You Are What You Eat

The shelves of Libraria, just off Brick Lane in London. The books are organised to ‘maximise serendipity’

Here’s a thought. Put to one side all the industry hype around ad-tech, real time data and it’s ability to provide us with consumer insight for a moment and go to your local charity shop. I’d wager that the book shelves of your local charity shops - or any book shop really - represent a far richer source of prepackaged ‘insight’ into human behaviour than any of the latest tools, feeds or dashboards we’re being asked to use.

That’s not to suggest there isn’t value in these new sources of data. Just that for all of the fetishizing of ‘insight’ (a problematic term, which could warrant a blog post in it’s right …) and our never ending quest for insights, we seem to actively ignore a ready supply of the stuff. Instead we seem to prefer to focus on hugely complex datasets which require significant effort and energy to refine into something useable… sources that still don’t guarantee us anything truly ‘insightful’, with the product often stopping short at the merely observational.

We behave as if insights are just sitting around waiting to be found, when in reality they have to be manufactured from the raw materials at our disposal - from data. There is an element of synthesis involved.

Writers have a brilliant knack for insight, for the creative synthesis required for turning raw data into something usable. They manage to routinely achieve what so many agency planners and strategists struggle to do - which is to say, that they describe the way people behave, think or feel about something in a way which we instinctively know to be true but such a way as to create the space for us to look at the world in a new light. The best writing does this routinely: it is concise, creative and offers fresh perspective.

That is fucking hard to do.

And because so much of human behaviour is largely constant, the stuff that authors write has enduring potential for us. Technology and the way people interact with it might change and evolve, but consumer motivations are broadly eternal.

I have just finished reading Cixin Lui’s The Dark Forest. The second in his Three Body Problem Trilogy. Without spoiling the plot - the story deals with a crisis that humanity knows will take place in 400 years time. It tells of how the planet’s nations rally to create a plan to tackle the issue at hand. And of how choices around specific technological platforms set in motion events which have consequences no-one in the present day can really understand. My reading of this was as a metaphor for climate change. The way the story’s protagonists react to this threat shows why it’s so hard for us to deal with this issue in an effective way - and why some of the best solutions (such as net-zero) might also provide us with a different set of problems. Particularly useful this week, as one national newspaper in the UK accused people concerned about climate change of being woke, lefty snowflakes.

At a more micro level I found myself ruminating for a long time on the passage below, where one character is in discussion with his son:

“Behai, you’ve got a long way to go. I say that because I can easily understand you, and being understandable to me means that your mind is still too simple, not subtle enough. On the day I can no longer read you or figure you out, but you can easily understand me, that’s when you’ll have finally grown up” (Cixin, p.60, 2008)

What a neat way of articulating the complexities and nuances of inter-generational understanding. Something which concerns me personally (as a father and as a son), but also professionally. And whilst I think there might be an issue with ageism in the industry, there might also be a intellectual or cultural blocker that prevents me (as a person rapidly approaching their 40s) understanding a Gen Z consumer as well as someone from within that cohort would.

I don’t read a huge amount of Science Fiction either. And I certainly don’t read much originating in China. This represents variety in my literary diet. Increasingly I feel that the value in reading is not just in picking up the stuff that I naturally enjoy, but in straying from the authors and genres that normally take up my time. Men, in particular, are really bad at adopting a more diverse approach to their reading. As a recent Guardian article suggested - for the best selling female writers, only 20% of their audience are male. Yet male writers enjoy audiences which are broadly split in line with the population. Female voices would most obviously help me empathise more readily with female points of view. That’s before you add to the mix authors from different ethnicities, countries, cultures and sub-cultures and gender orientations.

It’s an easy habit to fall out of - and I’ve certainly felt a weight of pressure on my time which has prevented me from reading as much or as well as I would have liked. The reading we’re required to do with work - just to keep up with our peers - is weighty enough. But, perhaps for every page of Byron Sharp we should add some Bukowski. For every report from WARC, some Woolf.

Ask your colleagues what they are reading. Write their suggestions down, even if they don’t look or feel like books you might enjoy. Start conversations about the books you’re reading. Ask people who look like the people your clients are trying to communicate with.

Fiction helps me think. And by virtue of the perspectives on the real world that it can offer, helps us be more insightful, more creative and more engaged with the world around us. It also helps you write - to convey your arguments with greater skill and clarity.

Data - the ones and zeros - may be plentiful in our world today. And there is no doubt, that the data we now process about the world provide a route to greater understanding. However, it doesn’t nourish the soul in the way a good book does. A ready source of insight, just waiting to help you. A broad and varied diet is crucial. You are what you eat.