I Will Not Follow

In 1983 Celtic troubadours The Waterboys released a song called “I Will Not Follow”. I’m pretty sure it was a response to U2′s anthemic “I Will Follow”. Answer songs have a rather mixed history (though I’m grateful to the category for providing us with Roxanne Shante and Althea & Donna…), and I suspect “I Will Not Follow” was not The Waterboys’ finest moment  Nonetheless, I admired their courage in taking on the emerging Titans of Rock. And I loved the sentiment. The determination not to go with the flow, not to follow the masses, not to get lost in the crowd. A passionate rejection of passivity. A celebration of the power of negative thinking.

When I was in my last year at College, thoughts turned to possible careers. It was the late ’80s and , in the wake of the Big Bang, there was a magnetic pull towards the Big Job in The City. It was natural, obvious, exciting. The dark satanic thrills .. I recall my decision not to apply for a City role felt more significant to me than any subsequent active career choice.

I used to interview young graduates looking for a job. I found that their CVs were curiously similar. When asked what they’d achieved in life, they’d say they’d travelled to Asia, captained the hockey team, and they liked skiing and reading. But when one asked what the candidate had chosen not to do, more singular answers were forthcoming.

Some of our most important decisions are the paths we choose not to take,the roads we refuse to travel. Our lives can often be best understood by mapping the things we didn’t do, the words we didn’t say. Perhaps we should more often consider a brand’s unspoken truth, quiet regret. Because in its silence and inaction may reside its strength and identity.

‘If you gave me a pound for all the moments I’ve missed,
And I took dancing lessons for all the girls I should’ve kissed.
I’d be a millionaire, I’d be Fred Astaire’
ABC – “Valentine’s Day”

My first job after College was as a Qualitative Researcher. ‘Brand elasticity’ projects were very much in vogue. Could this everyday family margarine perhaps be a cheese, or a biscuit, or a ready meal or a jam? With a sip of Chardonnay and a nod of assent, my respondents would consistently give the green light to a whole host of reckless innovations and insane brand extensions. And over the years the song has remained the same, even if the lyrics have changed. Could my brand be an experience, a portal, a membership club? Could it be a hotel, a hub, a content provider? Could it release a clothing line with rugged check shirts, boxer shorts and rain resistant outerwear? Isn’t my brand more a lifestyle choice than a yellow fat?

Curiously perhaps, research respondents find it easy to endorse our grandest aspirations. But then it’s not their money and maybe they’re just being polite. Sometimes it seems we need to be better at defining the limits of our ambition, at identifying the red line, the point beyond which we will not go. Sometimes we need to demonstrate more restraint, more discipline, more negativity.

Many Clients are instinctively suspicious of the negative perspective. Surely it betrays a lack of confidence, enthusiasm, ambition? In order to sustain consistency they develop processes and platforms, models and matrices, funnels and formats. But best demonstrated practice is often worst demonstrated imagination. Over the years negative thinking has inspired truly exceptional communication by the likes of Dunlop, Audi, Marmite, Volvo, Stella and Guinness. What would a world be like without this brand? Who are its enemies? What is its weakness? Whenever one is confronted by the bland, boring or undifferentiated, it’s always helpful to reach for a liberating ‘not’.

Of course in the age of the social web possibilities seem infinite. We want campaigns to be all embracing, 360º, holistic. We want to tick off platforms like

some bizarre game of I Spy. We want all the colours in all the sizes. Yet I wonder if the democratisation of knowledge and opinion creates a kind of accelerated conformity: the Consensus of Crowds. Surely brand behaviour on the web would benefit from a little more negative thinking? Perhaps more discipline and self denial? Maybe we need to see more of the brand that likes to say ‘no’, the brand that will not follow…

Every morning I face the horrors of commuting as I change Tube at Kings Cross. Crowded, crushed, compressed. Downbeat, dour, depressed. In order to get onto my teeming southbound train into the centre of town, I walk along the less cluttered northbound platform. Periodically empty northbound trains stop and then recommence their journey out to the quiet leafy suburbs. I’ve always promised myself that one day I’ll jump on one of those empty northbound trains, make my way to the end of the line, find a caff and settle down to The Guardian, bacon, eggs, tea and toast. One day…

No. 3

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The Birds That Sing At Night

Sometimes recently I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and there have been birds singing in the street outside. Two or three o’clock in the morning, well before sunrise and they’re chirping away, casually, confidently.

I’m no ornithologist, but shouldn’t they be saving it for the dawn chorus?

Inevitably one is troubled by the abnormal. My initial concern was that their singing portended some dark event, an omen of impending doom.

But the world didn’t implode.

I wondered was I witnessing some form of ecological fallout? Was the nocturnal bird song an unnatural response to an unnatural environment?

The bird authorities’ website reassured me that our feathered friends sing primarily ‘to attract a mate and defend territory’ and that some species are just  happy to do these things at night.

I prefer to imagine that the birds outside my window are adapting to the modern world. Working, socialising, eating and courting on a more fluid, 24 hour, ‘always on’ basis.

Perhaps the collective unconscious of London sparrows has connected with humanity’s accelerating metabolism. Perhaps they’re embracing deconstructed social norms, flexible working, speed dating.

Maybe this also explains the migrant foxes that have long since given up the tedium and conservatism of rural life for the bright lights and diversity of the metropolis.

I have always liked the idea that change is a social, collective thing. That we like to change together, that we are reassured by community even when that community is evolving in different directions.

I have sadly found it frustrating to entertain philosophies to which my Clients do not yet subscribe.

As a student I was taught that a society in some respects behaves like an orchestra. It assigns ‘in tune-ness’  to behaviours that are consistent with everyone else and it rejects abnormal behaviour as ‘out of tune’.

This of course has its downsides. But it’s reassuring to consider that, as we run at the future, we may be taking the the wildlife with us…

First published: BBH Labs: 27/5/2011

No. 2

From Art to Apps: Data Visualisation finds a purpose

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field.

As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

It’s also very reassuring to discover that complex, seemingly chaotic data sets and networks can be expressed as elegant, colourful, ordered maps and models. Perhaps there’s something akin to what the Enlightenment scientists felt as every new discovery revealed the endless beauty of nature.

Indeed the best examples of data visualisation have their own aesthetic beauty. (I felt a nostalgic pang as I recalled time spent with spirograph in my bedroom as a child.)

Like spirograph, but better: Email map by Christopher Baker

To some extent however this elegance, which makes data visualisation so immediately compelling, also represents a challenge. It’s possible that the translation of data, networks and relationships into visual beauty becomes an end in itself and the field becomes a category of fine art.

No harm in that perhaps.

But as a strategist one wants not just to see data, but to hear its story. And it can seem that for some visualisations the aesthetic overpowers the story. I spent many hours when younger staring at data tables, yearning for them to reveal a narrative. It is the prospect of bringing articulacy to hitherto cold, laconic facts that should be at the heart of the excitement around data visualisation.

The more compelling projects from Manuel’s archive did indeed seem to reveal some insightful truth about the relationships that they considered. Enron’s email patterns, the map of Segolene Royal’s supporters, the plotting of visitor eye traces in Barcelona, all looked extremely useful.

Enron Communication Graph, by Kitware Inc.

With this last instance in particular,  one can start to imagine how understanding the dynamic patterns of tourist traffic around the city and its most photographed areas might enable the development of all kinds of helpful tools and services for both tourist and city.

Tracing the Visitor's Eye by Fabien Girardin

Manuel himself talked about ‘turning tools of curiosity into tools of functionality’. In this respect he quoted Chaomei Chen: ‘A taxonomy of information visualization is needed so that designers can select appropriate techniques to meet given requirements.’ And clearly this desire to enable greater utility is driving Manuel’s own research into the different methods and models of visual representation.

As a pioneer in his field, Manuel discussed the opportunities emerging in interactive data maps and he described a Californian experiment in which it should be possible physically to interact with a huge data set distributed about a six storey building.  Blimey. I think I’ll leave that to the true data connoisseurs …

Finally, as a grey haired strategist, I found myself considering how the paucity of visual representation techniques had impacted the way we tackled problems in the past. I think we knew fundamentally that most events were precipitated by complex systemic pressures and relationships. But our limited power to disentangle the many elements in one system reduced us to characterising most strategic problems in rather monochrome ways.

So, this is progress indeed. Data visualisation has radically improved our understanding of these complexities. The real question is: what will we do with that understanding?

First published: BBH Labs 27/08/09

No. 1