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).

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. 

is FIFA a starfish or a spider?

I was watching BBC news earlier today with a chap from the federation of football supporters or some such being interviewed.

He was lending his weight to the controversy currently surrounding FIFA and was very much of the view that professional football doesn’t work without fans and professional organisations. Which I agree with. He ended his speech however by comparing what is happening at FIFA with what’s going on in North Africa – and there I had to leave him. It did get me thinking though…

One of my favourite sports books is ‘Football against the enemy’ which sets out as its founding principle that other than religion, football is the biggest mass participatory thing that humans do, and as such it is important. Very important. And I also think this is true.

To change course momentarily.

Something seems to have been very rotten in FIFA for a while. Something unpleasant certainly seems to be happening at the moment and it seems to be to the detriment of the beautiful game. Which is sad.

Yesterday a number of FIFA sponsors stood up and made a couple of vaguely strong worded statements about how FIFA really should get its house in order. The BBC’s point was that stronger conversations were presumably being had behind closed doors. Good.

It is not good enough that something so important to so many of us is run by (what seems to be) at best a highly secretive organisation.

One more digression.

Another book worth a read is called ‘the starfish and the spider’ it is about leaderless organisations and how if you cut the main part off a centralised unit (Spider), it stops working, whereas if you cut the main bit off a leaderless body (Starfish) it continues – and even grows into multiple bodies.

So here’s the point and the comparison between North Africa and Fifa that does stand discussion.

What sort of organisation is FIFA? Will cutting its head off (by which I stress I am only referring to removing Blatter from power), result in a different sort of organisation?

Libya, it is assumed, is a spider. Al Qaeda… is hopefully a spider but probably more of a Starfish.

FIFA because of its complex internal structures only answerable to its own members may well be a starfish… let’s hope not. Football is just too important to run on self interest.

Second tier sponsorships

I was driving past Carrow Road the other day, when I saw some tactical ads for the Barclay’s Premier league. In essence they were a nice little ‘welcome back’ to Norwich city and its fans in 48 and 6 sheet format, all bought in proximity to the football ground. All in all very nice.

I’ve done a lot of work over the years on sponsorships of one type or another - ranging from beer companies and football cups, to financial organisations and rugby trophies and insurance providers and athletics, heck I’ve even done some work on the premier league.

Now, obviously, the most high profile sponsorships are of the flagship properties The Premier League, The FA Cup, The Heineken Cup, The FIFA world Cup (ahem, less desirable now? discuss). But what about the others… the minnows… the vast pyramid system supporting the top tier? Who sponsors them? And frankly why do they bother?

Swansea City were promoted yesterday, via the play-offs, to the top tier. As a football fan I extend them a warm welcoming hand and note that they were one of the better sides I saw in the championship all year. All in all thoroughly deserved (justice is done… ahem? QPR? Any Cardiff fans discuss). And presumably there’ll be nicely placed tactical ads all around the Liberty stadium for the next two weeks. My question is… what becomes of the Npower championship?

For most championship fans the experience of the second tier is a painful one, punctuated by financial disaster and memories of the good old days in the Prem’. When they eventuially do get promoted, the sponsor is forgotten in a minute and all attention becomes focused on preparations for the next challenge. So why sponsor it?

The justification for second tier sponsorship is often about grass roots. We’re the real fan because we support the lower tiers. Well… no actually. You’re just a brand sponsoring the league we don’t really want to be in and if you treat us like you do premier fans we’re going to get annoyed. – I lost count of the number of Sky adverts I’ve seen in Championship toilets with grinning images of Chelsea and Man Utd players looking down on me.

Second tier sponsorships have to be about the fans, not the competition, not the ‘grass roots’… and to do this you need to do a few things.

Understand them – look at what they actually do.

Championship fans for example tend not to go near the football ground in the closed season. Proximity targeting fans there is a waste of money – I’m talking to you ‘the premier league.’

They also resent being told that you have a unique offer for them when every tom dick and harry is offering the same thing (you know who you are).

They hate the fact they have to sit through Match of the Day to get to the football league show.And they are some of the biggest users of the iplayer – for exactly this reason.

Here is my plea: Talk to real fans (there are millions of them). Ask them what they do on a match day, ask them why they do it. Ask them their frustrations; listen to how you can help. Then and only then act. And after it’s all over maybe, just maybe they’ll believe you’re on their side.

I’m not criticism second tier sponsors, I’m just saying if you’re going to spend your money that way, make sure you do it properly.

Politwits and deselection – why not to use social networks for personal politics

I like new words as much as the next man – spuffle is my favourite, it’s the word Hugh Laurie created to describe the foamy cover you put over a microphone.  So here’s a new one for you… Politwit. Go on then, I hear you ask derisively, if you must, what is it? And the answer, drum roll please…

Politwit

Noun

A person who makes a political point on a social network (e.g. twitter)

The verb should be easy enough to derive…

Over recent months I’ve noticed (as I’m sure we all have) the increasing trend towards using social media to make political points. Just about every modern political party is busy sinking their hands into the new social media opportunity – and this is all good and fine, I guess.

Now politicians spend a lot of time being boring. It’s expected of them. Invite a local councillor to dinner and you almost expect, after a glass or two of sherry, a discussion on PR or the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre (a hot issue where I’m from fifteen years ago, and one I saw Alan Partridge lampoon live at the Theatre Royal Norwich on one memorable occasion). Invite a Euro MP to tea and… well it’s likely to be expensive. Normal people on the other hand, tend not to bang on about politics so much.

Actually I talk quite a lot about politics, which is probably why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties. My point here is that most people you know on a social or superficial level don’t make sweeping political statements all that much.

So, yesterday the UK went to the polls. It was dubbed ‘Super Thursday’ by the media, though it had no shiny costume, cloak or pants as far as I could see. In the build up to polls opening social networks were awash with everyday people making political points (I did it myself). And to some extent this is all part of a healthy democracy. To some extent.

The problem is, I didn’t sign up to social networks so people could push things I don’t believe in at me. Most of my social friends and followers are business colleagues, mates, acquaintances and people who I can’t be arsed to send Christmas cards to… not you of course, I like you.

What I don’t want from these people, and what they almost certainly don’t want from me, is pushy political ‘Vote for X’, hilarious political cartoons clearly commissioned by X central office, or clever but misleading points on electoral reform.

In short the content did not match the context, and it failed to do so because we were making political points.

It doesn’t happen with these people in the real world. It shouldn’t happen online.

Stephen Fry (whom I love, and I expect to see at tomorrow’s post season celebration down at carra Rud. On the ball City! Etc.), spent ages trying to convince us that AV was the right choice – and he may have had a point, however that’s not why we all follow him. We follow him because we love him, because he’s warm, clever, amusing and a national treasure – not because of his political views. Which makes him (and me I hasten to add) a Politwit.

I’ll go further. Over the last few days I’ve seen loads of people saying that they are getting bored of Mr Fry (I’m not, I love him). I suspect this has more to do with politics than any sudden dislike of the man. I’ll call this ‘Deselection’ – see what I did there.

Politweet too much and you get deselected. Nice, and at the same time sickly huh?

It’s not just politicians. Recently a rash of charitable campaigns have sprung up insisting we change our status to reflect their views… and if we don’t. If we don’t... nothing actually. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter to tell people I support cancer charities (which I do, very much as people who know me well will tell you). I’m on Twitter because I like to tweet and to hear what others have to say. I’m on facebook for all kinds of reasons – but not for politics.

The lesson is obvious and as old as the hills – the content must match the context.

The buzzwords are new and instantly forgettable – Politweet and get Deselected.

There you go.