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Description
The dominant view of the consumer as an individual should be replaced with the more accurate model of the consumer as acting as part of the herd. Evidence for this is gathered from a variety of scientific fields. The paper concludes that moving to the herd model will allow researchers to provide more accurate and useful insights into consumer behaviour. This paper was joint winner of the Best New Thinking award at the 2003 Market Research Society Conference.
Introduction
This paper is born out of a feeling that something is not right with the way the word 'consumer' is used nowadays. This word must surely be one of the most frequently used in the lexicon of advertising, marketing and research language. Yet it has not been subject to the huge attention or to the rigour of analysis as has the word 'brand'.
(Valentine & Gordon 2000)
This paper is charged with the same sense of dissatisfaction. A feeling that there is more to be said about the subject. A frustration with the current models (including that proposed by Valentine and Gordon's insightful paper) for missing some big and important truths about how human beings are. And the belief that these 'missing truths' might contribute to a significantly more insightful and effective approach to marketing and market research.
In particular, we suggest that the most important characteristic of mankind is that of a herd animal, not a lone individual. Despite our (culturally determined?) protestations to the contrary (and the effort that has been made over many years to understand the mechanisms of the individual human), we are who we are and do what we do as a herd, not as individuals.
This point of view is supported by learnings from a range of fields: from evolutionary psychology, socio-biology and social psychology, 'small world' geometry and network mathematics, from long-forgotten studies of self-reporting and the newer thinking of the Latin School of Societing. The evidence for the herd perspective (and against the individualist one) is necessarily woven together to encompass all of the key issues.
We believe this perspective is able to shed new light on many phenomena which researchers and planners repeatedly encounter and debate (like rapidly changing and stable markets, the value and mechanics of mass advertising and the debate about relationships between behaviour and attitudes). The paper concludes with an examination of the challenges this perspective offers to all researchers. As Steven Pinker (2002) puts it in the introduction to his latest bestseller:
If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs... Why is it important to sort this all out? The refusal to acknowledge human nature is like the Victorians' embarrassment about sex, only worse: it distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse and our day-to-day lives.
Business needs our skills and insight but we must let go of this kind of embarrassment if we are to ensure that we continue to be as relevant as we would like to be.
The sound of the crowd
On a dark and rainy Valentine's night in 1988, the French football coach, Michel Platini, brought a youth team to Highbury in north London to play a friendly match. At the time, Arsenal FC were not the cosmopolitan crew that they are today (with more than half a dozen leading French players in the team and a French manager); nor were the crowd as comfortable with 'abroad' as many of them now are. Arsenal in the 1980s were the dour practitioners of British Football captured by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch: masters of the cynical crunching tackle, the hands-in-the-air-all-in-a-line offside trap and the 89th-minute goal.
However, on that wet February night it took just 30 minutes for the entire stadium to ring to the unusual chant, 'Qui est le bastard [sic] dans le noir?', a piece of abuse (as so many football chants are) aimed at the referee to question (as so many football chants do) his parentage. Those who were at the game report extraordinary feelings of elation and belonging, but no one can remember who started the chant or how they themselves came to pick it up and share it with their neighbours.
How did this behaviour start on that particular evening? Why this chant and not another (or silence or prolonged whistling at a series of bad decisions)? Why did so many thousands of damp and cold football fans join together in this way without so much as a song sheet, a choirmaster or any kind of instruction to do so? Why did it make them feel so good?
Crowds are scary
Crowds are always unpredictable and mercurial. They can generate enormous feelings of well-being and shared identity; equally, they can be enormously destructive and irrational. Crowds are 'contested', and to those interested in maintaining order, dangerous and scary.
Indeed, much of the psychological and sociological literature about crowds and crowd behaviour highlights the negative aspects. More so when crowd politics (e.g. Nazi Germany) or football crowds are the particular subject of a study.
Yet being together and interacting with other human beings is--we argue--essentially human: more human than being a lone and isolated individual. It is what we are largely designed for. It is who we are--whatever our culture or we ourselves would like to think (and both of these point misleadingly in the opposite direction to the truth). We are a 'we' species, labouring under the illusion of 'I'.
The dominance of the individual
Western culture has been dominated by the notion of the individual. Moral philosophers and popular sages have repeatedly encouraged us to 'be our own person' to 'remain unswayed by the "passions" [i.e. lack of logic and consideration in the thinking] of the mob.' Since the Age of Enlightenment explanations of what it is to be human have been dominated by the notion of the individual. For generations, decent men and women have struggled to understand the mechanics of the mind of the individual human and pondered on the ethics of the right or wrong behaviour for individuals. Indeed, the latter half of the twentieth century saw repeated attempts to make sense of individuals' behaviour in the light of mass political movements such as National Socialism and Communism.
Since the rise of psychology as a separate discipline from that of philosophy, we have continued to devote most of our struggle to the individual brain 'machine'. For example, while the cognitive and behaviourist schools disagreed violently on some matters (see, for example, Chomsky's (1959) savage review of Skinner), they were both primarily concerned with understanding the individual's internal processes. While much was learned about abstract unobservable mechanisms such as memory, learning and problem solving, the premise was still that the individual was the proper locus of study for generalised rules about all humans.
The 'processing-unit' view of individual humans and their cognitions has in fact provided an open door for the invasion of information science constructs into academic psychology departments. In particular, it made it easy to apply learnings about how individual machines process information into explanations of how individual humans do so. Marketing still works very strongly from this metaphor - marketing likes a machine!
Consider our obsession as marketing researchers with 'learning', 'recall' and 'awareness'. Consider also our use of the term 'stimulus' material (stimulus being important to both the Behaviourist and Cognitivist schools) and our abiding obsession with transmitting messages (of a rational or emotional kind). Consider also how many of the 'framework' models (identified by Hall and Maclay (1991)) which we use to explain how advertising might work can be explained in behaviourist or cognitivist terms - they too are largely concerned with how an individual processes and/or responds to new information or emotional inputs.
The rise of neuroscience
Sigmund Freud (see Gardner 1993), the father of psychoanalysis, started his career as a neuroscientist but he realised that the tools of turn-of-thecentury neuroscience were ill-developed for the ambitions he had for understanding how and why people do things. In recent years however, neuroscience has made significant advances which have changed our understanding of how individual human brains work for us to do what we do - Steven Pinker is just one of those academics to have penned bestsellers on the subject.
In this area, British market researchers are ahead of the rest of the business world and the broader popular culture - at least on conference platforms, if not in practice. In the last three years a number of excellent market research papers have used neuroscience as the basis for new thinking. Heath, in various works, has highlighted how much of what an individual does (and stores) is done at low levels of consciousness and suggests some methodological innovations for advertising research. Gordon (2001, 2002) demonstrates how out of date our information-processing paradigm is from a thorough review of learning to date. In particular, Damasio's depiction of the brain as 'emotionally' rather than 'rationally' wired is central to the new model of mind. Fletcher and Morgan (2000) suggest some useful challenges to our practice as researchers from... |
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