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Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
Christopher Locke, one of the co-conspirators of the best seller The Cluetrain Manifesto, has again set off to teach companies how to talk, not just offer lip-service, to their customers. In Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices, Locke takes on the myths and monuments of marketing armed new ideas and a razor sharp wit. Buckle up. Hold on. Mr. Locke is going to take you on a wild ride to the new world of marketing.
While the book's frenzied style will be compared to that of Hunter S. Thompson, I view the book instead as the first real book written in hyperlink-style. Jumping all over the map and all over the mind in search of gonzo marketing. Scrolling from idea to author to tactic and back again around the horn again.
Locke devotes a portion of the book to a refresher course in The Cluetrain Manifesto?s teachings: Markets are conversations. The Web is a micromarket made up of individuals. Your mass market mind tricks won't work on us. Gonzo Marketing picks up from there with a deeper examination of how companies must understand how micromarkets operate.
Locke accomplishes this by giving readers a detailed examination of the evolution of current marketing thought. The experts and evangelists range from Marshall McLuhan to Noam Chomsky to Sergio Zyman and Seth Godin. I stopped counting books and articles Locke mentions or dissects when it hit 32. Gonzo Marketing is quick to point out when grand ideas, like Godin's "Permission Marketing," were nothing more than underhanded tactics to send us spam.
What Locke pushes forward instead is this notion of gonzo marketing. Gonzo marketing "is marketing from the market's perspective. It is not a set of tricks to be used against us. Instead, it's a set of tools to achieve what we want for a change." No more tricks. No more schemes. No more mass market messages.
Gonzo Marketing also explains the evolution of the micromarket. Mass production created the need for mass markets. But globalization has been cutting the mass market into smaller and smaller pieces for many years now. The rapid proliferation of the Internet has only increased the growth of these micromarkets. While only global giants were once exposed to the power of micromarkets now companies of every shape and size must learn to deal with them.
The bad news for companies is that micromarkets are here to stay. As Locke puts it, "The web is a non-stop planet-spanning celebration. And we ain't goin' back in the box." The good news is that companies can be active participants in these micromarkets. But Locke isn't talking about "hashbrowned or refried databases" but instead "genuinely social social groupings." Micromarkets are "collections of people, communities joined by shared interests." And the big catch is that you need to belong to these groups to have a conversation with them.
This all sounds very 1960s commune-esk. And some readers may quickly label Locke's ideas as being as foolhardy as those he criticizes himself. But the evidence of micromarkets in action are all around. Internet chat rooms allow micromarkets to flourish and communicate like never before. Interested in rare coinage from the ancient world? There's a micromarket and somewhere people are talking about it, and telling people where to buy the best Tiberius Aureus Tribune penny. Online personal Web logs, also called blogs, allow micromarkets to share ideas, discuss new products, and to speak their mind in a way that traditional journalism never allowed for. Think, Oprah Winfrey's Book Club x 50 million and growing. Get the picture
Locke points to companies like Ford Motor Company, Delta Airlines, Intel, and Bertelsmann who are already reaching out to micromarkets. In February 2000 Ford announced that it was giving each of its 350,000 employees a computer and Internet access, and it didn't take long for those other companies to follow suit. Sure, Ford wants to put technology in its people's hands, but "the real deal is that Ford has unleashed 350,000 independent and genuinely intelligent agents to fan out online and listen carefully." First people start listening, then they start talking.
Gonzo Marketing doesn't tell companies they can't market to customers -- but that they need to radically rethink how they communicate. Before the automobile, the transcontinental railroad was the only easy way to get to the west coast. Before the Internet, mass marketing was the only easy way you could communicate on a global scale. And the railroads of old were just as inefficient and costly as the bloated marketing budgets of today.
Where as Cluetrain described the disease in detail, Gonzo Marketing concludes with a cure for companies to begin using. While Locke often sounds anti-big business, he notes that it is these larger companies who have the best advantage in making the early "transition from traditional marketing to more intimate micromarket relationships." They can begin to experiment with gonzo marketing by skimming a little bit off the top of their massive advertising budgets. Companies need to value their employee?s individual interests, and to find ways to nurture those interests. Allow people to go out and be ambassadors for your company, even if their interests have nothing to do with what the company is selling. People are more likely to talk to people with whom they share common interests than to corporate talking heads that share no common ground. Think about it.
Gonzo Marketing makes for great reading because it gets the gears in your mind turning. Everyone says their employees are their best advertisers. What if you really put that kind of attitude into action? Taken individually, micromarkets may seem insignificant, but collectively they have the power to move mountains. Locke concludes Gonzo Marketing with instructions for those pioneers that want to make first contact with micromarkets: "Hook up, connect, co-create, procreate. Redeploy. Foment joy. Brothers in arms, sisters of Avalon, champions of the world get to work."
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
The best way for marketing to be effective on me as a consumer is to... wait for it... show me products I am actually interested in.
Micro/macro/viral marketing call all suck it as far as I'm concerned. Show me things I have even a remote chance of buying and watch as advertising becomes effective for the first time in it's history.
Yes, If you want to be paranoid, you can call this mind control. Or you can give some other politically correct name and feel better about it.
But in any case what has happened with the internet is that the monkeys have escaped from their cages, so to speak. This is what the concept of micromarketing has tapped into, but it is more global than that.
This is because marketing is not just for business. It is also used for political agendas.
Marketing tries to aggregate people into masses. This is because it is easier to deal with the demographics of large groups of people. Also, large masses of people are easier to manipulate with images and emotions such as fear, sex, etc.
If you cut the visceral reactions to various images out of the loop, then there is a problem. Then you end up with dealing with individuals with individual thoughts and ideas and experiences. It is far easier to market to a million people as a mass market that to market to a million independent thinking individuals.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Man, you don't want much, do you?
Well, maybe not you per se, but a vocal segment of the slashdot community. There's something fundamental missing for the advertiser. Something simple... maybe he should ask you what you're interested in. That might be a little less annoying than current methods, and allows you to control what information they recieve.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So, we had: people at company -> communication/marketing dept -> you
And the dream is: people at company -> marketing dept -> people at company -> you
Which is best for all of us, as it puts social responsibility and accountibility back in the hands of a community (ie, community of exployees) rather than the all-or-nothing super-hygenic communication that comes out of board-meeting-inspired mass ad campaigns. Note that I am not saying that the form and message of that communication won't still go through the marketing dept and PR-sanitizers, but for the most part, humans want to talk to humans; not answering machines, billboards, or any other one-to-many communication platform.
I mean, at the end of the day, we all work for companies, and I don't believe we're all evil. We are just capable of intrusive or annoying behaviour far better when our names and individuality is 'trimmed' from the communication. People are very very cynical today about advertising, but we have to understand that we all, to some extent, depend on it. The goal is to balance the needs of the consumer (to allow them to distinguish between marketing and personal communication) while bringing marketing more inline with the types of communication that we actually enjoy and participate in every day.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Locke wrote the book, but I want to hear Demosthenes take on the book and subject before I buy it.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Oh yeh, I forgot, Eric Raymond. Well, carry on then I guess.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
* You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You go up to her and say, "Hi, I'm great in bed, how about it?".
That's Direct Marketing.
* You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You give your friend a $10. She goes up and says "Hi, my friend over there is great in bed, how about it?".
That's Advertising.
* You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You somehow mop up her mobile number. You call, talk to her a while and then say "I am great in bed, how about it?"
That's Tele-Marketing.
* You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You recognize her. You walk up to her, refresh her memory and get her to laugh and giggle and then suggest, "I am great in bed, how about it?".
That's Customer Relationship Management.
* You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You walk around playing Mr. Busy. You put on your best smile and walk around being Mr. Congenial. You stand straight, you talk soft and smooth, you open the door for the ladies, you smile like a dream, you set an aura around you playing the Mr. Gentleman and then you move up to the girl and say, "Hi, I am great in bed, how about it?".
That's Hard Selling.
* You go to a party, you see an attractive girl across the room. SHE COMES OVER and says, "Hi, I hear you're great in bed, how about it?"
Now THAT is the power of Branding.