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. 

Happiness and the caveman

There’s been a lot in the media recently about what makes people happy.

The government, and particularly the Prime Minister (UK) is driving the question and it seems to be causing a fair amount of controversy.

The argument goes thus:

Why are we fixated on the creation of wealth. The creation of wealth is assumed to make people happy… but what if it doesn’t. What if people are made happy by other things? Things like bank holidays and meals out. What if we’ve been concentrating on the wrong objective all these years.

One of the reasons the government is keen on this direction is so they can ask people what makes them happy, and in doing so make them think the government cares – it’s a good PR exercise. The other reason is that it seems to make some sense.

I was listening to some vox pops the other day on the lunchtime news, in which people were saying things like:

‘Lie ins make me happy’, ‘A good meal’, ‘My job’, ‘My family and friends’… etc etc.

What struck me was how like cave men (and women) they all sounded. None of the reasons cited were much different from those that might have been mustered by your average hole dweller (presumably with a few more ‘ugs’ (not the boot) and references to dry bear fur).

I mentioned this thought over breakfast today to find out that this has been known for years and that somehow I’d managed to overlook it. It was one of those theories you hear bandied around from time to time but never actually take the time to read. I subsequently read it.

So in a nutshell Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seems to tell us what we need to know:

Its good simple stuff and I am embarrassed to say I haven’t bothered to look into it before.

At the base you have your basic psychological stuff (Hunger, thirst etc) – these translate into ‘a nice meal makes me happy’, ‘I like a nice arm duvet’.

Then comes the safety stuff: ‘I like job security’, ‘I like a lie in’ (warm safe bed)…

Then there’s social needs: ‘I love my friends’, ‘I love my mobile phone’…

Then comes self esteem: ‘I like my job’, ‘I like being a good mum/dad’

Finally comes self actualisation: ‘I like completing things that make me feel good about myself’ (complex projects at work etc).

Essentially people climb the pyramid. Once you’ve achieved the bottom rung you move up to the second… etc. It all makes sense and explains quite a bit.

Now this is all pretty basic stuff and has moved on a bit since its conception (see ERG theory which allows you to be trying to achieve multiple levels of satisfaction at one time and blurs the boundaries between tiers), but you get my point.

There’s nothing new here. It’s just that no-one’s really bothered to think about it in policy terms before – oh and because it makes for good ‘honestly we are listening to your needs’ PR…

Two more thoughts I think I’ll come back to at some point:

1)      The rise of social networking, its fulfilment of the social need in the hierarchy and what this means for comm’s planning.

2)      A nice paragraph from the late great Douglas Adams – proving of course that there is nothing new here:

‘The planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.’