Happily Misunderstood

I find Mark Earls’  ‘herd’ theory fascinating and I also think he’s also onto to something. If you’re not familiar with it check out his blog here. I must confess that I have not read all of his material so Mark may have covered this but maybe not, I think there’s quite an interesting thing that happens when you consider different types of herd arrangement. Rather than the herd being one big uniform homunculus, it can be thought of as a group of individuals that can be arranged in an infinite number of ways.  It starts to get really interesting when you consider how the arrangement of individuals within the herd may effect its emotional state.

Whilst reading over Richard Huntington’s Adliterate blog I stumbled across a great post about the role of emotion in advertising, in which he cited Robert Plutchik’s ‘psychoevolutionary theory of emotion’ which quite nicely plots out basic emotions (very useful for discussing emotional territories with Clients). Here’s what it looks like:

Plutchick seems to be a bit of a genius, whilst researching him further it seems he has also mapped emotions onto various arrangements of individuals within a group:

Communications normally have objectives focussed on desired action – getting people do something, and advertising theory says emotion leads to action, so we make ads that make people feel something. Mark Hancock suggests, however, that we need to move away from this approach – to begin looking at emergent behaviour:

“I believe that we will stop thinking about trying to change behavior at the individual level and more about how to influence positive emotional responses through the creation of shared interactions.” (via Gavin Heaton)

However, if we want a behaviour to propagate through a group, or herd, it may be that we should look at the arrangement of the individuals in that herd to decide what emotion to leverage.

Tailoring communication/emotion to the configuration of the herd may maximise the chances of an idea catching on. Plutchick’s model deals with physical arrangements of people, but the theory should still hold when thinking about how people relate to each other in other ways (social networks, ideaology, interests etc.).

Some questions we might ask ourselves to explore this:

• How are the individuals in this herd arranged?
• How does their arrangement effect the groups emotional state?
• What kinds of emotional stimulus might the group be most receptive to?

I think there are some other things that drop out of this line of thought which I’ll explore in another post.