Mark Earls on why understanding the ‘Herd’ is key to better marketing

I blame it all on my friend Jamie. When I was an undergraduate, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and my career. Jamie was my martini-drinking friend – at university, instead of revising, we’d be sitting in his very fancy rooms, drinking dirty martinis. Six months after graduating, James said: “I think this advertising business is really superficial, but you’d really love it.”

I sent out a load of letters to all the agencies, and I got offered a few jobs. Within weeks of arriving at my first agency, I landed in what was known as ‘the planning department,’ which is the team that are concerned with a client’s audience: what we know about the audience and then targeting that audience using our understanding of market research to shape both the output and the thinking that led to the output.

I loved it and I didn’t want to leave. I did that for 20 years, in different forms. And I worked with the Grey agency first of all, then I went to BMP, (which then became DDP) – one of the two homes of this particular discipline, and they exported it all around the world. It was a great experience. I also worked at St Luke’s which was the first creative collective worth its salt.

At St Luke’s, we tried to make a business that was different in so many ways, not least of which is that the employees, not the people whose name was above the door, would have an equal stake in the agency’s success. They gave out equity to all of the qualifying staff members – whatever level of seniority they were at. There were no large corner offices for senior management – none of that stuff. It was just a fun, crazy experiment. Lots of it worked and we quickly learned about the things that didn’t.

Next I responded to a bet. A headhunter friend of mine said: “If you’ve such a clear vision about how the future of advertising agencies should be, then why don't you change to a big one?” So I did. I lasted five years, and it ended up being the worst job I’ve ever had, for a number of reasons, not least of which was this: at the time, they were obsessed with ‘one-to-one communication’.

It was 2001. Zuckerberg was still in high school. It must be hard to imagine, for some of the younger readers of this interview, what the world was like before the onset of the now ubiquitous social media. But for this agency, highly focused 1:1 messaging was the thing.

I was very lucky after a while to find myself chairing the global strategy team there. My colleagues were super-educated and capable, hailing from all kinds of cultures: Mediterranean, Latin, Scandinavian and Sub-Saharan Africa as well. It fast became very clear to me that only us – the Brits and the North Americans – thought of people as individuals in this way. As individuals.

The concept goes to the very heart of marketing and advertising practice. Marketing grew up in the Midwest USA, mid-twentieth century. If you like, The Simpson’s ‘Homer’ character is the ultimate individual who one could tailor one’s marketing to. I started to wonder: maybe it's not like that. I started to develop theories and collect evidence that people behaved less like individuals and instead preferred to be part of a ‘herd.’

We won lots of prizes for papers on the topic and I gave many talks about it. But essentially, I was told, “this is all very well, this ‘herd thing,’ this ‘social creature’ that you’re describing - but it is only right for young people who don’t know any better, for (and this was said in this in a ‘pre-Brexit voice’) foreigners… and women.”

I thought: this is the end. Seriously. I wasn’t willing to work for an organization that so talked in this way about its client audiences. It was the prompt that I needed, accompanied by some other factors, to make a big change in my life. I think many of us experience a moment like this: the tides run to a certain point and the change comes as something else entirely happens.

If you think about it, that’s what the COVID pandemic has been: a fixed point around which lots of tides have flowed in and around, and we can’t go back. In my case, in the mid-2000s, there was this situation at my work, and then I lost two people very close to me. So I took some time out and never went back. I wrote my book: ‘Herd.’ And I called myself ‘The Herdmeister’ on Twitter as my professional persona.

Mark Earls at work (credit: Marcus John Henry Brown)

That deserves some explaining: I was invited to speak at an event, at the last minute, to replace a guy from Disney. He was supposed to be the keynote speaker at the AMA Summer Academic conference in Chicago. When it came to fill in the speaker form – they often print verbatim what you have typed – I struggled.

The form asked: What’s your name? What’s your company? I thought - I don’t have a company. I’m just doing my stuff and writing a book. What was my company? I’d just bought the web domain ‘Herd’ for the book. So I typed that in. But what was my job title? I’d just invented a company based on the title of the book that I’ve been working on. Now I had to invent a job. Was I co-founder? President? Senior vice president of myself? So I called myself ‘Herdmeister’. It was intended to be completely ego-deflating: there’s a herd and I’m a meister of something, like good German burgher.

I never really looked back. It was a lucky break that I chose it at that time. This ‘herd mentality’ part of human behaviour was only just surfacing in the media and was going to be proved to be really, really important. At the time I was writing the book, Facebook was starting to be taken much more seriously. Its popularity was rapidly spreading around the world.

As the influence of social media grew and grew, it proved a load of theories that I found really interesting: at its core, social media went against what I had previously been told: this idea of individuals choosing on their own path. In fact the opposite – the ‘herd approach’ – people identifying with and then behaving with group mentalities - seemed to be true.

My book found its way into all kinds of weird places. I got to meet some amazing academics who work in this space. I’ve since written and collaborated with Professor Alex Bentley, an American who was for some time running the Time Team department in Bristol University.

The book connected me with amazing people doing all kinds of things around the world. I found myself teaching at MOD Shrivenham (the Government Intelligence business school). Thanks to my book, I’ve been teaching in rooms where I’m the only person not to have killed someone – and my book was on their syllabus.

I’ve been really lucky. That book led me to interesting places and fascinating conversations with different kinds of people that I would never have done if I had just sucked it up and agreed with the statement: “I think direct marketing to individuals is the answer.”

Your latest project focuses on how we think about time: how we can make good decisions in uncertain times, how we can escape unhelpful stories from our past and then choose better, and even how we can develop ‘memories of the future’. Could you break that into digestible chunks for our readers?

In a meeting, have you ever felt that everyone else seems on a different page? Or in a different book, from a different library, in a different language? it’s called a ‘chronic asynchronicity.’ As humans we often have this feeling of ‘not being aligned with each other’, different places in time in our heads.

It happens again and again because we can’t be bothered to ask. We always assume that everyone else is living exactly the same time as we are. But everyone has a different experience of time. For example, I once worked with a new leadership team at a broadcaster to help bring them together over two days in Oxford. They were facing some tricky challenges over the next 12 months, and we needed them to trust each other.

Present at the session were people from the creative side of things that commission shows, the legal people, the finance people and the people in charge of corporate governance and those who are in charge of speaking to the broadcasting regulators. Like any leadership team, they represented a vast difference of skills, experience and opinion.

Our challenge was that they needed to be able to work together instinctively and intuitively and with trust. One of the solutions was to get them on the same page, not from the shared perspective of the Project itself, but much more importantly, in terms of each other.

We stripped things right back and started with the basics: where do you come from? Tell me your story? Where did your career start? How did you get to this job here? What do you think is going to happen after this job?

This way we got everyone to understand each other's personal story. When you run an exercise like this, you quickly realise that we should all be more curious. Why have I turned up and why am I really uptight about something? What if I’m feeling really cautious about something?

An explanation might lie in your own story. Something there might help explain my behaviour in the future: you may be triggered by something in your past. Only by understanding our stories can we better navigate these situations. If you think about how much time we spend on Zoom, or on Google, or Teams: it is all very matter-of-fact, you have the business conversation and then the online meeting ends. How little time do we really spend asking “How are you? What’s going on with you at the moment? I know you’ve got this thing going on at the moment – how did it work out?”

We’ve learned applying this logic that it is really important for individuals to know this stuff about each other. And in turn, for one person to know that the other actually remembers the conversation and ‘what is going on’ for the other individual. Now that’s just two people. Imagine that you do that at scale. So that’s one example of ‘time travel’.

Here’s another one. We find ourselves all too often getting trapped by the past. This is the bread and butter of psychotherapists, right? If you’ve worked with leadership teams at all, you know same is true with organizations. They get stuck in the past. They tell themselves the same story, over and over. I’ve seen this in a number of big businesses in recent years. I can think of one in particular: the story often goes like this: “We were kings. Now it has got a lot harder. It has become sh*t, and now we can only see sh*t tomorrow.” Basically, it is a decline and fall.

This is what cultural historians call ‘temporality’. Well, there’s a solution: one needs to define where the organization is right now and where it is going. To get an organization to do great things in the future, we need to give it scope – we need to empower the organization to make bold choices. You have to contribute to the narrative. To go positive rather than go down.

A therapist might re-examine your past and ask: “So tell me about when you were keen. What was the start point? What was it like then?” If you and I are doing therapy you might say: “Mark, the fact is I don’t think my dad ever loved me.” Having made that statement, we need to investigate. What is the evidence for that? Maybe he was pretty busy. Maybe he was sick? Maybe you were sick – and he couldn’t be there when you needed him.

With organizations we can do the same: we can ask: “Show me when you were kings. What was that about? What was that based on?” This way one can be more analytical, which in turn makes it more reliable and less scary for organizational leaders. You point to the artefact that justifies the story that you’ve got, and build from there.

If you look around any major city in the western world, places where Greek temples or ancient churches are focal points – if you're in an American State Capitol, it’s going to be the Capitol building. These buildings were created as a celebration: they are deliberate. They are a statement saying to all who view them: we are noble, we are long lasting. We have principles. We’re enlightened.

And great as they are, those buildings try to manage our ideas of time. Some of your ideas are as old as those buildings and not so useful in the modern world. And unless we recognize that these ideas exist and how much hold they have over us, it can be hard to adopt new ways of thinking. From the French military’s perspective, WW1 was a scandalous bloodbath. In the 1930s the idea of those who survived was this: we’re going to build these fortifications all throughout the eastern side of France to protect us from that kind of German invasion – huge concrete bunkers – with great supply lines. But their plan was based on out-of-date constructs. The last thing the Germans wanted in 1938 was trench warfare. They had been practicing in Czechoslovakia with ‘blitzkrieg,’ their new concept of doing an invasion really fast.

We often get stuck with the things where we’ve invested our money. If you’re in an advertising agency, one can get stuck with the comfort of the old processes, the old products and the old tools (with just enough novelty for the judges and the commentators and our own egos). There aren’t that many presets. And frankly, it’s not that complicated. Those are the measurement lines, those are the things that keep us where we are, where we’ve always been, and stop us from moving into new spaces.

People need to review and question. Tell me again why we’re doing this thing. Why is this? Why are we doing things this way still? Forgive me another military metaphor, but Polish cavalry officers, on horseback, in full uniform heading into German machine guns.

And yet we see this in marketing and advertising all the time. People don’t question because they think, “That’s the way it has always been done.” It’s the same with the leadership in most other organizations: we’ve got the sunk assets and frozen culture that just keeps us where we are.

The novelist Faulkner wrote, “The past is never finished. It’s not even past. It’s with us always and in our hearts.” Looking around my peers, here and in the US, I’ve noticed that the future has become an obsession. It is an obsession in the creative world and marketing services – and as I wrote this book, I noticed that everywhere you turn the future is in your face. And we’ve got a game of Spartacus futurism: I’m a futurist, No, I’m a futurist.

Part of the reason for that is most of those businesses we get to work with has roots in North American culture – a culture which has limited past orientation. It is part of “the American dream” – you can go to a new town, have a new life. Your past is forgotten. It is all about your future.

In January, someone posted on LinkedIn 250 trends for 2024. So stupid. People need to understand where we are in our time traffic.

So let’s go right back to the three big questions that we’re supposed to ask ourselves in strategy. Where are we now? Where do we want to get to? How do we get there? In practice, which one do we always spend the most time on?

Typically we start with: Where’s the future and where do you want to go? That’s quickly followed by How are we going to get there? In a very poor third place, lagging behind the others is Where are we now? This needs to change. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, it’s a waste of time trying to go anywhere. If you don’t know where you’re coming from – if you insist on a blank piece of paper or you cling to the comfortable stories about the past – you’re not going anywhere interesting.

Mark Earls at Speakery. (Credit: Marcus John Henry Brown)

Your book ‘Creative Superpowers’ was about acquiring skills to compete the new age of creativity. How do you feel about the onset of ‘AI-generated everything’ and in the marketing world, the new frontier of synthetic customer data?

Human civilization has always advanced and developed new things. And there has always been pushback. It was Plato who complained about ‘all this written stuff that’s making young (Greek) men fail to memorize poetry, and it’s a terrible thing - you can only imagine what’s going to happen as a result’. And yet of course the written word has fuelled the evolution of our culture rather than its destruction.

It’s the same with AI - it’s quite easy for us to be overly defensive about it. This insight I have stolen – or copied if you prefer – from my friends in anthropology and archaeology: in the long run, things rarely change as drastically, as we say they're going to.

I do know that generative AI is one area where we should be very excited. And it's very cool. I’ve played with it, and it’s lovely. I’ve got my own Herdmeister chatbot, “Earls of Wisdom,” which is great. If you don’t want to ask me any questions, just ask the Herdmeister. Clearly it is not a good use of time to be over-the-top defensive about the evils of AI. But equally, I think we need to be really clear about what the use cases are. There’s a lot of lazy money floating around in investment circles looking for something that has AI tattooed on the outside.

On a case-by-case scenario, we need to establish: what’s the use case for this technology? Let’s see some problem it solves in the world rather than it being ‘just a bit better’.

I had a discussion online recently that turned into an interesting article with my buddy Professor Bentley: I argued with a neuroscientist about why Myers-Briggs tests are still a thing. I recognized that it doesn’t fit with modern personality theory and psychology. It’s just very different. But there was this neuroscientist going: “It’s sh*t. It’s like astrology for business.”

I explained that he had misunderstood how people choose and buy things. One, we’re not looking for the very best. Most of the time, as they’ve demonstrated in behavioral economics, ‘good enough, is good enough.’ The use case for Myers-Briggs is not personality profiling. It’s a sorting hat. It triggers conversations about candidates for roles: employees and managers. All it does it help us understand a little bit more about them.

Another point that was being missed is that the popularity of something is itself a benefit. So if everybody’s using Myers-Briggs, then that’s a real plus – it saves the time of having to learn a new system, understand it and communicate it to your peers. If that’s the case – no one will do it.

In anthropology, they call it a ‘locked-in utility’. At the moment, ‘Myers-Briggs’ is how we do it. It is not necessarily the best, there are better ways to do it. It is also a great example of how it’s easy to imagine that ‘the shiny new thing’ is going to be ‘the’ thing and that the best has got to win. We know throughout the history of the last 30 years: whenever technology comes to market, it’s not the best that wins. It’s not the newest that wins.

Imagine you're talking to a younger Mark Earls, starting out in marketing and advertising today, what would you advise him to do more of and what perhaps should he avoid?

When I started, there was an argument about “what is planning?” There was a sort of purity policing that was slightly Maoist in some ways. There were two sets approaches: there were the BMP Maoists, and there were the JWT Maoists. There was a big debate about which approach was correct. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have wasted too much energy thinking about that, to be honest, because the advertising industry was then and is now changing very rapidly. And whether it will even be a thing called advertising in a few years time, I don’t know.

So I would be more interested in developing skills that are valuable to people you work with and help you do stuff that you and they enjoy. That’s more important than trying to work out how to be the optimal person against some template that’s set up by a previous generation.

And what about everything you might avoid?

Avoid the sitting at the desk and just grinding along because frankly that’s not going to help anyone. Be honest. There is more fun to be had. I was very serious as a junior. I would probably be less serious now and have more fun. Don’t stay at your desk. Just f*ck off out there: go look at a gallery or go and watch a movie because then you might come back and have another idea. And that idea might be useful.

If there's one thing I know about marketing, it is…

It’s about people. That’s it.

I still get paid to help companies get customer-orientated. It’s 60-odd years since that paper I mentioned before was presented at the AMA winter conference that made the case for customer orientation and yet many have still not have all adopted this approach.

Do you ‘get’ your customers? I’ve done a lot of work in innovation over the years. You may have occasional fireworks, but it is very hard to do sustainably successful stuff. When you do, it is because you care about the customer and all that matters in their lives.

I’ve worked a number of times in India, often with local management for international businesses. On this occasion the management team were going to try and work out how to develop a consumer proposition.

They thought, “We’ve researched this. We know what Mark is going to do. There’ll be a darkened room for a week, post-it notes, flip charts, lots of templates, and probably some games. We have to pay attention all week and put our phones away. It’s going to be quite hard.”

But I had a different approach: I said, “Many of you may have used a tuk-tuk driver to get here today. Your job today is to go and find out what matters to these people in their lives. Go in pairs, choose one tuk-tuk driver. Find out all about them, and then come back and tell us.”

One guy burst into tears when he got back, he found it so upsetting – not the poverty aspect because that is super-evident and all around if you live in India. What had affected him was the fact that he had never ‘really seen’ these tuk-tuk drivers. He had never considered what their lives might be like.

It’s a great example of the fact that you don’t have to have spend millions of dollars on market research surveys. You have to really want to meet your customers and care about them. All the survey stuff is great for more discipline and scale. But to engage and to focus: you have to start wanting to like your customer. You need to find stuff out about them: what matters to them, and ask yourself to be honest. It’s the same for everybody: consumer marketing, b2b marketing and social media marketing. What matters to them is all that matters in the end.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Tim Healey, is founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.