Marketing in the age of the miscellaneous
In a couple of hours I’ll be the lunchtime presenter at the Canadian Marketing Association meeting in Toronto. I started out thinking I’d give a version of the marketing presentation I gave in Maastricht last week, but that one was pegged by the organizers around Cluetrain. This one I seem to have given the title “Marketing in the Age of the Miscellaneous.” So I spent the morning (6am-11am) rewriting. Since I’m running out of time to rewrite, this seems to be the outline of what I’ll be saying:
The digital world is blowing apart our traditional structures. This gives us the opportunity to put it together in ways that are more thoroughly ours.
An example of how marketing is not ours and is in fact hostile to our interests.
Marketing’s 100 Years War against its customers:
(Cluetrain stuff:) We’ve confused building a business with building a fort. The walls try to control customers/employees/partners by controllling the flow of information. But the Net has knocked those walls down.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association refreshingly puts ethics first. But ultimately it’s about influencing conversations, which puts WOM marketers’ interests at least a little out of alignment with those conversations. I therefore have mixed feelings about it.
A first step towards engaging in market conversations: Blog. Or at least keep your hands off of blogs.
What blogging isn’t: About cats. Journalism. About individuals in isolation. Simplicity. You the marketer
So, P2P is undoing the century of broadcast. But the change is deeper, molecular.
Three orders of order: Things, paper metadata about those things, and when content and metadata are all digital. The third (miscellaneous) order changes the relationship of what’s ours and what’s theirs. (Yes, after 100 years of war, it’s us vs. them.)
We’re of course generating our content. But we’re also organizing our way. In physical stores, the owner of the merchandise also own its organization. In the miscellaneous order, we own the organization. See Del.icio.us . And, by fortunate chance, the top post at Del.icio.us today is about a product, Dove.
This doesn’t just let us focus on what we want. In the third order, metadata beats data. We go to Expedia instead of the American Airlines site, and we go to Kayak.com instead of Expedia. The miscellaneous pulls apart stores.
We’re also now getting to own authority. E.g., Wikipedia. Not only are Fort Business’ walls down, but businesses now are the last people we’ll trust about their products…unless they establish that they’re on our side. CraigsList is on our side. Google is. (We can fight about this later.)
Can marketing be on our side? How?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
