Social animals or rugged individuals?
Individualism is a core belief at the foundation of the great American experiment.  In fact, it is a foundational concept animating the rule of law itself, thus contributing significantly to defining the boundaries between barbarism and civilization, as least as we currently understand ourselves.  A focus on the individual helped to break the power of the church and establish the dominance of a secular public sphere where women and minorities, the poor and the disabled, have been somewhat better able to find a place.

We believe in individual rights to speech and property, association, belief, and privacy.  While individual rights are frequently in tension with individual self-sufficiency and the scope of our collective capacity to constrain each other (government regulation and punishment of deviance), these conflicts then become center stage for our political spectacle, more deeply reinforcing the importance of the individual as the unit of analysis when we think of ourselves and our communities today. 

A 2003 article by Mark Earls, analyzing the impact of this way of thinking on advertising, suggests that our focus on the individual is wrong.  He argues that “the most important characteristic” of you and I is that we are “a herd animal” (311).  He starts with a story about a crowd at a sporting event.

“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” (313).

Certainly this is consistent with research on the paradoxical nature of community: the ways that we negotiate the meaning of law and community to include some and exclude others as an inescapable characteristic of community or tribe or herd.  Community suggests images of solidarity and lemonade stands as well as brownshirts, gossips, and Pleasantville.  Our attraction to a focus on the individual was, in part, to break free of these constraints to construct our own lives, as we choose.  In the social sciences and the law, this has meant a focus on the individual rational actor, despite the fact that individuals rarely act rationally, unless we define the model such that any action is rational because it was taken by an individual.

According to Earls, marketing decisions are still dominated by this wrong-headed focus on individual rational action.  Then, he surveys new research in a variety of areas to support the plausibility of his claim that this is wrong-headed and we ought to try to understand behavior in herds. 

“The individual has been shown to be variously unreliable, unaware of his or her behavior or motivations, easily influenced by others, capable of significant self-deception, and so on” (316).

Then he uses the illustration of a horse trainer, who is successful not because he connects with an individual horse, but because he understands the “herd-nature of all horses: if a wild horse is excluded from the herd it becomes (and feels) vulnerable; to be static is also to be vulnerable…. So, he uses movement and herder-leader body language to encourage the horse to ‘want to be with you,’ and want to do what you want, no matter how unnatural it feels…” (316).  Apparently this same horse trainer has applied this approach to juvenile delinquents.

A short review of the ways we are influenced by others begins to build a framework for thinking about ourselves as herd animals.  Our own emotional state can be influenced by the emotional state of others, cognition itself “is as much a social as it is individual activity,” and “the ability to interpret others’ behaviour also seems essential to our ability to learn without experience... [and] that we learn at least as much from others as from our own experience” (318-9, italics in original). 

One the one hand this is disruptive, but it is also not so unusual to think of ourselves as social animals and social learners.  For advertisers, this change suggests that “the consuming individual is a member of a tribe, where the product symbolism creates a universe for the tribe” (322).  One way of thinking about the distinction here is that individuals are the “ingredients” but it is the “interaction” of these ingredients that matters most.  Just like the Zen koan about the disassembled chariot.  The noble asked, ‘where is the chariot?’  All the parts are still right there…but the chariot is not the parts, it is the relationship between the parts.

What insights are gained from this change of perspective, this reframing of how we think about ourselves?  First, network analysis suggests that “it is not the [few] strong links that bind a network together but the [more numerous] weak links” (324).  Second, habitual (rather than rational) individual decisions may reflect a herd’s choice, which makes findings about the relationship between these decisions and identity more robust than when identify is merely an individual phenomena. 

Third, when we disrupt rules or processes or expectations it is possible that we are “acting on the herd’s shared assumptions” (326).  Fourth, as we have all known for years, this perspective highlights why word-of-mouth is the most powerful advertising tool, accounting for “more than 80% of the influence on an individual’s actual purchasing behaviour, with only 10% due to the direct impact of marketing activity on the individual” (327).  Word-of-mouth is a voice already in the herd and their mobilization indicates that the message has entered a new culture and is being talked about…drawing the attention of the herd.

The audience, not the individual, is key.  The herd and the “herd-ability” of a message is more important that the traditional focus on persuasiveness (329).  The individual ‘rational actor’ is actually ignorant (330) of the source in the herd of their beliefs, convictions, passions, and preferences and the information they provide is unreliable.  Each individual is ignorant about most things, relying on the expertise of others in the herd to purchase prescriptions or repair a car, have a baby or transfer funds to the Cayman Islands.

“We all know how difficult it is to predict the future but, because we are more valued by our clients and colleagues if we swallow our concerns and let them use our market research conclusions as if they were predictive, we all do it. In private, we researchers are often prepared to admit to this, but we find it terribly difficult to admit it in front of others” (333).

“Advertising to the Herd: How Understanding Our True Nature Challenges the Ways We Think about Advertising and Market Research,” Mark Earls.  International Journal of Market Research, v45n3, 2003.