Victims of our own ‘herd’ mentality?

I’ve just started reading Mark Earl’s new book Herd. I’m only a few chapters in at the moment but it seems fascinating so far. What initially struck me is the fact that our industry is a victim of its own herd mentality, with a new, unconfirmed one trying to break out. Let me explain.

There are three things that are really getting me thinking at the moment – interestingness, marketing enthusiasm and transmedia planning. All of which are imaginatively simple but not that easy to articulate to other people, particularly if starting your own agency isn’t on your CV. The thing I love about blogging is that you can get your hands on new observations from smart people without having to wait for their book to come out.

However, I do sometimes feel a bit isolated, these approaches can be hard to diffuse until it reaches the world of print. As a young planner peddling this stuff around the agency and talking to clients about it, I find that some don’t get it, some think it’s a fad or more often than not I get a response along the lines of; ‘That’s fascinating…but lets do it the usual way instead, maybe next time’. This is then followed by a pat on the head and probably some mumblings about me being bright, enthusiastic but not having much ‘commercial awareness’.

Commercial awareness is obviously important, but I think they mix this up with not conforming to agency processes, conventions and culture, or the herd. It frustrates me that agencies and clients have constructed their own realities to such an extent that they are stopping themselves from progressing and as a result being more successful.

We all seem to have lost touch with the concept of human nature and that is why I believe these approaches are hard for people to adopt. By focusing on human nature, which is sometimes hard to understand and most of all hard to measure, they make things seem simpler. As complex people, who like to make things even more complicated, we hate anything that might be too easy for us to comprehend.

I was in Dublin over New Year and there is a quote on the monument of Oscar Wilde that really stood out: “Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple and the simple thing is the right thing”. My aim for the next few weeks is to be a thorn in the side of our existing Herd mentality and try and sow the seeds of a new one. Not exactly sure what that is yet, but I do know it’s different, or at least more human.