Mark Earls

Can you explain the explosion of social activities like text messaging with little or no promotion of the behaviour? How a Mexican wave happens? The emergence of online communities? Or – more sensitively – the steady rise of floral roadside tributes to traffic accident victims from complete strangers? Unless you have a good explanation of mass behaviour, you’ll have little chance of altering it. Herd reveals that most of us in the West have completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behaviour because we have misplaced notions of what it means to be a human being. With a host of examples from Peter Kay and urinal etiquette to Apple and Desmond Tutu, Mark Earls offers the most new radical, controversial and significant new theory of consumer behaviour in a generation. "At one level a profoundly simple and important idea, that just happens to overturn everything we thought we knew about marketing to the individual." —Adam Morgan, Founder, Eatbigfish "Mark Earls helps us see clearly that we need to re-write the rules and provides us with a playbook for doing so. Are you ready for the ‘we’ revolution?" —Ed Keller, CEO, The Keller Fay Group "Herd is a dazzling, nutrient-rich read that urged me to see afresh the big underlying forces driving media behaviour and why they especially matter now." —David Abraham, EVP, The Learning Channel "As important to read as Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Morgan were. I cannot recommend it highly enough unless you are a luddite or an ostrich." —Mark Sherrington, Global Brands Director, SABMiller "Read this book. Think about it. If you’re going to be any good at your job in the next 20 years then you need to questions your assumptions about how stuff works." —Russell Davies, Founder, Open Intelligence Agency

How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature

Herd

R. Alexander Bentley

Michael John O'Brien

How we learn from those around us: an essential guide to understanding how people behave.

Mapping Social Behavior

I'll Have what She's Having

John V. Willshire

"100 pick-up-and-use marketing strategy templates--get copying!Copy, Copy, Copy is a big, bright volume of templates designed to help marketers and managers more efficiently change human behaviour through social influence. Based on the argument that copying is human nature and innovation isn't always the best goal, this book offers one hundred actual pick-up-and-use marketing plan templates specific to various scenarios. It's like a recipe book for human behaviour. Each strategy is illustrated by an example in marketing or contemporary pop culture from around the world and across different platforms, demonstrating the successful application of the techniques described.Copying helps humans navigate the world. From user reviews and bestseller lists to babynames and fashion trends, human beings are a social species that rely on one another to make sense of the bewildering array of choices that confront us every day. Copy, Copy, Copy describes how marketers can take advantage of this tendency to steer consumer behaviour and desires toward a strategic goal. Learn how much consumers copy each other and how you can utilize that for effective marketing campaigns Using case studies and examples of successful campaigns--each relating to a different behaviour Ready-made templates for more efficient strategy and planning More than just a book of behavioural theory, this guide invites you to do what the title says--copy, copy, copy. Expertly designed templates eliminate the need to build a brand new strategy from the ground up, allowing the efficient creation of a deployment-ready campaign. For marketers and managers looking to stay in front of the herd, Copy, Copy, Copy is the highly practical guide for changing mass behaviour"--

How to Do Smarter Marketing by Using Other People's Ideas

Copy, Copy, Copy

Laura Jordan Bambach

Daniele Fiandaca

Do you remember what it was like to be a child? A time when your imagination would run rife and it was easy to imagine yourself as a superhero? What was your superpower? Flying at the speed of light, X-ray vision, invisibility or the ability to turn your brussels sprouts into ice cream? In Creative Superpowers, we have assembled some of the world's creative leaders to bring to life the modern skillset for creative problem-solving. It will help you re-learn key traits often forgotten from childhood, such as adaptability, curiosity, empathy and fearlessness; the superpowers of Hacking, Making, Teaching and Thieving. The book includes contributions from architects, CEOs, creative directors, culture hackers, educators, fashion designers, marketers, musicians, storytellers and many more. People who will show you how hacking helps you tackle problems in different ways, how making opens up new parts of your brain, how teaching yourself and others consolidates experience in a fast-paced world and how looking to what already exists is a brilliant tool for solving problems. Expect to come away inspired to use your newly learned creative superpowers to thrive in the Age of Creativity. The cape is optional.

Equip Yourself for the Age of Creativity

Creative Superpowers

"...fascinating. Like Malcolm Gladwell on speed." —THE GUARDIAN "HERD is a rare thing: a book that transforms the reader's perception of how the world works". —Matthew D'Ancona, THE SPECTATOR "This book is a must. Once you have read it you will understand why Mark Earls is regarded as a marketing guru." —Daniel Finkelstein, THE TIMES This paperback version of Mark Earls' groundbreaking and award winning book comes updated with new stats and figures and provides two completely revised chapters that deal with the rise of social networking. Since the Enlightenment there has been a very simple but widely held assumption that we are a species of thinking individuals and human behaviour is best understood by examining the psychology of individuals. It appears, however, that this insight is plain wrong. The evidence from a number of leading behavioural and neuroscientists suggests that our species is designed as a herd or group animal. Mark Earls applies this evidence to the traditional mechanisms of marketing and consumer behaviour, with a result that necessitates a complete rethink about these subjects. HERD provides a host of unusual examples and anecdotes to open the mind of the business reader, from Peter Kay to Desmond Tutu, Apple to UK Sexual Health programmes, George Bush to Castle Lager, from autism to depression to the real explanation for the placebo effect in pharmaceutical testing.

This book chronicles the dawn of the age of creativity in business, when new ideas and practices based on creativity will drastically change the way we do business. Starting with an overview of the age of marketing, the book winds its way through the past and the present to show us the future of business, backed up with insights from sociology and psychology.

Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing

Welcome to the Creative Age

Michael J. O'Brien

How we learn from those around us: an essential guide to understanding how people behave. Humans are, first and foremost, social creatures. And this, according to the authors of I'll Have What She's Having, shapes—and explains—most of our choices. We're not just blindly driven by hard-wired instincts to hunt or gather or reproduce; our decisions are based on more than “nudges” exploiting individual cognitive quirks. I'll Have What She's Having shows us how we use the brains of others to think for us and as storage space for knowledge about the world. The story zooms out from the individual to small groups to the complexities of populations. It describes, among other things, how buzzwords propagate and how ideas spread; how the swine flu scare became an epidemic; and how focused social learning by a few gets amplified as copying by the masses. It describes how ideas, behavior, and culture spread through the simple means of doing what others do. It is notoriously difficult to change behavior. For every “Yes We Can” political slogan, there are thousands of “Just Say No” buttons. I'll Have What She's Having offers a practical map to help us navigate the complex world of social behavior, an essential guide for anyone who wants to understand how people behave and how to begin to change things.

Mark Earls

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