Crowd Surfing

CROWD SURFING

Crt

For Alison, Daniel and Louis And for Suzy, Izzy and Zach

Contents

Authors’ note

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The World Seems Out of Control

Chapter 3 The Corporate Response

Chapter 4 A Political Perspective

Chapter 5 New Leadership Skills

Chapter 6 Marketing to the Crowd

Chapter 7 Technology to the Rescue

Chapter 8 Final Thoughts

Crowd Surfing

CROWD SURFING

Surviving and thriving in the age

of consumer empowerment

Martin Thomas and David Brain

First published in Great Britain 2008

A & C Black Publishers Ltd

38 Soho Square, London W1D 3HB

www.acblack.com

Copyright © Martin Thomas and David Brain 2008

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organisation acting or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by A & C Black Publishers Ltd or the authors.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-40810-691-4

This book is produced using paper that is made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Design by Fiona Pike, Pike Design, Winchester

Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed in the United Kingdom by Caligraving

For Alison, Daniel and Louis

And for Suzy, Izzy and Zach

Contents

Authors’ note

Acknowledgements

About the authors

1. Introduction

2. The World Seems Out of Control

At the Mercy of the Crowd

Coe’s Ultimate Olympic Challenge

Trying to Hold Back the Tide

3. The Corporate Response

Dell Hell – A Story of Rebellion and Redemption

Microsoft and the Blue Monster

Why Apple Refuses to Play to the Crowd

The Crowd Leaders

Pfizer Looks Inside

4. A Political Perspective

Politicians Rediscover the Power of Debate

The Crowd Answers Obama’s Call

5. New Leadership Skills

Leadership and All That Jazz – A postscript

6. Marketing to the Crowd

The Crowd Demands a Piece of the Action

The Science of Participation

The Art of Being Interesting

Implications for Marketing Services Agencies

7. Technology to the Rescue

How the CEO Blog is Transforming Corporate Communications

Social media – Marketing’s New Magic Bullet?

Surviving the Future

8. Final Thoughts

Authors’ note

David Brain is European CEO of the global PR firm Edelman, which represents some of the companies mentioned in this book. Specifically, Edelman works, or has recently worked, for London 2012, Microsoft, Pfizer, Starbucks, Unilever and Wal-Mart. Martin Thomas has worked as a consultant for Bacardi (the owners of 42 Below) and was formerly Global Head of Communications Planning at Mediaedge:cia (MEC). However, the views expressed about all of these firms are entirely those of the authors.

Acknowledgements

All books are the product of collaboration and with a title such as Crowd Surfing, you will hardly be surprised to hear that we would like to thank a crowd of people for helping us get to this stage. Bob Pearson at Dell, Robin Spencer at Pfizer, Steve Clayton at Microsoft, Dion Nash at 42 Below, Mark Turrell at Imaginatik, Charles Courtier at MEC, Peter Walshe at Millward Brown, Jeff Jarvis, David Butter, Mike Kuczkowski, Robert Phillips, Jackie Cooper, Tim Kitchen, James Thellusson and Guy Lawrence provided quotes, advice, encouragement and ideas that we could, if not steal, then certainly recycle. Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented Google and so made the job of researching background articles and other interesting stuff so much easier. Richard and Dan Edelman continue to earn David’s praises for keeping the firm he works for out of the hands of advertising executives and accountants. Hugh MacLeod deserves much credit for simply being Hugh. The team at A & C Black – Jonathan Glasspool, Lisa Carden – had faith in our half-baked idea and hopefully helped turn it into something readable. Emma Ratcliffe deserves a medal for coping with David. Finally, Alison and Suzie kept us on the straight and narrow, listened to our moaning and not once threatened us with divorce. This book is for all of you.

About the authors

Martin Thomas

Martin has run just about every type of marketing communications agency during the past 25 years. He began his career in public relations before moving into advertising, via sponsorship, entertainment marketing and new media. At the end of 2006 he decided to go out on his own with Snapper Communications, so named not because he likes fish, but because he was accused of getting ‘snappy’ in his last job, which he took as a sign to move on. He now spends his time consulting, training and writing for a number of major brand owners and agencies. He studied Modern History at Oxford University, is married with two children and believes he would have won a Welsh rugby cap, had it not been for a dodgy knee and a complete lack of ability.

David Brain

David has worked in PR, corporate communications and advertising for 26 years; a continual span broken only by a brief gullible 18 months when he ‘did a dot-com’. He lived and worked in Asia-Pacific for seven years and is now based in London, where he runs the European operations of Edelman, one of the top three PR firms in the world and the only one that remains independent. He continues to consult with some of the world’s top companies and their brands. He studied Literature and History at the Redlands University in California and graduated from the University of East Anglia in the UK. He is married to a New Zealander, has two children and follows Manchester City FC.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Crowd surfing. The process in which a person is passed overhead from person to person during a concert, transferring the person from one part of the venue to another. The ‘crowd surfer’ is passed above everyone’s heads, with everyone’s hands supporting the person’s weight. It is believed to have been invented by Iggy Pop.

Wikipedia¹

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about an architect who designed a university campus. On the day of the grand opening, he was approached by the head of the university, who commented that ‘the buildings look fantastic, but why haven’t you put in any paths to connect them?’ The architect smiled knowingly and replied, ‘I will come back in six months to put in the paths, once I have seen how the students have chosen to walk between the buildings.’ Rather than impose his own views of where the paths should go, or use some elaborate computer simulation model, he believed that an enlightened architect should respond to the behaviour of the crowd.

Welcome to the world of the crowd surfer: a world in which a new generation of business and political leaders has learned how to harness the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of today’s empowered consumers. They are not manipulators, demagogues or mere populists. They have been smart enough to recognise that people around the globe – emboldened and enthused by a new spirit of enquiry and self-expression, and powered by the Internet – have changed the rules of the game. They realise that letting go – giving their customers, partners, voters and employees a greater say in the way that their businesses operate – is, paradoxically, the most effective way to ensure a degree of control over their corporate or political destiny.

Acres of newsprint have been devoted to the subject of consumer empowerment. As far back as April 2005 The Economist claimed that the consumer was ‘king’, and Time magazine named ‘the consumer’ as its cover person for 2006 – a title usually bestowed on the world’s great political or business leaders – claiming that the year wasn’t shaped by the deeds of great men, but by ‘community and collaboration on a scale never seen before’.

The collective intelligence of crowds has created new business models such as Google and Wikipedia, and has even been the subject of a best-selling business book, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds², in which the author argues that ‘a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than the most skilled decision-maker’. The key word in this quote is ‘diverse’. Surowiecki does not advocate the rule of the mob, but instead believes in the collective power of groups of independently-minded people, each of whom can offer different types of experience and capabilities. According to his viewpoint, it is the diversity in their levels of individual knowledge that makes the crowd work.

The business and political community has not been slow to pick up on this trend. Consumer empowerment is debated in boardrooms, marketing departments and political campaign offices. It is on the agenda of every marketing conference. For some business and political commentators it represents the dawning of a new age: a revolution in the way that companies and other institutions communicate and collaborate with their stakeholders. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams are typical empowerment evangelists. In their book Wikinomics, which has become something of a bible for the collaboration movement, they make the bold claim that ‘For individuals and small producers, this may be the birth of a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on a par with the Italian Renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy.’³

This hyperbole is echoed by many political commentators, who see the ability of political leaders to harness consumer empowerment as a means of reviving the democratic process itself. Not surprisingly, Al Gore, everyone’s favourite New Age politician and the man often credited with spearheading the growth of the Internet as a political tool, is a supporter of the ‘Internet as saviour of democracy’ thesis. In his book The Assault on Reason,⁴ he writes: ‘So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way – a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

‘Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.’

Our aim in writing this book is not to add yet more words to the debate about the causes of consumer empowerment or why companies and other institutions should embrace it. We may not buy into some of the hyperbole – that this represents the end of business and politics as we know it – but we believe that the reality of consumer empowerment has become broadly embraced. In our many conversations with business and political leaders – and those advising them – we have yet to come across anyone who denies that it has major implications for the way that they communicate and work with customers, employees, voters or other important stakeholders. They have largely accepted the idea that relinquishing some control of the communications process – encouraging a dialogue rather than a monologue and providing the means to participate – allows them to earn the trust of customers, employees, shareholders, partners, and, in the case of politicians, the electorate.

Where they differ is in how they have approached the challenge. Some have been cautious, fearful of losing control: they are guilty of what Marshall McLuhan many decades ago described as ‘trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts’. Others appear comfortable with the idea of relinquishing control. These are our crowd surfers; the people that concur with racing driver Mario Andretti’s maxim that ‘if everything seems under control you’re just not going fast enough’.⁵ They are people such as Procter & Gamble’s Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, A G Lafley, who describes how business leaders ‘are operating in what is very much a “let go” world’. He points to the success of the company’s website for teenage girls, BeingGirl.com, as a great illustration of the commercial benefits that can be achieved by letting go. ‘It wouldn’t be as popular if we just tried to tell consumers what they should do.’⁶ We believe that others can learn from the experiences of people like Lafley – their successes and their mistakes.

One business that has recognised, after much pain, the value of becoming a crowd surfer is Dell. The company’s eponymous leader, Michael Dell, now sees the value in taking an open and honest approach to criticism: ‘We sell 40 million computers a year and unfortunately we aren’t going to get them all right, and every time that happens it hurts, but you quickly realise that these conversations [about these things] are going to happen, whether that is at CNET.com or wherever, so let’s have them happen at Dell.com and let’s go do something about it. And let’s get involved in conversations all around the world and let’s shorten our reaction time and the ability to learn from this.’

We will chart Dell’s journey on the road to becoming a crowd surfer and compare the very different approaches adopted by Microsoft and Apple; the latter, for all of its populist credentials, appears far less willing to embrace the crowd. We will also examine how pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has successfully tapped in to the talents of the internal crowd and how, conversely, Procter & Gamble has looked beyond its own research and development resources to harness the creative skills of people outside the corporation.

Some businesses have tried to fight the crowd, resorting to litigation in an attempt to hold back the tide of consumer empowerment. They remain in what grief counsellors would describe as a state of denial, hamstrung by an instinctive impulse, when facing complex challenges, to revert to tried and trusted methods, even when they are clearly no longer appropriate. We will show how these aggressive tactics, rather than mitigating the effects of the crowd, have proven to be highly counterproductive. There is certainly nothing wrong in trying to protect valuable intellectual property or preventing outsiders from damaging the reputation of a company. It is just that companies need to pick their legal battles more carefully and accept that they can’t prevent every single trademark violation and silence every critic.

In this book we will also look beyond the world of business, analysing how politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have embraced the concept of consumer empowerment. In many cases, they have understood its implications far faster than their marketing peers. Despite the description of the Internet by one political commentator as ‘the lawless frontier of politics, a place where student hackers, sociopaths and saboteurs lie in wait’,⁷ a new generation of politicians, such as Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron, has used Web-based communication (especially social media) to transform their party’s approach to political campaigning. And, in the case of Obama, to reignite the political enthusiasm of younger voters. We believe that many of the techniques they have adopted to encourage participation and make the electorate feel more involved in the political process could be applied equally to the world of business.

The new marketing communications mantras for politicians and business leaders alike are participation, collaboration and dialogue. We will explore what is driving this desire to participate, and analyse the role of informed individuals in shaping the behaviour of the crowd.

Becoming a crowd surfer is not without its challenges. The mood of the crowd is volatile, and we will show how even the smartest companies can struggle to satisfy the demands that it places on them. The crowd, often with the blogging community in the vanguard, is always highly suspicious and naturally cynical. It will spot quickly any examples of what it believes to be inconsistent or hypocritical behaviour or a lack of transparency in a corporation’s dealings with its various stakeholders. We will show how even the smartest marketing teams have come unstuck.

The other major challenge to becoming a crowd surfer comes from within. By nature we are all control freaks: we don’t like the feeling of being out of control, especially in our professional lives. Unfortunately, you can’t become a crowd surfer without abdicating a degree of control, taking a few risks and leaving the professional comfort zone. We will examine what type of personality is best suited to becoming a crowd surfer. How do they cope with complexity? Are the behavioural skills most commonly associated with female managers likely to become even more important in the future: things like empathy, sensitivity and flexibility?

This is not a book about the wonders of new technology. Neither of us are what you could describe as technology geeks – our preteen children almost certainly know more about computers already than we ever will. But we have witnessed the impact that new communications technologies have had on corporate life, and fortunately we have had the opportunity to talk to many leading technology thinkers. They have provided us with an interesting perspective on the impact of future technological developments which we are able to share with you. Crowd surfers don’t have to be technophiles, but they do need an understanding of how technology, both today and into the future, is likely to change the nature of their relationship with the crowd.

We both like to think of ourselves as pragmatic realists. Between us we have spent more than 40 years helping all sorts of companies and institutions respond to social, political and economic change. This has given us a useful perspective on the way that they work and the best way to change their behaviour. But above all, we think that the time is right for a sober assessment of what needs to be done to embrace consumer empowerment.

We are not ‘open source’ evangelists, who argue that the only way to work is by collaborating with the crowd, nor do we believe that all communication has to involve an open dialogue. All of the evidence indicates that collaborative business cultures are likely to be more successful, and that dialogue tends to be more effective than monologue, but the reality of running a business or political party is that you can’t always surf the crowd. Equally, the success of Apple, under the self-proclaimed control freak Steve Jobs, provides us with a cautionary example of how ignoring demands for open and sustained dialogue does not necessarily damage a business’s performance. We explore why Apple’s unique business model allows it to ignore the need to crowd surf.

Crowd surfing does not mean abdicating all personal control, becoming subject to the whims and prejudices of the crowd. It is not simply a case of being a crowd pleaser or a populist – a criticism that is often thrown at politicians who cannot face making unpopular political decisions, even if they are the right ones. Leaders should continue to lead: to debate issues with the crowd, try to influence its opinion and, if necessary, take a contrary position. As Allan Leighton, Chairman of Royal Mail and one of the most revered business leaders in the UK, reminds us: ‘Sometimes doing the right thing is the hard thing; leadership isn’t a popularity contest.’

Rather in the way that a highly skilled meeting facilitator can control the ebb and flow of debate during a meeting or workshop without appearing to do so, the crowd surfer can respond to and shape the wider discussion within the crowd. We will show how some businesses have even become what we describe as ‘crowd leaders’. These businesses have chosen to align themselves with issues beyond their immediate corporate interests. Prepared to take a stand on sometimes controversial issues, even if these might alienate some of their stakeholders, they behave more like activist groups than traditional companies.

Above all, our aim in writing this book is to provide practical advice for anyone contemplating the challenges posed by the empowered consumer, based on the experiences of other businesses and institutions that have faced similar challenges. Forget the hyperbole and the exaggerated claims that this represents the end of business as we know it. It is an interesting challenge: sometimes difficult, and occasionally feeling close to impossible, but we believe that given the will, every institution can become a crowd surfer. And that becoming a crowd surfer will ultimately make them stronger and more successful.

Listen to me. Learn from me. I was not the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.

Proximo, Gladiator, Dreamworks/MGM (2000)⁸

1 http://en.wikipedia.org, June 2008

2 The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (Little, Brown, 2004)

3 Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Atlantic Books, 2007)

4 The Assault on Reason, Al Gore (Bloomsbury, 2007)

5 www.brainyquote.com

6 Association of National Advertisers, September 2006

7 Tom Baldwin, Fear and Blogging on the Campaign Trail (The Times, 29th December 2007)

8 Scriptwriter, David Franzoni

Chapter 2

The World Seems Out
of Control

All of the big changes that emergent technologies bring us are, for the most part, completely unanticipated by the people who introduce those technologies. It’s out of control by its very nature, and if you could control it, it wouldn’t work.

William Gibson, science fiction novelist

and inventor of the word ‘cyberspace’

To many business leaders, the world seems out of control: the level of public scrutiny of corporate behaviour is at an all-time high; criticism of what is perceived as corporate malpractice can spread at startling speed; domestic business issues can suddenly gain a global dimension; governments are rushed into anti-corporate legislation at the merest hint of a consumer protest; confidential internal memos are published online almost before they have left the CEO’s office; employee disputes are being fought out on social video sites; potential new customers can investigate the opinions of previous customers, circumventing the blandishments of the glossy brochure or new advertising campaign. As a travel agent was heard to remark, ‘I can’t sell bad hotels any more, because all my customers check them out on Expedia before they pay me a deposit’. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.

One leader who can certainly empathise with this sentiment is Lord Sebastian Coe, former Olympic champion and now chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. On 6th June 2007, he and his team unveiled the new logo for the London Games and were met with a howl of protest. Within 24 hours, almost 50,000 people had signed an online petition protesting about the logo. Every amateur marketing and design expert seemed to have a view on its merits; it dominated the news channels for days.

We will explore what made the crowd react in this way and analyse the effectiveness of Coe’s response. We will also highlight the problems faced by those businesses who have tried to hold back the tide of consumer empowerment through legal action. Their actions may have been correct from a legal standpoint, but they were completely counterproductive. In the online world, freedom of speech is considered by many of its most vociferous constituents to be a fundamental right, and any attempts to compromise this freedom are treated as an attack on the online community as a whole.

The companies who have resorted to legal action would have been better off listening to the wise words of online journalist Jeff Jarvis, who advocates learning to ‘love the customer who hates you’. Like Jarvis, it is our belief that the most robust businesses should be capable of withstanding criticism from their customers; in fact, if they are smart, they should treat it as the most valuable form of feedback.

At the Mercy of the Crowd

Crowds are always unpredictable and mercurial. They can generate enormous feelings of well-being and shared identity; equally, they can be enormously destructive and irrational. Crowds are ‘contested’ and, to those interested in maintaining order, dangerous and scary.

Mark Earls¹

Paul English is the type of intelligent, motivated and well-connected individual who makes business leaders feel out of control. This US-based blogger should be a hero to all of us who have spent hours lost in the twilight zone of corporate telephone systems, those interactive, multiple-option telephone systems that stop us talking to a real person. Paul created www.gethuman.com, an online directory, or what he described as a ‘cheat sheet’, explaining the numbers you need to dial in order to beat the automated systems and talk to a real person. Predictably, the corporations on Paul’s sheet tried to put a stop to this heresy, but according to Paul, ‘When companies change their interactive voice response systems as a response to the cheat sheet, their employees often tell me the new numbers and codes.’

The failure of some of the world’s most powerful corporations to control a lone activist such as Paul English, or the behaviour of their own employees, who helped him beat the automated systems, tells us all we need to know about how the balance of power has shifted in favour of the consumer. It has led to a sense of helplessness in many of the world’s boardrooms, which is summed up by Kevin Roberts, Chief Executive of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi: ‘For the first time the consumer is boss, which is fascinatingly frightening, scary and terrifying, because everything we used to do, everything we used to know, will no longer work.’²

He exaggerates his point for effect. Not everything we knew before the rise of the empowered consumer has become redundant, nor every marketing technique thrown on the scrapheap. Consumers may enjoy a greater degree of access to information than ever before and feel as though they have more influence over the behaviour of their political masters and the suppliers of products and services, but their core beliefs, values and needs are not that dissimilar to those of previous generations. Whenever one comes across any hyperbole in the marketing communications world, it always pays to read the wise words of Jeremy Bullmore, advertising commentator and former Chair of both J Walter Thompson and the Advertising Association: ‘I haven’t read them all of course, so I may be wrong. But I believe it to be the case that every single marketing strategy written since 1955 contains the sentence “It is essential that we recognise the increasing sophistication of consumers”. . .It’s a puzzling form of self-deception, this. Comparisons across time are meaningless.’³

Despite Bullmore’s words of caution ringing in our ears, it is possible to sense that, at the very least, there has been a power shift in favour of consumers and away from the previously monolithic corporations. The Internet has clearly been a driving force behind this change. To prove the point, Forrester Research undertook a simple Google search on the world’s 20 largest brands. This revealed that fewer than 20 per cent of search results are linked to the companies themselves. About half are related to experts, the media and other sources. The remaining – and growing – 26 per cent come from consumer-generated sources such as blogs and product reviews, all of which are playing an increasing role in what the public learns and thinks about companies and their products.⁴

In a separate study of young Americans, Wikipedia was identified as the second most credible source of information about a company and, conversely, corporate advertising was deemed the least credible source⁵. The implications of these studies are pretty startling: the vast majority of the information about a brand’s products and services online is not directly controlled by the owners or managers of the brand. It is a thought that terrifies many brand managers who have spent years deluding themselves that they are the ones in control.

We only have to cast our minds back to the millennium and the launch of Naomi Klein’s No Logo to see how things have changed in such a relatively short period of time. This manifesto of the anti-globalisation movement depicted a world in which consumers were under the thrall of global brand owners. Consumer freedoms were under attack; global brands were too powerful, too controlling. She talked about how ‘in ways both insidious and overt, this corporate obsession with brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space: on public institutions such as schools, on youthful identities, on the concept of nationality and on the possibilities for unmarketed space.’⁶

She saw the consumer as a victim of this corporate obsession with branding: ‘That we live a sponsored life is now a truism, and it’s a pretty safe bet that as spending on advertising continues to rise, we roaches will be treated to even more of these ingenious gimmicks, making it ever more difficult and more seemingly pointless to muster even an ounce of outrage.’⁷ It was a view that, at the time, pandered to many people’s suspicions of the major corporations, based on a paranoid image of Machiavellian branding gurus, who wouldn’t rest until there was a branded coffee shop on every corner and a pair of Nike trainers on every foot, inevitably manufactured in sweatshop conditions by an army of malnourished children.

It is an image of the world that, in hindsight, almost seems charming in its naivety. Far from being all too powerful, the 21st century has seen a weakening of the power and influence of global brand owners in the face of a rising tide of consumer activism and empowerment. Most of the global brands criticised by Klein have experienced difficulties. Nike has been forced on to the back foot by critics of its Third World labour policies; Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, has talked about ‘the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand’⁸; even Coca-Cola appears to have lost some of its fizz, with a host of new product launches struggling to revive sales in its US home market. Consumer trust in corporations as a whole is at an all-time low.

Endless hours are wasted by people sitting around boardroom tables trying to second-guess the behaviour of what appear to be increasingly irrational and unpredictable customers. In a poll of UK-based marketers, 64 per cent agreed that it is becoming more difficult to communicate with consumers than ever before⁹. The remaining 36 per cent were probably too depressed to answer the question. Professor Stephen Brown of Cranfield University captured the pessimistic mood of the new millennium in his public address at the launch of Cranfield’s New Marketing Research Group: ‘The certainties of consumer expectations, behaviour, segmentation and communications that have underpinned marketing seem to have evaporated. Marketers are struggling to come to terms with splintering social structures, changing tastes and a fragmenting mediascape.’

One empirical study which gives an indication of some of the changes that have occurred in recent years is the Edelman Trust Barometer, which asks opinion-formers – essentially reasonably well-off, 35 to 64 year olds around the world – about who and what they trust. The study has for eight years asked the question ‘Who do you trust as a credible source of information?’ In 2005 a noticeable shift in attitudes became evident, with the respondents preferring independent figures of authority such as economic analysts or experts to established figures of authority such as a company CEO. A year later, a further shift took place with ‘a person like me’ becoming the most trusted source. By the 2007 study, not only was ‘a person like me’ confirmed as the most credible spokesperson, but a company’s CEO had dropped to number seven in the list.