Emerald Management Review:
Forget influentials, herd-like copying is how brands spread

Abstract:

Purpose - To argue that spread marketing is a pull, not a push, random phenomenon and requires lots of fires to be lit to start a trend.

Design/methodology/approach - Outlines an alternative model of how things spread, rooted in contemporary behavioural sciences and successfully applied in practice.

Findings - Marketers look at how ideas, opinions and behaviour spread through populations using a mixture of old diffusion models from the 1920s and newer network and information theory but these do not reflect contemporary behavioural science or even how things really spread through populations. Argues that humans rely on copying to learn and it is our species' number one learning and adaptive strategy, creating a pull mechanism by which things spread through populations. Goes on to identify two extremes in the type of copying that can occur, random and directed copying, each leaving different signatures. Next, considers social networks, asserting that the underlying structures of networks can be characterized in terms of category rather than exactly and that they are not scale free in form because behaviour spreads through ordinary people rather than being broadcast by special individuals. Ends by recommending that marketers understand the tides through which pull is operating before deciding what to do and lighting lots of fires to see which one takes.

Research limitations/implications - Contends that the model reflects behavioural and cognitive science, that it is more efficient and that it is directional.

Practical implications - Remarks that the model points to an inversion of marketing and what it does in the world: rather than impose our own agenda, marketing can encourage the natural pull mechanisms that spread ideas and behaviour, becoming a pull-facilitator function rather than a push one.

Originality/value - Concludes that 'spread' is largely a pull, rather than a push, phenomenon and so marketing's challenge is to help the mechanism work to spread the ideas that clients are interested in.

Keywords:

Article Type:

General review

Reference:

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