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.
Successful marketing. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Rate your mate! (Score:0, Interesting)
Strategy 1: Administer the Grammar Income Test
The Grammar Income Test is one of those ideas teachers wish scholars had invented. It is a test that measures a student's grammatical knowledge and then uses that measurement to predict the student's potential income. To motivate interest in conventions, give your students this test.
University of Mottsburgh Occupational
Inventory of Grammatical Knowledge
As demonstrated in the research of Dr. Edward McCormick, an individual's habits of grammar correlate with her or his income. Test results indicate that one can predict with 80% accuracy the income of an individual based on his answers to the questions below. Use this quiz to see what income level your grammatical patterns place you.
Instructions: Mark each sentence as "C" if it is grammatically correct, "I" if it is incorrect, or "?" if you are uncertain. Wrong answers count as a minus two. A question mark, indicating you are uncertain, only counts as a minus one. Keep in mind that errors may be of any variety: spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or usage.
1. Her choice will strongly effect the outcome.
2. We have alot of work to do.
3. Mottsburgh is a busy industrial city, thousands of cars and trucks move through it every day.
4. "I suppose", she remarked "that success comes only with time."
5. The company should receive the package tomorrow.
6. Its impressive to hear what she has done.
7. She was late, however, she did make the presentation.
8. Give the book to whom?
9. When the ship arrives we can begin the journey.
10. We rafted down the grand mountain river.
11. The name of the book was "Outbreak."
12. There were four in the group: Ann, Jim, Theo, and Amanda.
13. He sings good.
14. You shouldn't lie on the wet grass.
15. He paid all the interest on the principle.
16. I wish to go irregardless of his decision.
17. He doesn't know history very well. As you can see from his answers in class.
18. He imagined that Hawking would have all the answers but Hawking just posed more questions.
19. Spiraling in the Andromeda Galaxy, Dr. Vilhelm insists that there is alien life on the Andromeda planet called Lanulos.
20. We packed all of our luggage, then we were on our way to the airport.
Scoring Answer Key: 1. I, 2. I, 3. I, 4. I, 5. C, 6. I, 7. I, 8. C, 9. I, 10. I, 11. I, 12. C, 13. I, 14. C, 15. C, 16. I, 17. I, 18. I, 19. I, 20. I. (Click here for corrected sentences.)
Number Wrong Projected Salary Occupational Level
0 to -4 $150,000 and above top executive
-5 to -6 $90,000 to $150,000 upper management
-7 to -8 $60,000 to $ 90,000 key personnel
-9 to -12 $25,000 to $ 60,000 semi-skilled
-13 to -18 $10,000 to $ 25,000 unskilled
-19 or more $0 to $ 10,000 unemployable
After students have taken and scored this test, explain that over the next few days you are going to increase their incomes by at least $30,000 each. Later, after you have worked with some of the grammatical concepts in this test, reveal that the test was fabricated. However, explain that the concept of the test is very real.
Every day individuals who make grammatical errors are victims of a pervasive but seldom discussed prejudice. People assume that those who make frequent grammatical errors are unintelligent, not very knowledgeable, and incompetent. None of this may be true. Language habits are more indicative of social background than education and ability. However, any business executive will support the notion that grammatical skill directly affects promotion. So, the idea behind the Grammar Income Test is valid, although the scored income level may not be.
micromarkets (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:How is this News for Nerds? (Score:2, Interesting)
The really scary parts of marketing are that:
We (geeks) are good at it.
It's fun !
Occasionally I've got involved in marketing (I can handle it, honest, I've just got a bit of a cold at the moment). The surprising ease of it and the ease by which it's possible to not only do it, but to get it right , makes me even more convinced that Scott Adam's view is right (marketing people are those who can't play piano well enough for a brothel). If you're going to play ball with consumerism, then you need to look at marketing. The fact that the field is full of extremely stupid people without the brains of a HR droid shouldn't put you off making your own marketing work right.
#ob_karma_whore
Paco Underhill's book Why We Buy [amazon.co.uk], is a great intro to common sense applied to retail marketing. Much off it works for e-comm sites too.
Any actual effect from "Cluetrain"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I found it to be similar in many ways to "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People": a couple of useful observations and good ideas, wrapped up in many pages of useless blather, pseudo-religion, annoying condescension, and obviousity.
Has anyone seen any effect, anywhere in the world or the world's economy, resulting from the publication of "Cluetrain"? From the perspective of late 2001, that is, with all the dotbombs now fully buried, not 1999.
sPh
Re:Rate your mate! (Score:3, Interesting)
1) The point of grammar-based prejudice is a good one! I think online communications (email, message boards, chat rooms, IM, multiplayer games, etc) actually exacerbate the situation. Since text is often the only clue we have about other people, I end up making a lot of assumptions about others by their writing style. Assumptions about age and education, primarily. The fact that my assumptions prove correct more often than not strengthens this instinct. But is this another form of prejudice?
2) While I enjoyed the test, it always aggravates me when people equate salary with success/prestige. I've just finished my Ph.D. in physics, and am looking at jobs now. There appears to be a major fork in the road, where I need to decide to go into industry or acadamia. I could be challenged and happy either way, but it's a difficult decision. My feeling is to stay in academics, because I feel a strong affinity with the whole academic process of teaching, research, and open sharing of knowledge. But jobs in the industry typically pay two to three times more than academic jobs, just starting out. And later on the academic salaries quickly asymptote while salaries in the industry have practically no limit. From a purely financial perspective, the decision is absurdly obvious.
So my future salary is not determined by my grammar, grades, or whatever. It's determined by my priorities. I would say "greed/ethics ratio", but that's too smug. So I won't say that.
I also aggravates me when people talk about intelligence like it is some kind of metric. I personally don't think that intelligence can be measured in any meaningful way. Grammar, intelligence, and salaries are not like inches, centimeters, and cubits. They are related more like sweetness, color, and temperature of food are.
Whew! done ranting. That felt good.
First book in hypertext on paper? Not really... (Score:3, Interesting)
James Burke has already done that sort of thing, in The Pinball Effect and The Knowledge Web -- any time a subject in the book (histories of technology, effectively the companion books to TLC's Connections 2 and Connections 3 series respectively) has references in other parts of the book, he provides the page number and an id for that reference in the margin, so you can switch gears and see where the same invention or event had other effects described in the book instead of just following the text in order or having to check the index to cross-reference the subject.
Missing the point (Score:1, Interesting)
This is 2001. If I want a product, I will go to my favorite search engine (which I probably found by friend saying he or she liked it and it didn't have annoying ads), and I will search for the product category I want. I will then read what's available. If your product is in that category, I'll see a link to your website, and I'll decide whether to click on it and learn about your specific product. I will also read competitors web pages, and reviews of your products and theirs.
Or, alternately, I'll go to a store (again, probably one recommended by a friend), and see what products they have in that category. I will ignore flashy packaging and prominent displays, and will make my decision based on my ability to figure out if your product will actually do what I want.
This involves no advertising at all. It only involves learning what people I trust do when they need to product (and I don't trust you or your corporate shills), and doing a little bit of research, only when I feel like it. If people actually did this, product quality would be significantly higher than it is today, as people wouldn't recommend crap to friends.
-D