How do you know what you know?

Gut feelings, peer pressure and the dubious wisdom of crowds

It’s been all work and no play here in the UK over the last couple of months. We’ve had a slew of ‘bank holidays’: a term that confuses foreigners, even English speakers, but seems obvious to locals. The expression originates from the very first bank holiday, way before we became 24×7 always-on people (yes, there was a time) in 1781. It was in that year that the Earl of Cambleseed decided to shut his bank on the first Monday in May. Or so it says on Wikipedia. So does that mean we can we believe it? Well the natural instinct is to google the term and see what you come up with. And in this case, you get lots of entries referring to the noble banker, and to the end of the 18th century. So it must be true, then. But wait a minute: many of the references reproduce word for word the account given on Wikipedia. In fact, it almost looks as if they’ve cut and pasted it. The Oxford English Dictionary makes no mention of this episode. Not the print version, and not the online version, both of which you have to pay for. So does that make it more reliable or less? Remember, the OED is not crowd-sourced, as Wikipedia is. So it’s not necessarily as up to date, but then since it’s had 200 years or so to sort out the bank-holiday question, you’d think it would have mentioned Cambleseed by now.

Left turn

But back to the reason I mentioned these holidays in the first place, before my brief Wiki-digression. You see all these bank holidays (Good Friday, Easter Monday, the Royal Wedding, the May bank holiday) have had a knock-on effect on bin collections throughout the UK. Lots of the bank holidays have been on Mondays. We had another, the Spring bank holiday, just last week. And when bank holidays fall on Monday, the bins here in Cambridge are collected a day late. Monday’s collection is on Tuesday, Tuesday’s is on Wednesday and so on. And my street’s collection moves from Wednesday to Thursday. Every time. And yet all it takes is one house to put out its bin in a bank holiday week on a Tuesday evening – a day too early – and it causes a chain reaction. People across the street see the bin and they put theirs out too – just in case. Then people next to the original offenders see the second lot, and they follow suit. And the bins sit there all day long on Wednesday, to be finally emptied on Thursday, right on schedule. And yet all people have to do for reassurance is jump online to the council website to see that the collection is a day late. That would be the same online where Wikipedia lives. It’s not as if it’s that big a leap. People know the collections are usually a day late. But they question that knowledge because they see other people acting differently.

Tweet success

The same niggling doubts affect our marketing. We do things because other people do them. We copy what our peers do. We question our own judgement, even if we almost certain we’re right. Just last week, I was chatting to a friend of mine. He was singing the praises of Twitter as a marketing tool. But there was a note of hesitation in his voice, which I picked up on. Did he really believe what he was saying? Is he absolutely convinced that it’s a good use of his time, I wondered. Has he measured it? Can he track sales back to Twitter? And what’s the opportunity cost of tweeting – the other things he’s missing out on while he’s doing his thang in 140 characters? He paused, collected his thoughts and finally answered. “To be honest, I’m not sure I really understand the whole Twitter and marketing thing,” he said with a vague air of resignation. But then he rallied, buoyed by the wisdom-of-crowds argument. “I’m sure there’s something in it, though. I don’t know what, but it’s definitely there. Otherwise, why would everybody be doing it?” Let’s see. For the same reason that everybody believes that the Earl of Cambleseed invented bank holidays? (Is it just me, or does that name seem a tad suspicious?) Or for the same reason that people put their bins out a day early on a quiet suburban street in Cambridge? Because other people are doing it. And that’s simply not a good enough reason. Assume, yes. Check your gut feel, yes. Take the pulse of the masses, yes. But always verify.

Kevin Ideas, Marketing.