Corporate Decision Making and Honey Bees

Music is perceived and consumed inside our brains and nobody knows if how you or I hear a single piece of music is consistent.

We know for certain that listening to music lights up huge areas of our brains - but that the patterns discernible through investigations with EEGs are different for different people. We also know that music and memory are inextricably linked - so we can deduce that when I hear a piece of music, particularly if I have heard it before, then my personal memories of when, where and how I first heard it will form a part of my understanding of it today.

So how can marketing people and corporations ever agree on a piece of music for a commercial or as part of their brand identity when in reality, they are all hearing and perceiving that single piece of music differently?

Over the years, I've seen a few patterns emerge in how decisions get made in this most subjective of areas. Here is one of them. I'll save others for a rainy day...

The Honey Bee Decision

Honey bees are clever little social creatures and the way they communicate with each other shows us one way corporations make decisions (on anything really but I'll focus on music).

In searching out new flowery hunting grounds senior bees are sent out into the world to do some fact finding. When each bee returns to the hive, it communicates the quality of the blooms it has discovered by doing a dance. So what you get after a major exploration day is a lot of bees, all dancing furiously in order to tell the rest of the bees that their discovery is worth a visit. Here's the clever and simple bit. The hive will only follow the bee that does the most elaborate and longest dance. In other words, the bee that bee-lieves (see what I did there?) the most in its own discovery will dance with more passion and fervent energy than any other and as a consequence, other bees will follow it to the flower-bed it is championing.

Over the years I have seen the bee dance in action. In corporations where passion and belief are usually in scarce supply, if one person - no matter their seniority in a group - is willing to jump up and down and wave their arms about for long enough they will often end up getting their own way. Others will follow simply because they don't have the personal belief or stamina to champion their own choices in the face of the long dance. The group ends up making a decision because of the conviction, confidence and willingness to stand up and be counted of a single member of the team.

Now for the bad news. In my experience, the person willing to do the dance is hardly ever the person championing the best option for the corporation - they usually champion the best option only for themselves. Where bees have no ego, unfortunately advertising and marketing people do. My advice? Beware the bee - and don't follow the dancer.

NB Agencies (like mine) are founded on their abilities to identify and select strategies for getting subjective work agreed and signed off by large groups. Do you feel used? Have I ever done the bee dance? Are all questions rhetorical?

DJ

The Half-Life of a Papadum

In this, my second (and probably last) food-based business lesson, I will investigate the strange thing about popadums.

A papadum is a thin, crispy Indian flatbread that goes well with a whole range of Indian chutneys and a pint of Kingfisher. But the really interesting thing about a papadum (and this can only be discovered through close ethnographic studies in Indian restaurants) is that a papdum has a half-life.

Nobody at the table ever takes more than half of a papadum. They start off about the size of a dinner plate - before you smash them into pieces and people start eating. For a while everyone gorges but at some point - usually towards the end of the popadum course - you get down to just one piece left in the basket. This is where the strange psychology of the popadum half-life starts to occur.

No matter how small that single piece gets - with people breaking bits off for a nibble - nobody EVER takes more than half of it. To take more than half would be greedy, uncaring and unsharing. Other diners would be resentful. It's like the single piece of popadum is screaming to stay alive - fighting for its life - refusing to give up until it is too small to be divided again (about the size of a large coin) and it is either left alone completely or some late-comer to the table eats it out of their own desperation and hunger.

The number of interesting business ideas that I've learned from the half-life of the popadum are almost as numerous as the choice of chutneys (4) at my local Balti:

1. Get stuck in early. You are entitled to half a piece - no matter how large the papadum starts out. The early grab gets you a massive amount of value for your half.

2. Don't leave it late. Come into the papadum market at the end at your either get a tiny half - or you end up with the scrap that's had everyone's fingers on it.

3. When you are trying to sell a proposition, double up what you really want to sell because the half-life principals apply. People will almost always bite off about half of what you can do.

Now it's your turn.

You know how you can only fold a piece of paper in half 8 times - no matter how large it started out? I wonder how many times a papadum can be halved before you get to the fingery end-piece. Answers on a postcard please.