Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices 222
| 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."
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
I wonder if there's a chapter on... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing like irritation to inspire me to buy a product, eh?
Marketing and control (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
And do that... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Successful marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy advocates are up in arms about this kind of research, but these people have to get it through their heads that these companies don't give a fuck who you are. To them you're just a number. A number who happens to like programming books, geek shirts, alternative music and donkey porn. And it is through that information that you can get what you want: "show me products I am actually interested in."
- j
You argue the privacy advocates' position (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is precisely why I am up in arms about that kind of research: because, to them, I am "just a number." Companies don't care that I am am human with notions of privacy and dignity. I'll take my privacy and dignity over someone else's notion of "what I might want to buy from them" every single time. To companies trying to make money, my privacy and dignity are barriers to their profit-making abilities. What gives them the right to take it?
And if you argue that people have no privacy, then I reserve the right to clandestinely take photographs of you masturbating and send those photos to everyone who knows you, including your employer, potential employers, and your extended family.
Re:X-10...get the hint! (Score:2, Insightful)
I too despise those idiotic X10 ads. But isn't it curious that everybody knows the name X10? They've attracted our attention and have created a very high profile brand name. Sounds like pretty good marketing to me.
It's a very fine line between attracting peoples' attention and pissing people off. If you don't risk pissing people off you don't risk attracting their attention either.
Now if they actually had something to sell...they could make a bundle!
...laura
Re:Successful marketing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tricking people into looking at shit they don't want... will not make them buy shit they don't want! Oh my god really? Punching the monkey and conning someone out of 2 minutes doesn't make people buy X10 cameras that they don't care about? Etc. That's why internet advertising doesn't work. It could.
WTF is this?? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are real economic trends that support "Gonzo Marketing". Much of it will come true. But this kind of bad writing isn't helping. One trend is that everyone is this future will be a writing. Hopefully MacLaughlin takes some time between now and then to learn how to write effectively.
Re:Successful marketing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Please explain to me why, for all of this research and data mining, these companies have not been able to divine the simplest of truths:
I don't want any of their crap, and I don't want to see and ads for their crap.
Marketing is not about selling people the things they want. Marketing is about convincing people to buy things that they don't need!
does the book include... (Score:2, Insightful)
marketer: "gonzo marketing"? what the hell is that? wow, this guy must be some kind of "guru" on the "bleeding edge". i want to be sure i'm up to speed on the latest techniques in this "new economy" world. gosh, maybe us marketing guys will finally have an impressive array of lingo and abbreviations like the programmers do. woo hoo!
Re:X-10...get the hint! (Score:3, Insightful)
Advertising involves pestering them into buying whatever trash, you need to get rid of the quickest or at the most sales commission. At most your role in it is to object in terms that the salesman has researched rebutltes to.
To a marketer you are a part of the process from the very start, and he strives to build a long term relationship with you. To an advertiser you're just prey, eat quickly and move on to the next mentality.
Yes I know about X10, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I'd ever buy one. This gonzo marketing is more about a "Am I proud enough about our product to recommend it to my friends" then it is about consumers being prey. It appears to me that X10 not only considers me to be prey, but the entire theme of its adverts are trying to appeal to preditors as well. Personaly I think that Marketing and advertising depts should be in sepperate buildings
Re:And do that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Follows is an actual(*) conversation between a marketing agent and an internet user.
Salesman: "Hi, I have bunches of products to sell... but I care, I only want to sell you what you WANT to buy. So. What would you like me to advertise?"
Recipient: "Go away. I dont WANT to be advertised to. I am more than capable of doing my own research."
Salesman: "OOooh now you've done it. I'm going to monitor your favorite websites, and then I'm going to blast 640x480 popups and banner ads specifically targeted at your browsing habits. Watch out for them, they'll make you buy my stuff anyway!"
Recipient: "Why cant you just ASK me what I want, huh?"
(*) Actual conversation made up by myself
Re:You argue the privacy advocates' position (Score:2, Insightful)
I do have a problem with the census. The Constitution does not approve that which the leftists have turned the census into.
and all the benefits that arise from it
What benefits?
other forms of social research.
What other forms of social research? As long as it is consensual, provides recognizable benefit to me, and protects my privacy, I'll probably agree with it.
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.
Totally wrong! The goal for marketers is to make money, and the goal of a non-profit basic social research project is variable. Garnering information about the target population is merely the means to the end.
The leap from statistical analysis of populations to the privacy concerns you voiced is a large one.
Since when did I indicate that I was concerned about "statistical analysys of populations"? It seems like you are beating up a strawman to me.
Why moderators continue to confuse slippery slope arguments with true insight is beyond me.
"Insightful" is a subjective term. You are not the judge of what is insightful and what is not.
X-10 Focus (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, a few years ago... and before the blitz of annoying adds, X10 devices were often subjects of slashdot stories. Cool little devices that do various neat things. And they weren't that expensive. Gadgeteer's delight.
Now, it seems that the only time X10 is mentioned on slashdot its about their annoying adds.
You tell me. Is moving a perfect customer base (gadget-loving geeks) from a focus on a product to a focus on an advertising campaign all that good of a move?
We've all heard that the phrase "there's no such thing as bad publicity." I'm sure there are industries where this is true. However, I can't see how the message "avoid buying this product, whatever it is" is really going to help hardware sales.