Following the Herd
When the iPod came to market in 2001, technophiles waxed rhapsodic and it quickly became the must-have gadget among the geek chic.
Sales, of course, didn’t stop there. The pure lustiness of it all catapulted the device to iconic status with the iPod’s white headphones doing for consumer electronics what the Nike swoosh did for sneakers.
About this Video
This is the first in a ScribeMedia / BrainJuicer innovation series that will include leading thinkers across a number of industries and disciplines. For editorial or sponsorship details, contact us.
Credits
ScribeMedia’s Arts and Culture editor Alexandra Lerman directed and produced this episode.
But what actually happened that brought the iPod to global status symbol while earlier MP3 players like the Diamond Rio ended up in the historical dust bin?
Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.
Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.
In the video above, John Kearon, Chief Juicer of market research firm BrainJuicer, and Earls discuss specific examples of this phenomenon, how the advertising and marketing industry has changed over the years, and what all this means for products, brands and those that create and market them.
Michael Cervieri is Executive Producer of ScribeMedia.Org and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
I am reading Earls’ book now. I can see the application of his thinking for the iPod, but what about less exciting products, such as checking accounts, a can of beans, or getting the oil changed in one’s car? Does his “herd” thesis apply one to some products, and not others?
Thanks for the query Terry.
Yes, it applies to everything: it’s based on human nature not on a marketing technique.
Indeed, it works to explain the spread of all kinds of cultural behaviour - from charity donation to tractors, from kids’ names to
The point with the iPod is that the white earpieces make it really visible and thus easy to copy…
One of the main challenges for marketing big established brands is to create the impression that everyone else is using it (that’s why big TV ads are so popular still); but if you’re a small brand of baked beans, you have to work harder to create the sense that this is what people buy…
Interestingly, a number of folk are taking the Amazon version of this (where the retailer helps individuals see what their peers are doing) and trying to reverse it back into the grocery store so we can see what our peers bought e.g. from the coffee fixture…
Bottom line (after Henry Jenkins): if it don’t spread it’s dead. And if it can’t be seen, it can’t be copied so it won’t spread…