Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices

Reader Steve MacLaughlin (you can visit his blog here) contributed this review of Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, which sounds like an interesting followup to The Cluetrain Manifesto. Whether micromarketing of this sort really takes off will depend chicken-and-egg-like on whether a few companies escape being annoying and actually get people interested in what they have to offer.

Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
author	Christopher Locke
pages	256
publisher	Perseus Publishing (2001)
rating	8
reviewer	Steve MacLaughlin
ISBN	0738204080
summary	Leaping through and thrashing about current conceptions of reaching people and making money in an inexorably more-connected world.

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."

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You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

viral^H^H^H^H^Hmicro marketing

[shibut]

All these principles make sense and on paper work great. However, it's been tried before - it was called viral marketing (and don't tell me that employees of .com-s in 98-early '00 were not enthusiastic about their jobs and true embassadors, I was living in the bay area at the time and could feel it from every friend I had). Most companies found that in order for the "viral" part to work they had to give away a service/product that costs them money for free. Later, they started charging for it and that's when the real test came and in many cases the virally added consumers that came for the freebies left. The only viral service I can think of that I still use now that it isn't operating on a loss is Snapfish [snapfish.com]. I like their processing and posting (good for overseas parents) and this way I don't have to remember to pick up my photos. Still, if I found out that they were way more expensive than other alternatives I'd drop them in a heartbeat. Lucky for me they're priced well.

Re:Damn.

[Tackhead]

> > Course, if you also realize that 'gonzo' also is a method of filming low-budget porno, this book takes on a whole new meaning.
>
> "Gonzo" is not a method of filming porn. It has no meaning specific to porn. It is just an adjective roughly equivalent to "outrageous" (gonzo [dictionary.com]).

Google query for "Gonzo porn" [google.com]

I do believe you owe the original poster an apology.

Though your point - "outrageous" - is equally well-taken.

For those at work and unable to check out the links, it appears that "gonzo porn" is to "tasteful erotica", as "goatse.cx" is to "national geographic".

Re:Successful marketing.

[sg3000]

As the token sleazy marketing guy that reads slashdot, I feel obligated to weigh in there.

First, to correct someone else who commented earlier, the point of marketing is not to convince someone to buy what they don't need. That's nuts; getting someone to buy something they don't need is no way to build a business. There are, however, two points to marketing:

1. Differentiation: explain the value of your products to solve a prospect's problems better than those of your competition.
2. Segmentation: determine what attributes your product has (or needs to have) to solve problems that your prospect is willing to pay to solve. This means either take an existing product to solve the products of different prospects, or start with a market that you're successful in and build something new that solves additional problems.

So looking at that, let's consider your statement:

> 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.

that's a concise goal, but it raises additional questions.

> marketing to be effective

What do we mean by "effective"? What do you do? what problems are you having today and you're trying to solve? what buying decisions are you involved in? how much money do you have? How much are you willing to spend to solve the problems you mentioned? How about your ideas of brand loyalty? How long will you keep the product?

> show me
Okay, how? Come to your house? Come to your office? Set up a booth at a trade show? Which ones? Advertise in trade magazines you read? How do I know what you read? Advertise on Slashdot? What if you're blocking ads? How about television ads? What do you watch? Are you using Tivo to skip ads? Do you like billboards? Do you prefer mailing circulars? Is there a more cost effective way of reaching you?

> products I am actually interested in

How do I know what you're interested in? Is it related to what you read on the web? Is it related to your job? How about your hobbies? Do you know what specific products you want? How about product categories? What attributes do you consider important in your buying decision? What attributes does your boss force you to have, but you don't think you really need?

My point is your statement makes perfect sense, but it leads to a lot of other questions as well, which is what complicates the issue. And just like with anything, there are good approaches to it, and bad ones (for the web these would include annoying popup ads, email harvesting, spam, telemarketers, etc.). Just like you, I hate the annoying approaches, but remember, hearing someone say they hate marketing is like when you hear someone say they hate computers. They don't really hate *computers*, they hate the experiences they've had with certain computers (or software programs, or whatever) so far.

Re:You argue the privacy advocates' position

[great throwdini]

this is precisely why I am up in arms about that kind of research: because, to them, I am "just a number."

You must really have a problem with the census, then, and all the benefits that arise from it and other forms of social research. Intelligent marketers want to achieve the same goals as with any social research project - learn as much as they can about target populations as accurately and efficiently as possible. In the case of marketers, so they will know who best to peddle their wares and what wares will sell best.

The leap from statistical analysis of populations to the privacy concerns you voiced is a large one. Why moderators continue to confuse slippery slope arguments with true insight is beyond me.