Markets are
conversations
In the beginning
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Markets were markets
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Personal contact
Talking
Personal examination
Personal evaluation
Interpersonal haggling
You said it as it was
Brands were real people: Miller, Skinner, Fisher,
Shoemaker, etc
The industrial interruption
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Industrial revolution
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Enlarges markets beyond the ability of any single
vendor to cover it in person
Buyers have the opportunity to select from a
myriad of sellers found far, far away (catalogue
shopping goes all the way to Mr. Sears, 1880s)
The bond between seller and buyer was broken
More importantly, products became standardized
and impersonal workers (assembly line) produced
impersonal products
A market driven by
consumption
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Needs the product to be pushed to the buyer
Needs to convince the buyer that he or she needs
THIS product, right NOW
Advertising needs to create consumption
PR needs to convince the people that this company
or product is revolutionary and will change the world
as you know it
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Even if there was no reason to believe such a thing
Business is shipping
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Business became a gigantic assembly line whose
business was to ship vast amounts of commodity
from producers to consumers
Consumers had to accept what was given to them
Consumption was guaranteed by the fact that
people were offered a limited selection (relatively
speaking)
One size fits all and ready to wear products
invented…
The master metaphor was the “channel” through
which stuff (merchandise, messages) would be
pushed to the people
Markets become massified
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People are turned from talkative browsers at
the country fair into consumers aggregated in
abstract “markets”
A market ceases to be a place, becomes a
statistical fact
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A number of customers sufficiently large to justify
producing a specific commodity
Market participants are assumed to be the same,
their needs to be satisfied the same
Examples
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Automobile: Ford, model T
Cereal: Kellogg
Gasoline: Standard Oil
Telephone: ATT
Radio: NBC-CBS duopoly
Communication in mass
markets
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Is essentially mass communication
One to many
To very, very, very, many
A single message is BROADCAST to many
Mass audiences evolved
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Newspaper (penny press)
Radio (first national media in the US)
Television (first truly global medium)
Markets during the industrial
era
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Are turned from a noun, into a verb
Marketing is something we DO TO people
We “market” products to people, or people to
advertisers
Marketing
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Is not a service, it is an interruption of our
natural train of thought or conversations
It is anti-conversation
In the last few decades marketing has
become something we just don’t want to hear
about anymore
Attempts to fix the problem
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Disguise marketing as something else:
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Entertainment
Information
Even education
In fact marketing is war
Against you…
How did the Internet change
things?
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It has created marketplaces where
consumers, erstwhile isolated, can get in
touch with each other
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Ebay, Amazon, Epinion, Rotten tomatoes review
sites
Support groups
Product fan groups (MAC)
Sport afficionados
The Internet is a bazaar…
“The Net is a real place where people can go to
learn, to talk to each other, and to do
business together. It is a bazaar where
customers look for wares, vendors spread
goods for display, and people gather around
topics that interest them. It is a conversation.
At last and again. “
Where everybody knows your
name
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In this new place, every product you can name, from
fashion to office supplies, can be discussed, argued
over, researched, and bought as part of a vast
conversation among the people interested in it. "I’m
in the market for a new computer," someone says,
and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t
buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask
around first -- on Web pages, on newsgroups, via email: "What do you think? Is this a good one? Has
anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life?
How’s their customer support? Recommendations?
Horror stories?"
Markets are conversations
about
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The value and utility of products
Firm and brand reputations
Tips and tricks related to using products
How to roll your own
Conversation take the shape
of
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Bulletin board postings
Blogs
Wikis
Review sites
Or simple ym or email exchanges
Value produced by Internet
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Can be measured in terms of amount of
conversation it generates
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N^2*C/N = Number of members squared
multiplied by the amount of conversation per head
Variation of metcalfe’s law=value of network is
equal to the square of its members
Internet markets
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Do not push
They allow YOU to pull
They enable YOU to pull information and
value from what you find on the web
Internet conversations are not
only
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About people talking
Or reviewing
It can be broadly conceived as people
interacting for
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Software writing (Linux, Apache)
Knowledge indexing (Wikipedia)
Innovation (Nine sigma, innocentive)
Marketing/retail – Astore, Cafepress
PR: blogging, news rating, social bookmarking
PR in the era of conversations
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Does not mean Public relations
It is PRIVATE relations
You should talk to people as individuals
You should treat each person with respect
Do not talk to, talk with them
Because…
They are in the business of making and
spreading messages just as much as you
are…
PR should not be
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BS
Dishonest
Canned
Preset
Best PR people are not
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In the business of intoxicating or even
informing the public
But in the business of
Striking conversations with people and their
media…
This does not mean
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That PR (or marketing) is less
But MORE important
Than ever
It should however be conducted in a decent,
human way
Advertising
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Needs to be radically different
Not banners, or links or words
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Needs to be a message that is vetted by
happy customers who help you spread the
word
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Word-of-web is what sells the product
Marketing communication
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You might think Marketing Communications
departments talk about communications. Not really.
They actually spend most of their days thinking
about how to hide what’s really going on in the
organization. That’s what crafting "messages" is
mostly about. For every "message," there are
dozens or hundreds of facts -- interesting, useful
facts -- that never get said. Numbers that change.
Divisions that move. Features added and
subtracted. And that’s not counting all the outright
negative stuff: the merger that failed, the layoffs, the
departed leaders, the stopgap products.
What to do
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Put your message on the web as fast as you can
and
Loosen up. Lighten up. Listen for a while.
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Have a voice, speak real words, not TechnoLatin
Share fact and tips
Accept failure and work with clients to get over it
Replace brochures with real people from your organization
talking to real consumers
Compete not by lowering price, but by adding value to your
products through honesty and conversation (support)
Or by allowing the customer to co-brand things with you
In brief, allow for mass personalization and mass
customization
The Pentium debacle
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What does it highlight?
What is the point of the story?
Marketing is a craft
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What’s happening to the market is precisely what
should -- and will -- happen to marketing. Marketing
needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers
listen to the material they’re forming, shaping the pot
to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with
and even reveal the landscape. The stuff of
marketing is the market itself. Marketing can’t
become a craft until it can hear the new -- the old -sound of its markets.
By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.