A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting article about the Millennium pedestrian bridge that crosses the Thames in London.
In 1996, the Financial Times held an international competition in conjunction with the London Borough of Southwark and the Royal Institute of British Architects to design a new footbridge crossing the Thames between Southwark and Blackfriars bridges using a cutting edge design.
The bridge is the first pedestrian river crossing over the Thames in central London for more than a century.
Soon after its opening, on 10 June 2000, the new bridge began to see a larger than expected crowd crossing it daily.
Like all bridges, the Millennium Bridge, was designed to cope with some amount of movement. Yet the deck started to sway so severely that many pedestrians started to act like drunken sailors when crossing it. The swaying became so bad that it was renamed the 'The Wobbly Bridge'.
After an investigation, the engineers concluded that the problem was due to the way people walked in unison. It seems that the “synchronous lateral excitation” was due to the “chance correlation of footsteps when people walk in a crowd.”
This synchronicity “generated slight sideways movements of the bridge which made it more comfortable for people to walk in synchronization with the bridge movement.” In other words, once it started to sway people tried to counteract it, en masse, only making the problem worse.
This story reminded me that there are many wonderful examples of synchronicity in nature.
Earlier this year I posted about one of my favorite books, The Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman. In it, Ackerman talks about the fact that when humans enter REM sleep our bodies operate at a frequency of 8 to 13 hertz. Similarly, the earth’s natural rhythm is 10 hertz. We seek synchronicity, and organically, we find it.
Is this what happens with trends? As consumers, we see something in popular culture, like the iPod, we synchronize our language and thinking about the possibilities of such a product or idea, becoming in sync with others around it only causing its popularity to grow, fueling the trend.
So, if there is synchronicity happening that makes us all act similarly how can brands cope with this?
Many companies have actually become so divorced from the world around them in a way that doesn’t allow them to see the synchronicity of people’s thinking. They must find a way to reconnect with the world by creating a deeper dialogue with their customers in order to get in sync with a trend. Think about GMs recent problems.
Companies can participate in the synchronicity by going beyond the old model – of us and them, producer and consumer, company and customer – and co-create with their customers by developing a more organic, albeit more complicated model of the relationships that people inside a company have with people outside the company.
Concentrating on these relationships means thinking about the dynamics of any organic system of give and take, ebb and flow. A system based on dialogue.
If traditional branding is all about searing the name of the company into a consumer’s mind, then the willingness to co-create is all about slowing down enough to have an on-going, open dialogue with people. It is about a journey of learning rather than the accomplishment of putting out the next new product without the full participation of customers in the process.