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The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
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Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Camel’s Nose from their Ostrich Effect.
 
This week we explore consumer habits in the run-up to Christmas, and look at falling childhood obesity in Brighton. In in a world becoming ever-less certain and predictable, we check out which parts of the values map are least risk averse. And, in our PPP section, we explore the obvious burning political issue of the day: the comparative age profile of different European Parliaments.
 
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, TCC’s perennial locker room, where small talk and big ideas do battle.
 
Finally, a quick reminder that More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box, Philip Cowley and Rob Ford’s fantastic new book is on special offer for TCC Weekly readers, now with a whopping 40% discount. Click here and enter the discount code (MSL40) at the checkout to get your copy.
 
Also, several academic publishers having kindly made the articles behind the work free for a limited period. You can find the full set on our website here.
 
David Evans
Director
 
If you see a link belongs in The Weekly then just email it to us and we’ll accredit you for the good spot and give you a free TCC exclamation mark to say thanks. Meanwhile, if you’re interested to see the mad, marvellous and missable articles featured in recent weeks then just click here for the full back catalogue of TCC Weeklies.

 

A semi-tongue in cheek article by Quartz this week plots the switch-on of the Oxford Christmas lights on a chart (see below) and predicts that, on the present trajectory, they’ll be getting turned on in July in about a century’s time.

The analysis probably won’t win any awards for statistical robustness. But underlying it is an interesting story about brinksmanship and the Sorites paradox (that’s the process by which an infinitesimal change in isolation can gradually create a deep and noticeable change).

 

That said, it seems that breaking the October seal, and having the lights turned on before Halloween will be too noticeable an encroachment for any single year – and may, thus, be a measure that many in the retail industry balk at.

 

In the meantime, though, with plenty going on to be gloomy about, why not get into the Xmas mood as soon as possible – in the spirit of which, here’s John Lewis’s annual advertising offering (and here are the various spoofs the whole thing has inspired).

 

Also this week:

  • This new book on the role of ‘messiness’ in policy-making may be a primer for life in the Oval Office in 2016
  • Read Bloomberg’s ‘What works cities movement’ guide.
  • “Peekaboo” – read this fascinating insight into what children’s willingness to hide behind their hands tells us about human reciprocity.

 Enough on Behaviour Change – let’s cut to the big political revelation of the week. We’re talking, of course, about new insights into the comparative age breakdowns of parliaments across the EU – tweeted here by our friend Phil Cowley. France, it emerges, is the realm of the grey-back; over one in ten French politicians is a septuagenarian. Denmark, meanwhile is the taking the ‘stale’ out of “male pale and stale”, with nearly half their politicians being under 40. (The UK is virtually slap bang in the middle).

 

There’s a genuinely interesting question in there about exactly what effect these things have on politics and political trust. On the one hand a country run by old men clearly seems like the epitome of establishment politics. Yet on the other, the establishment politicians most reviled are often young blades, seen as SPAD-like and overly polished (i.e. Cameron, Clegg and Miliband). Indeed, many of the outsider politicians of the era are old-timers like Corbyn, Sanders or Trump, whose combined age is 212.

 

On the topic of which, we may as well now move onto Trump, whose absence thus far – not to mention his onomatopoeic name and the logo of the party he represents – renders him a definite ‘elephant in the room’: 

  • Here’s the Trump victory in maps and here’s the demographic breakdown.
  • Here’s what the Iowa paradox tells us about The Donald, and here’s what Michael Moore makes of it all.
  • Here is a piece about where professional campaigners go from this failure – and here’s another  on the future for pollsters.
  • Here’s what queues at the US polls tell us
  • And here – as a granule of hope for Trump-sceptics – is the lowdown on speculation of a bid by Michelle in 2020…

There was good news for Brighton & Hove this month, whose childhood obesity levels are below the national average and appear to be falling. The council say they focused on holistic approaches, small steps and the involvement of third parties in tackling the problem. “We want to prevent obesity happening in the first place, so our focus is on the whole family rather than just the children,” explained the council’s consultant in public health Katie Cuming.

 

This very much corresponds with our own experiences, which show that tackling obesity isn’t something that can be done in isolation. Because poor weight-management has such a diverse range of causes – from cultural reasons to logistical or practical ones – a holistic or ‘person-centred’ approach is vital in solving it.

 

Also this week: 

The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC – which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.

With big, unexpected events like Trump’s victory and Brexit sweeping the globe, we thought we’d take a quick look at the values profile of those who like things “certain and predictable”.

As the heat map shows, the people who ‘know what they like and like what they know’ are primarily Settlers and, in even more intense concentration, socially conservative Prospectors.

 

What’s immediately interesting about this is that the Prospectors – a group we might assume would be drawn to novelty or ‘flashiness’ – agree as strongly as they do. This is hard to explain, but perhaps it comes down to the fact that these individuals like to have a clear understanding of the parameters of the world around them, in order to excel within it. In other words, they like to know the ladder’s secure before they start trying to climb it.

 

What’s even stranger is that many of the sources of uncertainty, are often driven by the groups who are most hostile to it. While we do not have the values data on Trump-voters, for example, it seems highly likely that they’re Settlers and socially conservative Prospectors. Why this is, is hard to say. But one explanation might be that things like Brexit and the election of Trump, while sources of instability in themselves, are actually a desperate quest to resurrect the sort of stability that voters associate with a more certain and stable past. Unpredictable throws of the dice, the aim of which is nevertheless to turn the clock back to more straightforward and stable times.

 

Also this week, this YouGov analysis on the plight of Labour doesn’t mention values, but what it’s effectively looking at is the ‘Blue, New or True’ dilemma, of whether Labour should covet Settlers, Prospectors or Pioneers. And here’s Blue Labour originator Maurice Glasman’s take.

And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, where unpredictability trumps certainty every day of the week:

Please click through onto our website for more details on what we do; the TCC website,  and if you would like to take our values test too!  Click here 
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