Herd

The central tenet of this book is based on challenging our assumption that the individual is the starting point from which to understand human behaviour.  By focusing on group behaviour, or the herd rather than the individual, Mark Earls purports that we will have the key to a better understanding of human behaviour and better business and social policy initiatives to change it.  The book provides suggestions on how to harnesses this new knowledge in marketing, through example and anecdote. Along the way, he shows why the rush to 1-2-1 communications and the obsession with individual opinions (and changing people's minds) are all nonsense. One of the core arguments to come out of Marks research is that the most important metric for any business becomes the degree to which its customers influence each other positively.  This idea has massive repercussions for the marketing manager in terms of thinking about their marketing strategy, and Mark provides the tools and metric for applying his thinking in a practical way. Importantly, cross-cultural studies reveal that the Western way of seeing humans and understanding human behaviour is the exception rather than the rule. This book uses non-Western sources (Asia and Africa) to undermine a Western mistake. (The idea behind the book was inspired by a visit to South Africa where Ubuntu is very topical and widely understood.  Ubuntu is the core idea that has enabled South Africa to migrate from minority to majority rule the Peace and Reconciliation Commission is an attempt to recognize that we have to forgive each other our pasts if we are to move forward.)