Found: How to find the ‘next big thing’
Central Valley Business Times 3/29/07
But, lo! It’s been there all the time, says a professor at California State University, Long Beach.
The next big thing, whatever it is in any industry, often comes from random copying, according to the researchers at Durham University in England, as well as CSULB, Western Carolina University and Indiana University who authored an article titled "Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying" that appears in the May issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
The study shows that almost all people are copycats, and it is guaranteed that their taste in clothes, music or baby names will change at a consistent rate over time.
However, there is no way of predicting how it will change, as it is completely random, they say.
New ideas become highly popular by chance alone, and then over time are replaced by others, all through the process of copying with occasional innovation, the researcher say.
The popularity of things like baby names, music, dog breeds or fashions change at a constant rate regardless of population size through a process of people randomly copying trends, according to the study.
This contradicts classic economic models that believe that people make rational choices about the clothes they wear, the way they dance or the music they listen to.
Carl Lipo, an associate professor in anthropology at Cal State Long Beach and research scientist at CSULB's Institute for Integrated Research on Materials, Environments and Society, says that the results demonstrate how relatively simple models can be used to explain remarkably complex phenomena.
"What we demonstrate is that the aggregate effect of simple rules often underlie what we see as organization at higher scales,” he says. “We don't need to invoke the idea of some individual or group for patterns to emerge."
Led by Alex Bentley of the Durham University Anthropology Department, the team looked at the Billboard Top 200 chart and found that it turned over at a constant average rate for over 30 years between 1950 and 1980. The number of albums entering and exiting the chart varied from day to day and month to month, but overall the average stayed fixed at 5.6 percent per month for the full 30-year period. A similar consistent turnover rate was established for the top baby names and dog breeds.
Their real-world data was matched by computer simulations of a random copying model with 2,000 individuals copying each other from one instant to the next, with a small proportion of innovators (2 percent or less). During the simulation, they kept track of the Top 40, Top 100 and other lists of popular trends and monitored how much turnover there was. The model predicted continuous and regular turnover matching the proof of the real-world data from the charts of baby names, music and dog breeds.
How quickly a list will change depends on the size of the list - the more choices people have, the quicker trends become popular or unpopular. However, the research has found that the size of the population does not have an impact on the turnover of lists. Although a higher population means more new ideas are out there, the turnover on a top 100 list does not increase, as there is more competition for any particular idea to reach the list.
Marketing professionals who use viral marketing, which spreads information by word-of-mouth through social networks and the Web, often classify people as innovators, early adopters and copiers. "Innovators are the cool ones who don't bother imitating other people, but instead 'pump' new fashions into our world," says Mr. Bentley. "Most are ignored, but some get copied. If the innovator is already a 'cool' celebrity, it means something shoots up in popularity much faster than you would predict likely via random copying. However, turnover over time will still be constant."
"The model we have discovered predicts that the turnover of fashion will be proportional to the square root of the proportion of innovators, regardless of population size," he says.
Since it is a game of chance, the model cannot predict how any one particular fad will fare, or which trends will become fashionable, just that new trends will definitely emerge at a regular and predictable rate.
The discovery that change is continual and regular under the random copying model means it could be a useful tool to predict change rates as well as distinguish copying from other forms of collective behavior, the researchers say.
Psychology Professor Harold Herzog of Western Carolina University and biology Professor Matthew Hahn of Indiana University also participated in the study.