HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE THE WORLD?

Answer – none because it’s changing so fast without any help from us. The Christmas “break” with all the connotations that has of disintegration allows us to lounge about, get colds, put on weight, see some old films and read a bit more. It was whilst doing the latter I rediscovered that great line about the unreliability of market research by David Ogilvy, he who said of research “most people use it much as a drunken man uses a lamp post – more for support than illumination”. Here’s his other quote: “Consumers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say”. This explains in part the increasing popularity of neuro-marketing, the application of neuroscience to determining what’s really going on inside people’s heads. But what neuro-marketing can’t do is understand the profoundly changing context in which people feel, think and talk. We live in a world where most of us assume things will (always) get back to normal….and they never do because normal is history. So, back to old films, well actually not so old. First from 1998 “You’ve got Mail” with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. The story of a cyber-relationship created via e-mail in parallel with the story of chain store Fox Books driving an independent bookstore out of business. E-mail seemed like a black art 13 years ago and book stores seemed like big business. In little over a decade e-mails are normal and books are out of business. So this film seemed more out of touch than “Casablanca” which I saw a few days later. And then (cold kicking in and mental faculties barely able to cope) I watched Harry Potter “The Philosopher’s Stone” from 2000, featuring some children (Radcliffe, Watson and Grint) who are now relatively mature adults. Some 4000 days gone in a flash. And, finally, from 2008, “Mamma Mia”. Oddest of all in a way because it was filmed on a Greek island when Greece was still an OK place rather than the disreputable gambler of an idle cousin it now seems. This was the Greece of laughing holidays rather than the place described around Christmas as “somewhere that feels carpet bombed”. This is a world where we’ve gone from the magic of e-mail to the banality of a tweet in a flicker and where good old ordinary normal has gone forever. Maybe films will be the only way we’ll be able to feel the scale of change in the future. Imagine seeing “Minority Report” or “Avatar” in a few years and thinking….is that all?