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Christopher Locke

Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices Hardcover – October 1, 2001

by Christopher Locke (Author)

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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is a knuckle-whitening ride to the place where social criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meet…and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are being left in the dust.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.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Basic Books
Publication date

October 1, 2001
Dimensions

6.5 x 0.88 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0738204080
ISBN-13

978-0738204086
Lexile measure

1120L
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The coauthor of the no-more-business-as-usual blockbuster The Cluetrain Manifesto--which basically told Net-age marketers to stop talking at their markets and start conversing with them--follows up with a book that's more a highly entertaining, nimbly erudite screed against our current mass-market, mass-media culture than it is a recipe book for e-commerce marketing success in the post-cyberboom era. Writing in a paler imitation of the profanely irreverent, freely associative "gonzo" journalism style pioneered by his obvious idol Hunter S. Thompson, Locke starts with the by-now-familiar idea that old-style mass-marketing "broadcast" advertising just won't work on the Web. Indeed, he says, conventional print-ad tactics as embodied online by banners and pop-ups might actually generate more ill will than sales, and that's why companies must use the Web to somehow enjoin their products and services to the quirky niche interests of the gazillion individual cybercommunities (or "micromarkets") whose greatest advantage for marketers is how freely and speedily their members talk among themselves, touting a brand when and if it's truly deserved.

Useful examples of such enjoinment don't appear until a slim, penultimate chapter, and they are mostly theoretical in nature, e.g., what if Ford, after giving its employees worldwide free home computers and Net access (which it did), got all of them who were into organic gardening to infiltrate organic-gardening Web communities to push (via the subtle art of persuasion, one supposes) the niftiness of Ford pickups for organic gardeners? Truth be told, Locke seems more like a social critic or humanist at heart than a marketing consultant, and his essential disdain for corporations (which are anti-human, he declares, despite all their philanthropic tootle) leaves the reader wondering whether he really wants e-commerce to effectively pervade the Web's truly democratic, populist microcommunities for its own purposes. As his wonderfully cranky cult Web zine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, and his alter ego therein, RageBoy, have proven, the man's a smart, witty, broadly read cyberpundit. In Gonzo Marketing, he tweaks everyone from Disney, Time Warner AOL, and IBM to fellow biz-book writers like Seth Godin (Permission Marketing), and if you read it first for its own eclectic, acerbic delights and second for a postboom e-marketing primer, you'll be rightly pleased. --Timothy Murphy

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Library Journal

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.

From Booklist

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

Review

"An astute critique of traditional marketing... a pleasure to read, something that cannot be said of most business books." -- Smart Business

"Chris Locke is really creating trouble." -- Tom Peters

"Chris Locke is the real thing... It's not too late to listen to him now." -- Michael Wolff

"Delivered with humor and passion." -- Harvard Business Review

"Get ready to be provoked, infuriated and stimulated. You'll be the wiser for it." -- Don Tapscott, co-author of Digital Capital, and co-founder of Digital 4Sight

"Pink Floyd meets business: over-the-top, infuriating, provocative, entertaining and always stimulating." -- Charles Leadbeater, author of Living on Thin Air

From the Author

I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope you have as much fun reading what I wrote. It's not all comedy though. As the first line promises: "This is a serious book. No fooling." And it is. Between the cracks (of which there are plenty), Gonzo Marketing describes a way for business and online markets to enter into an entirely new and far more productive kind of partnership. The model it proposes is radical -- in the sense of going to the root -- but surprisingly practical as well. The potential payoff is not just better business, but a more vibrant and interesting world. It's getting there that's the trick. I suspect the book's slashing critique of corporate "best practices" is going to cheese some people off, but good. However, I hope a many more will begin to put these ideas into practice. That comes later, though. For now, Valued Readers, just enjoy the ride! -clocke/RB

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.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; 1st edition (October 1, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0738204080
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0738204086
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1120L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 0.88 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,154,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,330 in Web Marketing (Books)
- #4,740 in Advertising (Books)
- #7,863 in E-commerce Professional (Books)

Customer Reviews:
34 ratings

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Christopher Locke

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I am RageBoy, hear me roar. I write Entropy Gradient Reversals, EGR to you, and think about gonzo marketing in my spare time. I'm also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which you can look up here on Amazon or at cluetrain.com. In reality, I'm a meek and unassuming person. Your Mom would probably like me.

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5 star		54%
4 star		9%
3 star		9%
2 star		20%
1 star		9%

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Todd Dailey

Another winner from Christopher Locke

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2001

Verified Purchase

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-)

7 people found this helpful

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David E. Rogers

I Want to Believe

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2002

Verified Purchase

Upon finishing Cluetrainer Christopher Locke's masterful Gonzo Marketing, I said, "I want to believe."
I suppose I should clarify. After all, I'm a diehard, card-carrying, seen-the-light Cluetrainer. I signed the dotted line. I was among the first to buy the hardback. I wrote a glowing Amazon review. I weigh potential clients by scanning their shelves for that familiar Cluetrain cover. I've referred to it more times than I can remember.
So yeah, I am a believer as far as that goes.
And, yeah again, I'm a believer in what Locke says in Gonzo Marketing--and he says it so well! Mass markets and their accompanying top-down mass media "buy it" pleas are dead or dying. Business is scurrying to find out why advertising--its lifeblood--is increasingly barren. Fatcat media execs scramble to discover where their audiences have gone as ratings continue a downward plunge, trying ever-more-desperate measures to attract a crowd. Slice-and-dice market segmentation doesn't cut the mustard any longer; niche marketing has broken down under the assault of emerging micromarkets, too tiny for giant marketing campaigns to reach.
What's happening to the world we've known for a hundred years?
It's simple, says Locke. People are fed up with hype, mass marketing, force-fed selling and its accompanying falderol. We're dying for the sound of a human voice, not some artfully-but-painfully-obviously-crafted tagline. We're tired of the repeated efforts of corporate rustlers to sear their brands in our hearts and minds. We're not mindless automatons who idiotically dispense greenbacks every time we see a commercial!
We want to be known, to be heard, to be respected as individuals, as living, breathing valued human beings,
We're finding this on the Web.
In Gonzo Marketing, Locke picks up where Cluetrain left off and begins to lead us to the Promised Land. But not by the most direct route. He leads us to various fields of green, to waters still and waters turbulent. He rants, he raves, he whispers and laughs. He laughs a lot--and he cusses too, or he wouldn't be our RageBoy. At times we wonder exactly where it is we're headed...
But resist that temptation to jump ahead to the last chapters. For you shall miss many and sundry wonders--wonders that will shed golden light when Brother Chris finally brings us to his apocalypse, his revelation.
It's good. It's right. It's even practical (something that Cluetrain wasn't quite ready to be). It might even work.
But...
I know that corpocracy and its media high priests still haven't got a clue. I've been in the maw, the very belly of the beast. Like Locke, I've buried my ideals and worked in the salt mines of giant firms and media monsters.
And while I've found hundreds, nay, thousands of people of like mind, people seeking to express their voice, their ideas, their passion for their work, yearning to actually benefit their employer by employing their gifts and talents and voices on the Web as Locke suggests.... the giant bronze doors to the executive suites remain hermetically sealed, guarded with a flaming sword that bans all entry. Even worse, should we ever reach the inner sanctum we will find that the very foreheads of the top-down, control-at-all-costs commissars are like brass.
That's why I say, "I want to believe!" For Locke is right, and his ideas can bear great fruit for companies, workers and employees. Yet the thirst for power and the hunger for dollars and the terror of failing the institutional stockholders hold business and media executives in thrall. I fear it will take a catastrophe of epic proportions to shake them loose.
So buy this book. Read it. Now. Before it's too late.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

brainwash

Interesting, but slow, and yet if remember right (and I might not), he's very prejudiced against slow.

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2017

Verified Purchase

Interesting, but slow, and yet if remember right (and I might not), he's very prejudiced against slow.

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2004

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.

6 people found this helpful

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Luis C. Saenz

Librazo

Reviewed in Spain on September 1, 2016

Verified Purchase

Un libro imprescindible en cualquier biblioteca de marketing. Cualquiera que quiera aprender algo más de redes sociales y de copywriting deberia tener este libro en su biblioteca

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