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Christopher Locke

Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices Paperback – October 17, 2002

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knuckle-whitening ride to the place where social criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meet -- and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are being left in the dust.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

October 17, 2002
Dimensions

6 x 0.59 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0738207691
ISBN-13

978-0738207698
Lexile measure

1120L
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"What separates Locke's book from most publications targeted to business practitioners is that it is truly entertaining." -- Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing Volume 10, 2003

About the Author

Chris Locke is author of The Bombast Transcripts, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and editor/publisher of the 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 publications, including Forbes, the Industry Standard, Information Week, Harvard Business Review, and Release 1.0. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; Revised ed. edition (October 17, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0738207691
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0738207698
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1120L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.59 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,429,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,133 in Advertising (Books)
- #18,444 in Marketing (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.

Customer reviews

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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Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices Paperback – October 17, 2002

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Christopher Locke

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