The other day I stumbled across this rather fab video of Robbie Williams strutting his stuff at Kebworth in 2003. I knew there had been a lot of people there, but this shot made me wonder how many…
That’s 125,000 people, right there. Or to put it another way 0.2% of the UK population. 0.2% doesn’t sound like very many people when your client brief says they want to convert that many to their exciting new low fat spread or convince them to switch energy providers. But as you can see, that’s an awful lot of hearts and minds to convince.
So I started thinking about other ways to bring perceptions about audience size back down to earth. The obvious first stop was BERG’s How many really? for the BBC (bookmark it, it’s dead handy for presentations).
Then I watched a few minutes of QI on TV which reminded me about Dunbars Number (which states that humans can only manage to sustain about 150 friends). Your brand has 20,000 likes on facebook? Great, but how many of them of them are you involved in an ongoing conversation with? How many of them have shuffled up their 150 friends to make room for a real ongoing relationship with a brand?
I guess we sometimes need to think beyond the numbers.