Month October 2007

Marketing for Idiots

Sandro Groganz 3 Comments

I don’t like marketing phrases trying to pull my leg even before I know what the offer is about. Recently, I received an email from my German mobile phone provider, it starts (translated from German):

You have to grab this chance!

… and I stopped reading and immediately deleted the email. Do they think they can talk me into a buying decision with an initial aggressive sentence?

I get the same feeling of being treated like an idiot after reading lots of information hardly finding the price of the offer, nor being able to make a choice. Try out Microsoft SharePoint Web site – how long will it take you to find a price tag? How much longer will it take until you got an idea which of the SharePoint product variants might be the right one for you?

Some products might need more explanation than others, but in the end, all a customer wants to know is: What do I get for which price?

Assuming that higher intelligence leads to higher income/revenue, why are those with a good spending power much too often being treated like idiots by marketing? Customers mature just like markets mature, urging marketing to catch up, make potential customers feel intelligent and acknowledge that they can decide for themselves.

Open Sourcing Your Life

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I often skip Dave Pollard’s blog entries, because they are rather long pieces of text. Yet, Dave’s latest posting struck me:

Our traditional education system teaches learned helplessness, and does not teach us how to make a living for ourselves. It perfectly feeds the industrial business-political-economic system, which wants an excess of cheap, frightened, obedient, dependent labour.

That’s basically how I felt at school and (a bit less though) at university. I dropped out of university, because at that point I had learned what I wanted to learn and it did not make any sense to me to invest two more years just to hold a piece of paper in my hands.

In the same blog entry, Dave writes:

Get a bunch of us together, bunches of bunches of us together, to start imagining how this virtuous cycle could work, perhaps using Open Source, telling stories of this Natural Economy as if it already existed.

Right, Open Source is also a way of living, a way of supporting what Dave calls “Natural Economy”. That’s why I only work for Open Source companies. I would die like a flower not getting enough sun and water in a proprietary company – which reminds me of IBM Distinguished Engineer Gunter Dueck, who believes that human beings should be treated like flowers with some of us loving the sunny deserts with little rain and others enjoying the shadows of a rain forest.

Marketing 2.0 and its Resemblance to Open Source

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

There is this fantastic working paper over at Harvard Business School that sums it all up so well what has been labeled Social Marketing or Marketing 2.0: Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers.

The authors hit the nail, positioning marketing in a constructivist manner by referring to Web 2.0 phenomena they describe as “consumer collaboration”, “digitally enhanced communication among consumers”, “peer-to-peer interactivity”.

[…] marketing is a cultural producer. Just as an author puts into circulation words that do not become ideas except in the minds and hands of readers who make them over for individual or social purposes, so marketing in this paradigm aspires to be an author in the culture of its customers. For marketing to play this role it needs to be welcomed, not resisted.

I can’t get that idea out of my head that Marketing 2.0 was actually invented years ago by Open Source developers. Their style of communication has lead to transparent and honest information about their products, something that customers of Open Source software highly appreciate.

Additionally, no Open Source company can afford a marketing guy who has no or only little clue of software technologies, because especially when it comes to community relations (which I regard as part of Open Source marketing) one can only convince by expertise.

Hence, I believe that the Open Source style of marketing aka evangelism aka community relations has very much formed the basis of Marketing 2.0 and contributed to the understanding that marketing needs to act more like an ally of customers rather than an intruder (e.g. by aggressive mass advertising).

This makes me hope that with Marketing 2.0, things will become more realistic in all kinds of businesses. Marketing staff will loose their nimbus of spin doctors, magical seducers and manipulators. Instead, marketing will be much more about forming trustworthy relationships based on human interaction between a company and its customers.

Marketing 2.0 also requires marketing persons as well as management and staff in general to develop their own voice, because only authentic communication e.g. via blogs can leverage “the power to mobilize identity” (as the working paper states) within and between customers and company.

Something I miss in the HBS working paper is a discussion of Long Tail effects on marketing. For example, whether and how social marketing needs to be different in the head and the tail?