The "New" New Marketing

Hugh MacLeod has written a piece on the New New Marketing - he sums it up acutely here:

"The New Marketing" came about because of two unstoppable forces: [A] The invention of the internet and [B] the beginning of the demise of what Seth Godin calls the "TV-Industrial Complex". Thanks to the internet, as Clay Shirky famously stated in 2004, "the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast." While this was going on, large companies found out that people were starting to ignore their ads. We have too many choices, too many good choices, and we've gotten too good at ignoring messages.

ie Lots of Customers x Lowered Transaction costs = a whole New Paradigm

The TV-Industrial Complex is an interesting point btw - we have recently completed a survey on the state of the UK broadband multimedia market, and a comment by one of the people we interviewed resonated with this - he noted that most of the big Ad / PR / Marketing agencies today started in the "TV boom" of the 20th century Q3, and have 4-5 decades of DNA that is just so different to what is evolving in today's online fitness landscape. This builds on Hugh's point re:

Why is it so hard to explain The New Marketing to large companies? Because the people who work there are simply not prepared to relinquish the idea of control. Live by metrics, die by metrics etc.

Other interesting points Hugh makes:

If I had one big insight from the last year, is how The New Marketing has everything to do with how your product or service acts as a "Social Object". Kudos to Jyri Engestrom for turning me on to it.

Jyri's PhD is on Social Objects in SocNets I understand (I hope Google gives him time to finish it), and I found that this idea resonated with something we were working on, in how Intimacy will work in increasing the nuance in SocNets online - ie its not the nodes, or the links between the nodes, but what sort of link it is that really matters. Understanding the "link object" imho makes it far easier to attach some form of rules / policy to manage intimacy in a way that is easier to automate, but does not get clogged up with user maintenance nor gives too many false results.

My second big insight from this year was learning that, even with a fairly everyday product, you can create social objects simply by using your products to make social gestures. That's what we did with Stormhoek. The message wasn't, "Here's why you should buy our wine". The message was, "We think you're kinda cool, and we like what you're doing. We'd like to be part of it, somehow." And much to everyone's surprise, it worked rather well.

I wonder if Soap Powder would have worked quite so well though, Hugh? One of the things I have noticed over the years in consulting is that the product you make can drive the company culture (and the customer response) to a surprising degree. One can imagine a sort of 2x2 for this game, say "commodity / not commodity" on one axis and "liked / necessary evil" on the other - SA blended wine may be a commodity, but being liked helps.

Blogs were the big story for 2005. YouTube for 2006. Facebook for 2007. What's the big story for 2008? I have no idea. Nor do I think it matters. For the big story, really, is always going to be the same. Websites comes and go, but "Cheap, Easy, Global, Hyperlinked Media" will be with us forever, save for Nuclear Holocaust.

Actually, I think a big story for 2008 will be the impact of "Cheap, Easy, Global, Hyperlinked Media" on "Expensive, Hard, Local, Non Linked Media Companies" - The tensions building up are huge, and I know from the work we are doing that the tipping points for large companies are lower than you imagine, as they can't easily banish their cost bases overnight - so relatively small drops in revenue can push them into loss.

A lot of what fuels The New Marketing is quite simply, the most important word in the English Language: "Love". It's hard to get someone to read your website if you're not passionate about your subject matter.

I'm not sure.....Facebook for e.g. doesn't love its users a lot as far as I can see - though they certainly are passionate about their product. No matter what you think about the ethics, it is beautifully engineered for its purpose - and the punters love it anyway.

Thus the theme song for the New New Marketing - in practice - seems to be not just "All you need is Love", but maybe a bit more like Sir Bob's Great Song of Indifference than one would like........

I don't mind about people's fears
Authority no longer hears
Send a social engineer
And I don't mind at all

Or something "Old Marketing" like that......................