Robert Burton is attributed with this quote from his book, “Anatomy of Melancholy” in 1621. Actually, the quote is exactly, “Birds of a feather will gather together.” Burton's book is considered by many to be the first major text in the history of Western cognitive science. He couldn’t have possibly know the importance his quote, or his book for that matter, would have with regard to robotics. There have been a number of studies as of late regarding flocking behavior. Flocking behavior has particular interests to people in the fields of robotics and biological mathematics. If you want to get a glimpse, just head to Google and type “Flocking Behavior” into the search field. Flocking is now a common technology used in screensavers and animation. Batman Returns and The Lion King are two films that included a flocking behavior sequence.

In order to achieve a computer simulation of flocking behavior, researchers made the following assumptions:

1. Homogeneity: Every bird in flock has same behavior model. The flock moves without a leader, even though temporary leaders seem to appear.

2. Locality: The motion of each bird is only influenced by its nearest flockmates. Vision is considered to be the most important senses for flock organization.

What this means is that the groups are homogeneous and they are local and therefore, three simple rules borrowed from nature observations are applied, the three “Flocking Rules”:

1. Collision Avoidance: Avoid collision with nearby flockmates.

2. Velocity Matching: Attempt to match velocity with nearby flockmates.

3. Flock Centering: Attempt to stay close to nearby flockmates.

Applying the above rules to a group of similar birds (or fish), you can get behavior for the whole group.

• The bird will match velocity with neighboring birds

• The bird will move toward center of group of neighboring birds

Certainly then, you can see that flocking behavior extends to the realm of marketing. We all like hanging out with people who share our common interests. We have organizations, forums, email lists, IM groups, blogs, magazines and publications specifically targeted to “people like us.” We spend a good portion of our time communing with others who share our concerns, our headaches, our worries and our good fortunes. It is important that we do this to help keep us motivated and inspired. If we are doing these things, wouldn’t you bet that our clients are doing the same? While it is fine for us to hang with our own flock, we need to make sure that we are also flocking with our market segments.

The beauty of determining the market segments that we serve (or that we wish to serve) is that we provide ourselves a way to focus our marketing efforts. We are better able to put away the “shot-gun” effect which wastes our resources and market where our clients are. Ideally, you want to get to where your company is communicating with your market segments once per week. Why? Because process marketing which works really great for services businesses, relies on the law of probability...the probability that your info is going to be in front of the right person when they have a need. To increase your chances of being at the right place and time, it becomes clear why a weekly communication of some sort is necessary.

You want to be sending news, announcements and alerts to your market segments regularly. You have the flexibility to mix up your delivery between direct mail, email, a market segment specific blog or a portion of your website dedicated to each of your market segments….Or any other communication that you can think of that gets you in front of them more often. Information can be hashed and rehashed.

For example, the one of the environmental regulatory agencies changed some requirements with regard to environmental assessments. We sent a press release to the local media regarding the changes and how they will affect developers. The local media ran the info because they just weren't aware of it and it was novel to them. We took the info from the press release and used it in a letter announcement from our firm which we mailed to the affected market segments. Since we have a guy trained to perform this particular type of environmental assessment, a week after the letter from our prez, we sent out a postcard that was eye catching and pointed out that we provided these kind of assessments. Our guy was suddenly swamped. The beauty of this process is that if we had just sent out an announcement that our guy was now trained to provide these assessments, it wouldn't have been as meaningful to our client base, because it hadn't hit them yet that the EPA changes were going to affect their business. Our announcement would have probably been pitched in the trash right away.

If you have already divided your clients by market segments, then you are ready to begin your research. Look at your list of market segments and make note of where they are flocking.

- Do they have industry magazines and publications? (Potential advertising/press release contact)

- To which organizations do they belong? Are there organizations within their industry?

- What news items would be of interest to them and to the welfare of their businesses?

- What functions do they like to attend?

- Can you offer seminars that address their particular business needs and/or concerns?

- Can you create booklets or other “How To” materials that would be pertinent to each marketing segment?

I’m sure you can think of other questions to ask yourself about your market segments. Train others to report information to you, too. At our firm, we have clients with which we have a special bond. We have trained these key individuals to forward alerts and pertinent information for their market segment to us when they come across it. We can then share it with the rest of the folks in the market segments.

One other key is that you keep this information stored in a contact database or some other way in which you can get your hands on it swiftly. In your contact database, you not only want to include your clients, you want to include members of the press and industry contacts. You’re doing well if your press contacts equal 200 individuals or more. My press contacts are divided into three groups which suit our firm:

1. Local

2. Regional

3. National

You may need to include international in yours, but our firm doesn’t do any work outside the U.S.

So let’s review:

1. Get your clients divided into market segments.

2. Find where your market segments flock.

3. Send “news you can use” instead of experience-based, bragging about your firm items, and send them often. The long-term goal is once a week, keeping in mind the Law of Probability.

So what are you waiting for? Start flocking!

Credits:

The Flocking Robots Project from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich.

Craig Reynolds “Boids”

 

© Copyright 2005 Lisa Duty