flock's sake

If it seems like it's been quiet round these parts for a while it's because I've been up to something in the real world that's taken up a considerable chunk of time.

More on that in another post, later.

In the meantime I've also been reading up on some stuff, including Alain De Botton's 'The Consolations of Philosophy' from which the following nugget is an extract.

'It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time.

It seems implausible that our [society*] could be gravely mistaken in it's beliefs and at the same time we could be alone in noticing the fact.

We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hithrto unknown, difficult truths.'

*industry?

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how to do youth marketing

I'm sure we're all familiar with the 'Diffusion of Innovations' theory - how, why, and how quickly new ideas spread throughout cultures.

The concept was popularised in 'The Diffusion of Innovations' (Everett Rogers 1962) also adapted and illustrated by the famous adoption lifecycle curve as used by Geoffrey A. Moore in the tech marketing tome 'Crossing the Chasm'and in Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point', amongst others.

For the non-academics amongst us, it's explained neatly, and in a youth marketing context, by American Bandstand legend Dick Clark in this excerpt from a feature in seminal 70's US rock journal Creem by the equally legendary Lester Bangs.

'Anything that's new takes a while before it gets disseminated across the country...You get the J.C. Penney versions of fashions of what the style leaders are wearing.

There's an interesting premise in all of this, in the youth world, you take the lunatic fringe, the avant-garde, the style leaders, the nuts.

And if you are careful enough to determine what they come up with that's a legitimate trend, then you'll be able to figure out eventually what the people in the middle...will be doing in the next couple of months'

Look to the freaks-in-our-midst as Tom Peters would say.

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vivienne westwood : disruptive innovation

'It's only the unpopular ideas, that are capable of slowly gaining a few disciples until it's then possible for them to have an effect...because they are original'

Vivienne Westwood, describing, in effect, the notion of disruptive innovation.
The process of creating ideas and things which, on the face of it, often have characteristics that the mass market may not appear to want, or in many cases will be fundamentally opposed to and possibly afraid of.

But doing it anyway.

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