Which is interesting.

I think we can learn lots by considering the common factors that prime for Schelling events.

·         How can we recreate the sense of anticipation at a football match?

·         How do we allow the audience to take control of a communication (rather than try to talk at them)? (authority point)

·         How do we use no bought channels to get them to share the communication (verbal and non-verbal) with each other (think about iPod earphones)?

As an aside, sponsorships aren’t normally sold on the basis that they allow people to communicate and act around common ground, but maybe they should be.

This weekend I will be attending Norwich City vs Stoke. The first game we have played in the top flight for 6 years. I am looking forward to the football so much that I can hardly think properly (which may account for the rambling nature of the above), but I am also looking forward to the Schelling point where after the countdown 27,000 fans (minus the away support), as one voice sing out our anthem.

On the ball city! (or OTBC as web savvy canaries like to say).

Love walls

I like those post-it walls.

For those of you who’ve not come across them yet, post-it or ‘Love’ walls are a response to the riots that hit London recently.

Areas affected by the riots now play host to walls on which locals have spontaneously stuck post-its, with simple heart-felt messages relating to the events.

As the BBC point out, there is generally nothing poetic or complex about these messages, just a simple ‘1 heart Croydon’ or ‘don’t burn my town’.

Some commentators have seen these walls as an analogue response to the way smart phones were used by the rioters – I think this is nonsense. To relate smart phones to rioting is like relating pagers to football hooligans. Sure these people used these channels, but they’re not somehow tools of evil. Smart phones were used in organising the clean up that followed the riots as well.

What is interesting, I think, is that people seem to be using post-its as a public way of communication. As a way of saying ‘I am a part of this community and I care’.

Over the years successive governments have legislated (explicitly an implicitly) to rip the hearts out of communities. As a result today, people feel alienated from public spaces and unempowered to connect with each other. Post-it walls are a way of reconnecting with community.

I gather that some libraries and museums are talking about preserving the love walls for the future. I think this is both lovely and amusing – there’s a part of me that finds the concept of putting short term outpourings on permanent display somehow artistic.

Mass influence, post riot political correctness and... yup communications.

I’m not for one minute defending them but...

I was chatting to a colleague of mine the other day and our conversation strayed, for a moment away from communications and on to the riots.

Over the past week of so I’ve noted that conversations of this type tend to follow a pattern:

·         What was your experience of the event (Experience).

·         Isn’t it awful (Empathy).

·         What’s your theory (Explanation).

Two people talking about things at work

Theories are then traded for a bit until a kind of nodding consensus descends on proceedings... Oh and empathy and experience often get switched around dependent on who you’re talking to and their connection to the event, (By the way, If I was trying to convince a client of something I’d probably re-order this type of chat, but there you go).

Anyway, once you get past the second (Empathy) bit of the conversation there is almost always a pause followed by one of two things; either an outright declamation against the rioters or (and here’s my point), this:

‘I’m not for one minute defending them, but...’

I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly because, most right minded people aren’t actually defending the acts of the rioters in London, but (and importantly), because we all feel under a tremendous amount of unspoken pressure from everyone else to behave in a certain way. Being seen to in any way defend anything to do with the riots is, currently, a massive taboo in English society.

Now I’m not for one minute saying the riots are anything like the death of Princess Diana... but I do remember quite clearly how, for a certain period after her death, if you did anything other than praise her as the princess of hearts you were shouted down by the mob. Come to think of it the same was true of Jade Goody too.

This is interesting for all kinds of reasons.

·         Mob (herd) mentality governs the way we think a lot more than we ever admit to.

·         This kind of influence can if we’re not very very careful, lead to dangerous actions based on ulterior motives or just bad thinking (think about the reactions of the main political parties to the rioting...).

·         It may well be the same mechanism that leads to otherwise ‘respectable’ people committing reprehensible acts in mob situations, that guides our thinking in the wake of such events.

There’s loads to be explored here, and when I get the chance I’ll have a proper think about it and try to write something more useful.

 Next up - what the new Premier League Football Season can teach us about mob entrepreneurialism. or 'Kick it off...'

Riots, stock market crashes... and metastable states.

Rioting. Very Nasty.

There’s been a lot in the news about rioting recently, and for good reason. It’s everywhere, and it’s very unpleasant.

London riot police

My own particular lowlights were:

• Seeing Mr Reeves Snr and Jnr of Croydon heartbroken by the devastation of their family business.
• Seeing the bus stop where I used to awkwardly wheel my (then) baby daughter to the pavement on fire in Ealing.
• Talking to a colleague whose local tube station was the centre of the Clapham disturbances last night.

The obvious thing to start talking about now is social networking, maybe drawing some parallels with the Arab Spring – at least in terms of how it has influences behaviour. I won’t do this. Everyone else will.

Instead I’d like to dwell for a moment on phase transitions.

A diagram

For those of you not in the know phase transitions are those things in physics when a substance turns from being in one state into being in another. Water into steam, butter into liquid, orange juice into refreshing lollipop etc.

Under normal circumstances substances tend to operate in equilibrium states. The obvious thing to do here is talk about water, but for fact lovers out there… mercury freezes at around -39 degrees c and boils at 357 degrees on the same scale… so below -39 solid is mercury’s equilibrium state, above 357 degrees it’s a gas and in between it’s the liquid that we all know and love.

However it is entirely possible for substances to persist in a state outside their equilibrium. Known as ‘Metastable’, And this is where things start to get interesting… Gas in a snow cloud for example can stay as a gas, or liquid in temperatures way below the point where water (or presumably mercury) would normally freeze.

The point here is that metastable states aren’t terribly stable. It just takes a little reaction (nucleation) to transform some of the uber cold gas or water into a solid and the whole cloud can suddenly change… And what you get is a snow storm.

Back to the riots…

…Or if you want another example, back to the recent stock market slump.

The theory then is that certain pockets of society are living in a state you could describe as metastable.

In general society people have a reasonable standard of living. They feel safe, happy, part of the bigger group and empowered. In certain areas – and particularly with youngsters in these areas this is not happening. They are in effect metastable.

All it takes is a nucleation and they all (all the rioters at least) spontaneously change.

I think this is a really good explanation of why the current riots (and the recent stock market slump) happened – or at least how they happened when they did.

Clearly this is not my thinking. It was pioneered by a chap called Phillip Ball, and then taken on as part of Mark Earl’s book on Herd theory.

I think it’s worth a look, or failing that it’s worth pondering its applications to marketing – which I think are considerable.

Meanwhile, on the ground I wish all concerned in sorting the rioting out the very best.

Consumers don't make decisions how you think they do

Consumers don’t make decisions how you think they do.

Or at the very least, most marketers don’t act like they understand how consumers make decisions.

sweets - kid in a candy store... see what I did there?

My wife is very intuitive… or at least that’s what she says when confronted by me telling her she hasn’t thought something through properly. I’m the type of person that over analyses everything.

I’ve often scoffed at ‘intuitive’ people who make decisions on gut feel …By all means make decisions based on rules you’ve perfected over years of practise but making decisions based on some emotional hunch is just plain scary.

Except, apparently, this is the way we all make decisions. We do not analyse everything objectively. We do not rationally consider all of the factors in our paths. We are all intuitive decision makers.

A while ago (‘02) Daniel Kahnemann won the Nobel Prize for economics for work he did into this area. In a nutshell he claims.

The first step in decision making is intuitive. We narrow the options based on rules of thumb we have taught ourselves, and occasionally gut feels.

We avoid the weirdo rocking strangely on the tube since we know unpredictability on the late night train is seldom a good thing. We avoid unlit alleyways. Turn down the ‘can’t lose’ money making scheme our unreliable mate presents us with. We choose a wine in a certain price bracket (often foolishly) etc etc. None of these decisions is thought through to the minuteist detail. We generalise.

The second step may sometimes be rational and considered. But this by no means happens all the time. Most of the time we just do stuff on gut instinct. I correct my balance when I get to the edge of a cliff, I pull the money out of my pocket to pay for a Big Mac blah blah blah.

What is interesting is that individuals often claim to have done things for certain reasons when actually they did nothing of the sort… they were driven by emotions and generalisations (Heurisms).

A lot of communications companies focus on the consumer journey these days – and well they should, the consumer should be at the heart of everything we do etc etc. But these consumer journeys are more often than not constructed from claimed rationalisation rather than actual emotional drivers.

I just think it’s worth a thought that maybe we should be building some emotion and generalisation into our models… and maybe start thinking about how these generalisations are formed.

Ho hum. I found it interesting anyway.