Customer Reviews

Gonzo Marketing - Winning Through Worst Practices

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I've been a fan of Chris Locke/RageBoy for quite a while. His attacks on Internet marketing gurus, those stupid know-it-alls on e-whatever, has been great, and had me rolling on the tatami (I'm in Japan).

This book sums up his criticism, and tries to come up with a remedy of his own, which he calls gonzo marketing. But, I'm very sad to say that his arguments doesn't hold water.

What he proposes is a very zen kind of thing; if you want to sell products on the Net, then you should not think of selling it (because if you think about it, people will sense that you are a sales person, and would despise you). Just be as you are. If you are active online without ever mentioning your product, then someone would notice that you work for such and such company, and people will come to you. Do not seek sales, and the sales would seek you out.

Based on this theory, he proposes that firms should allow employees to enjoy net surfing and engage in news group discussions on payed time. They won't be forced to make any sales or do any sales pitch. Just be sincere, and then, when people encounter some problems with a certain product, it might pop into their minds; "hey, that guy works for this company! Maybe he can help me!" And then you'll have a lead!

Now, this sounds nice (as an employee myself). Hey, I can waste time on the web all day and get paid! But if you have been active on the Net, you should step back and think. For example, I've been so-so active on the net, participating in Linux and other user groups and discussions. In Japan, I'm a pretty famous online presence. Now, has anyone contacted me about my professional business (I'm a consultant in the road and power sector)? Has anyone inquired me about the projects and services of my firm?

Not once.

Let's think the other way around. Has it ever occurred to me of asking my online friend Mr. W, who works at NTT (the Japanese telecom giant) to give me advice on the selection of my calling plans? Never.

If my experience is of any indication, I must conclude that the Locke/Rageboy's Gonzo Marketing proposition is false. It does not happen.

The fact is, I really don't want this sort of thing to happen. I want my online presense to be a private thing. And I don't want to deal with someone with some hidden (or explicit) corporate agenda on his/her mind. Even if you are NOT explicitly required to make any sales pitch, a sales lead IS desirable than not having one, and that motivates people to make subconscious distortions to make subtle sales pitches. He says that there can be an iron wall between the content and the sale department. We all know how well THAT works.

His logic is often screwy. He tries to fool the readers by mixing 2 claims: that the broadcast model is dead everywhere, and the broadcast model is dead on the Internet. He claims that there is no mass market on the Net, so in order to get the market share, they have to go for the numerous micromarkets through gonzo marketing. But when he talks about market shares, is he talking about market shares in general, or just the market shares on the Net? Maybe, it just means that firms should forget about net marketing altogether, and focus on TV. How important is the net market anyway?

His over reliance on mushy sentimental rethoric is often annoying. Also, he never shows us that the gonzo marketing model actually works. All he mentions is that he wrote funny clever zines which the readers loved (or some big shot praised). Did it really lead to any sales for the sponsor companies? He never tells. In one rare occasion, he notes that Harry Potter series have elicited over 10,000 reader reviews, and he says that the worth of these reviews (which represents a conversation within a micromarket) is apparent by the fact that Harry Potter part5 is already the #1 best seller. But... that's not entirely due to the reviews, is it? That's not any proof.

And Amazon encouraging reader reviews is vastly different from GM infiltrating an organic gardening site in the hopes that some one may mention something about cars (that's the gonzo proposition). A bookstore wanting people to talk about books is understandable. A GM sleeper lurking at an organic gardening site...that really creeps me out. And I don't think that's sincere or truthful. Maybe she IS really interested in organic gardening, but still, people would feel awkward talking about cars there. It won't be the same. And before you know it, you'll have to start suspecting everyone.

The book has its good moments. The Internet being a market in the old sense, a place for conversation and interaction, is nice and interesting (as it was in "Cluetrain".) But as a whole, I can't really see his ideas flying. It was great while he was ranting. But when he tried to compose it into some rational theory that makes sense, well... it doesn't make any sense. And trying to make sense sort of spoiled the irrational crazy energetic fun part that made it gonzo.

I'm giving the book 3 stars, because it is a good read on what's wrong with Internet marketing today. His proposals are, well, a good try, better than most other books that I've read, but falls way to short to actually work, IMHO.

...He offers some interesting ideas, but unfortunately I doubt that any of his examples would result in positive ROI for any of the companies involved.

True to its title (a reference to the eccentric writing style of writer Hunter S. Thompson), "Gonzo Marketing" also wanders and leaves along the way to its business advice. Alas, the odd writing style (sometimes quite readable, sometimes not) failed to entertain or educate me, and it certainly did not convince me that the author's proposals were worthwhile.

The recurring central theme of Gonzo Marketing is that companies should try to connect with customers by having employees or agents participate in communities that include the company's customers. "Companies don't give a damn about advertising . . . . What they care about is connecting with potential customers by whatever means is most effective." (p. 186)

Locke suggests that a company like Ford and Dell empower its employees to participate (on company time) in online communitites which include potential customers. For example, Dell could encourage its employees who believe in home schooling, to participate in online communities about home-schooling, not writing sales pitches about Dell, but instead being visible as helpful community members who happen to identify themselves as Dell employees. Locke also suggests that Ford employees who like gardening could participate in related online communities, and perhaps other participants in the community will decide they like Ford and buy Ford trucks.

This is not a new idea. Local business owners have long been involved in their local communities, by sponsoring Little League teams, by encouraging staff to join the local bowling league as a team, by donating supplies to the local Habitat to Humanity project -- and quite simply, by being actual members in the local community who share the interests and goals of many other members of that local community. People like to do business with people they like.

Alas, Locke's examples all seem to fail, not because they are "wrong" but because they all appear to fail the ROI (return-on-investment) test required of all intelligent marketing. They also create huge risks of brand dilution and potential legal liability.

Another of Locke's ideas is to "tell a story" or create a fun, playful message that can be associated with your company or product. Thus, 'marketing' becomes more engaging, more interesting, and more accepted by consumers -- but alas, when marketing is so entertaining that it is accepted, it often is no longer marketing.

Oddly, the real message I drew from "Gonzo Marketing" is that companies can do interesting, different styles of marketing, as long as they focus on being "useful" or helpful to the audience they are addressing. It's not enough to be "relevant" or "entertaining" -- those are good, but good marketers must go further: be useful, be helpful -- be someone that your audience "knows, likes, and trusts." That last phrase is not from Gonzo Marketing -- it is one of my standard marketing mantras...

Gonzo Marketing is not a dreadful book; I read it through, and I enjoyed parts. But I think the book could have been much better if a capable editor had carved its 214 pages down to about 80.

...It was better than CATS - I'm going to read it again and again.

Are you tired of trying to figure out who moved your cheese? If so, maybe you might want to hearken to the siren call of Gonzo Marketing. Like a latter-day Copernicus, Christopher Locke once again asserts that individuals, not corporations, are the center of the commercial solar system. This heterodoxy might seem counterintuitive, especially to those brainwashed by years under corporate auspices, but I think he's on to something when he writes:

"The embodied-corporation metaphor allows corporations to mimic human beings. To act as if. But the corporation has no heart. The cries will go up at this one, I know. But the reaction is based on another misplaced metaphor. Forget how much your business gave to charity or how it's planting trees or teaching ghetto kids to use computers (so you can hire them later at minimum wage). I mean, the corporation lacks the physical organ we call the heart. That thing in your chest that goes thump-thump. Here, I'll make it easier for you: the corporation has no sex. Those who protest even this obvious truth need to be reminded: it can only screw you *metaphorically*. But this is serious. This is important. Embodiment is a very big deal. Bodies don't come into being through mergers and acquisitions. They are born of woman, as King James put it. Bodies don't file for protection under Chapter 11. They die."

"No corporation has ever fallen in love. Reflect on that a moment. Roll it around on your tongue, in the back of your mind. Does it seem like a non sequitur, irrelevant? It's not."

This type of thing makes some folks uncomfortable. They seem to think that there's no point to reading Locke's ramblings, since he doesn't use the now-ubiquitous bulleted PowerPoint presentation, hermetically sealed and sanitized for your protection. What's more, he makes offhand references to movies, literature, and rock 'n' roll, for crying out loud! The critics howl, "How could his thinking possibly be valuable without clear action items? I don't have time for this kind of rubbish. Time is money, and the business of business is business. Just tell me what I need to do so I can go back to kissing up to my boss, terrorizing my subordinates, and giving our customers a good rogering."

Well, sometimes connecting the dots is more than half the fun, and Gonzo Marketing is some of the dottiest prose you've ever read. It's enticing to think of business as an easy, formulaic proposition, but the reality is that it's anything but. Locke doesn't have a pat little recipe for selling soap, but he does have a lot of interesting ideas. As an added bonus, he's brutally honest and awfully entertaining. Other business book authors might take note - business books don't have to be boring.*

Personally, I agree with Locke's thoughts about the importance of voice, the power of conversation, and the pending re-emergence of micromarkets. Don't take my word for it, though -- buy the book, read it, and decide for yourself. You might not agree with all of Locke's crazy notions, but you just might find yourself rethinking some things that you always took for granted. Of course, if that makes you uncomfortable, you can just flip on the tube and let "important messages from our sponsors" wash all of his heretical thinking from your mind.

"This limited-time TV offer won't last long. Don't delay - order now!"**

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* A prime example, one of the endnotes for the third chapter cites: 'Christopher Locke, "Take My Word for It," Journal of the Wild-Assed Guess, September, 1995.' If only every business author had the guts to admit when they were just pulling things out of their backside, the world would be a much better place.

** A total lie... see, I don't know about you, but I feel better already.

Marketing -- especially online marketing -- is a wasteland of failed strategies, bogus gurus and overused hype. This book is, at long last, a marketing book that moves past such (...).

Gonzo Marketing -- at its heart -- dares to put business in the bigger context of life. In light of 9/11, this may be one of the few business books to come out this year that can stand in the face of the radical recontextualization of business.

Smarmy background music and hushed, reverential speech wasn't all that effective before -- but now it seems downright offensive. Yet, here we are --- just weeks out from the worst disaster in American History and Global 1000 corporations are resorting to just that kind of marketing. Why? Because they cannot even conceive of an alternative.

Gonzo Marketing provides that alternative.

Don't be fooled by those marketing types that spew nothing but derision for this book -- they do so because their interests are threatened. Walk into this with an open mind, and emerge with an entirely new way of doing marketing -- and indeed -- business.

I disagree with the recent review that thinks this subject only deserves an "article" instead of a book. The reviewer seems to think that because Locke does not provide a nice neat little well annotated map of the future of the Net as it relates to business and marketing that he hasn't done a service worthy of "book" status.

Just because you recognize that something is wrong doesn't mean you know precisely what right is. We all know that the torrent of spam that we are daily assailed with is the wrong way to market on the Web (how many of you have really bought anything that was so advertised). But while Gonzo Marketing does not spell out the precise ABCs of what is developing in this New World, he does a very exemplary job of talking about it's roots and realities. I think perhaps the most important single word that is used in both Gonzo Marketing (and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is "voice". The Net and it's derivitive, the Web, are forums for the individual voice to speak quietly but to a huge audience. It is this voice, this individual human communication that matters, because while we'll all trash a spam email within milliseconds, most of us will responed to a truly individual message from another human being. This takes the market back to what is originally was before it was usurped by corporations to mean masses of blank faces, and present it as the simple aggregation of people who wish to have discourse about their daily needs and perhaps exchange a few items for a few other items. Never mind that we're not really a bartering economy anymore, the character of that ancient market place is still deeply embedded in our psyches and most of us feel comfortable on that more personal basis. Locke even points out that Amazon is participating in his view of the current Net market by the very fact that it lets it's buyers review the books they purchase and thereby pass on to others a personal account of the value of the product.

So I say that you should buy the book if you are prepared to think for yourselves and project what Locke says onto whatever micro world you live and make money in. There simply are no books that can tell you extactly how to do it, although many claim to, but this book reminds you of lots of truths that you may have let slip into the sub-conscious realm, and once you have brought them back into view it is quite possible that you can apply Gonzo principles to whatever it is that you do with your life.

My experience is that most people go into business because they don't want to think or have to really analyze (that's for the humanities people). They want to be told what to do, how to do it, and then proceed to do exactly that -- nothing more, nothing less -- for the next 30-40 years until retirement.

Locke, in this book as well as in the original Cluetrain Manifesto, basically says to hell with conformity and consistency. This isn't a marketing book, nor is it an anti-marketing book. The main idea, which Locke has been consistently ranting and screaming for years now, is that it's all personal. Treat your customers as faceless, and they'll leave you for someone who sees their face. Yes, it's hokey when the Amazon website says "Welcome Jim Kosmicki." Yes, it's just this side of junkmail promising "Jim Kosmickhie" a million dollars. But it's the RIGHT side of that false personalization. Amazon recommends things to me based on what I've reviewed and purchased, and more often than not, they are right that I'm interested. I may not buy, but I'm usually willing to look. I accept their use of my name because it FEELS like they are trying to get to know me, unlike some bank who wants to give ME another credit card, even though I haven't used a non-debit credit card in five years.

Don't expect traditional marketing or business people to get this. they can't. But anyone interested in some solid ideas on where the world of commerce is going, should read this book. You won't agree with everything in it, but you know what? you weren't supposed to!!

To bring humor to a topic requires mastery beyond that of a mere expert. In Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices, Christopher Locke exhibits a lot of things, but most of all, his hilarious wit shines bright over the often drab concepts of business. His mastery is not of how business is done best, but how it's done worst.

While his feet might be firmly planted in the box, his head is decidedly unboxed. Locke evokes Esther Dyson's aphorism 'Always make new mistakes,' inviting corporate marketers and consumers alike to realize that markets aren't clean and tidy; they're messy and ugly - quick and dirty even. His ideas don't lend themselves to conclusive be-all, end-all solutions, but to random, dangling loose ends. And that's the point really, isn't it? The fault lines in the mass mind don't divide the markets, they are the markets. Their rumbling and shifting is where Gonzo Marketing collects and analyzes its data, like a seismograph of the new economy's undulating and ever-changing landscape.

While corporations scramble to make sense of the paradigmatic wreckage of the Web, Locke sits back laughing. The Web has reconnected consumers with each other. We converse online about everything. "Markets are conversations," asserted The Cluetrain Manifesto (of which Locke was one of four co-authors), belying any established attempt to contain or coerce them. Gonzo Marketing invites business types to abandon their old ideas about markets and just join in the conversation, dammit!

Don't come 'round here looking for answers to your marketing problems. Yes, we have no new panacea for your demographic woes today. But, if you're looking for an engaging romp through - and an enlightening rant about - the way business is done in the now, Gonzo Marketing is the blinking Exit sign on the box in your mind.

I applaud with enthusiasm the intellectual view of Locke's marketing evolution through the use of the internet. While inviting and an adventure to read, does this book really pave the new way to glory for current mass marketed dinosaurs? I think not.

It is easy to cast a story that describes a current success story (Amazon) and marvels at the possibilities of Ford's internet connection of its employees as a progression to the promised land.

Corporations are not people, but unfortunately, this Kellogg grad has to get a paycheck from a viable company (and got tired of being bashed in the process). Where this book leads is interesting and probably best off makes one really wonder what to do next. A conclusion that states that making a profit isn't as important as the human experience and interaction is easy to say, hard to make happen.

Through the honesty will come confusion...
While bashing MBA's, it creates the continued need for them.
Enjoy the trip, don't stay there.

Gonzo Marketing is just as audacious and outrageous as I'd hoped. But Locke also manages to sample enough material from the leading strategists of traditional and non-traditional marketing to ensure that his bold statements have to be taken seriously.

Read the book closely, and you'll see that there has been a method to his madness over the past years. As a regular reader of Locke's EGR newsletter posts, I sometimes wonder if, well, the air is getting a bit too thin in the mountains of Colorado. Of course, I still read every post, because in between the rants comes writing so eloquent and insightful it makes me shake my head with envy.

But as he reveals here, it's all been something between a calculated strategy and a social science experiment. In the process, he's learned - and shares here - quite a bit of value about the way business works, or doesn't.

Not to be too serious about a book designed to shake the trees and see what falls off, but this is a remarkable achievement.

Like his last book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, in this book Christopher Locke attacks the sort of stale, boring marketing and customer relations practices that are practiced by nearly every corporation in the world.

The book contends that press release, the press tour, the analyst quote, and the friendly book jacket review are not what consumers are looking at today. The consumer of today is looking at things like my review here to make their decision, or they are looking at usenet newsgroups, or enthusiast web sites, or instant-messaging their friends to see what they like.

Locke proposes a new way of dealing with customers, called "the Gonzo model", which provides a lot of ideas for how these old-world customers can changes to embrace some new ideas. This is a great chapter to give to your corporate management to get them thinking in new ways.

I've already used this at work. Just this week, I rejected a flyer that we had some marketing contractors write for us that was full of marketing doublespeak. That's the great part of Locke's book, it wakes you up from the stupor that your bland, lifeless marketing has put you in. Have you ever *read* one of your corporate press releases? Prepare to be frightened.

Speaking of gonzo marketing, as a subscriber to the EGR list, I hope if Locke sees this he has the integrity to ... me to the list.

8-)