Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Hardcover

Locke, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0738204080 ISBN 13: 9780738204086

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

Ladies and gentlemen, please return your tray tables to the fully upright and locked position, suspend your disbelief and put on your tinfoil pyramid hats. We are now entering… [cue lights, cue music] the Brand Dimension!Gonzo Marketing is a knuckle-whitening ride to the place where social criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meet…and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are being left in the dust. As master of ceremonies at the wake for traditional one-size-fits-all marketing, Locke has assembled a unique guest list, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Hunter S. Thompson, to guide us through the revolution that is rocking business today, as people connect on the Web to form powerful micromarkets. These networked communities, based on candor, trust, passion, and a general disdain for anything that smacks of corporate smugness, reflect much deeper trends in our culture, which Locke illuminates with his characteristic wit.Just as gonzo journalism arose in response to "objective" news standards that claimed to foster fairness but in practice discouraged writers from speaking their minds in their own voices, so too does gonzo marketing call for a similar response to assumptions about consumer behavior that no longer relate to how people actually live their lives. Gonzo Marketing is not yet-another nostrum for hoodwinking the unwary. It's about market advocacy. It describes how "the artist formerly known as advertising" must do a 180. It's about transforming the marketing message from "we want your money" to "we share your interests." It's about tapping into, listening to, and even forming alliances with emerging on-line markets, who probably know more about your company than you do. It's a hip-hop cover of boring old best practices played backwards. The paradox is that companies that support and promote these communities can have everything they've always wanted: greater market share, customer loyalty, brand equity. Irreverent, penetrating, profoundly simple, and on-the-money, Gonzo Marketing is the raucous wake-up that no one interested in any aspect of twenty-first century business-from the trading floor right up to the boardroom-can afford to ignore.

About this title

About the Author

Chris Locke is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, president of Entropy Web Consulting, and editor/publisher of the widely acclaimed and justly infamous webzine, Entropy Gradient Reversals. He has worked for Fujitsu, Ricoh, the Japanese government's "Fifth Generation" artificial intelligence project, Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, CMP Publications, Mecklermedia, MCI, and IBM. Named in a 2001 Financial Times Group survey as one of the "top 50 business thinkers in the world," he has written for a wide variety of business and technology publications, including Forbes, The Industry Standard, Information Week, Harvard Business Review, and Release 1.0. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. He can be reached at clocke@panix.com.

Reviews

This latest offering from the coauthor of last year's The Cluetrain Manifesto puts a new spin on the age-old approach to marketing, which says businesses need to establish common ground with potential customers before they begin to try to sell anything. "At its heart, gonzo is animated by an attitude of deeply principled anti-professionalism in the best sense," says Locke, who purports to offer a new business template and a futuristic view of the marketplace. Although this work suffers from frequent dead-end tangents, hopeless self-indulgence and endless references to Locke's last book and his former coauthors, it does have a few shining moments. His theories are intriguing; in Locke's world, for example, employees of Ford Motor Co. who like organic gardening would be given space on the Ford Web site to communicate with other organic gardeners, thus reaching people who eventually could become Ford's customers, thanks to their online relationship with the gardening Ford employee. To his credit, Locke's nine maxims ("best practices usually aren't"; "storytelling is the path" to marketing success, etc.) do make sense, and his avoidance of Internet advertising and embrace of community involvement are refreshing. (Nov.)Forecast: Perseus will have to do a little gonzo marketing of its own to help this title break out of the saturated new business category.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Locke, the coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto (2000), borrows "gonzo" in his title from Hunter S. Thompson, in whose lingo gonzo means to care about results or to become thoroughly engaged--which is, Locke proclaims, the heart of the Web. Therefore, he suggests forgetting the original intent of marketing--to get more people to buy more stuff more often--and adopt the notion of sharing knowledge among various Web communities of interest. No company can be gonzo, he says, because it is an individual's prerogative. Further, companies need to back off pure marketing and rather embrace the underwriting of external sites to establish personal relationships between it and micromarkets. He doesn't get much beyond this sketch of utopia, nor does he insist that this model be applied anywhere else but to the Internet, but his opinions are intriguing and provocative. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Providing a lively reading experience through anecdotes and humor, Locke (coauthor, The Cluetrain Manifesto) here introduces Gonzo marketing, which he describes in terms of effective marketing strategies utilized by companies doing business on the web. According to the author, Gonzo marketing "provides a model whereby companies can stop manipulating people as if they were abstract demographic data, and instead create genuine relationships with emergent online communities of interest: powerful new web micromarkets." For instance, Amazon.com was innovative in creating "a marketplace where customers, not advertisers and marketers, could assess the value of products." In addition to describing Gonzo marketing, Locke provides specific examples and presents guidelines for its implementation. Bibliographical references to books, articles, and web sites are included. Libraries purchasing this book should make sure to have The Cluetrain Manifesto on hand, since it is frequently referenced here. This highly innovative work should inspire discussion in the business world and classroom alike. Recommended for marketing collections in both public and academic libraries. Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0738204080
• ISBN 13: 9780738204086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256