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