The End of Marketing, The Return to Markets


Every time I travel to another city for another conference, the need for deep, broad, real, systemic change in our approach to marketing becomes more and more clear. This weekend at IzeaFest was no exception. Having the IzeaFest advertisers together with their bloggers along with social media professionals, SEO experts, affiliate marketers and some big brands was a real eye opener on many levels. Mostly though, what I saw was a lot of people trying to figure out how to do the right thing and a small few who were just focused on the money.

As more people come to realize that we are all in this market WITH one another instead of AGAINST one another, the tolerance for traditional advertising, publc relations and automated customer support phone systems will eventually reach zero. We have already lost our tolerance for not being able to get an answer from the company representatives assigned with that task, how much more efficiency can be squeezed in pursuit of profits over brand prosperity?

Marketing is not real.

Its what we design to seem real, to seem believable, to create a sense of desire, to tap into a need, to increase awareness, to communicate value propositions, to drive a call to action, to create a sense of comfort and familiarity with the brand and to create a sense of urgency. But let’s be honest, its carefully crafted, tested, refined and carefully controlled as its being deployed. It’s not real, and often times, its not really nice or considerate either.

Or as David Weinberger has infamously said, “Somewhere along the way, markets, what we did WITH each other, became marketing… what we do TO one another.”

Or as the Cluetrain Manifesto so brilliantly stated “Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.” But the best ads are the ones that transcend the chains of its innately false nature, to either really be genuine or too fake it so well as to seemingly create no doubt.

There is a very serious need for us to fully return to an emphasis on markets and get away from marketing altogether. Once and for all.

But where does it begin?

I had thought this was very clear over five (5) years ago in the time leading up to the first BarCamp. Going beyond interactive marketing, required genuine ENGAGEMENT. Or as I saw so clearly at that BarCamp in the summer of 2005, participation is marketing. But it’s more then participating, it’s contributing value, it’s respecting market participants, it’s having integrity and embracing transparency.

Since then, all segments of the communications industry has struggled with defining it, as the competing qualitative and quantitative camps argue about what is really most important with it. Engagement is dialog. Engagement is empathetic. Engagement is human. Engagement is mutually beneficial. Engagement can be measured by how it feels. Engagement can be measured by how the new philosophy starts to shift the bottom line.

Serve the Market

If markets are conversations as the Cluetrain posits, then what are executives supposed to do about it? The more we converse with each other, and the more we do so openly, leaving a trail of thoughts on our experiences and insights upon which others may stumble, the greater the importance of serving the market for mutual benefit.

This realization came to me during Community 2.0 in 2006 when Craig Newmark remarked that “all organizations used to be community service organizations”. It’s what was lost as we focused on scaling our ability to create profit during the industrial era and as profit above all else was so enthusiastically pursued without concern by just a few too many ‘leaders’. Then modern marketing evolved in certain corners of the profession with the goal of separating as much money as possible from as many customers as possible.

Of course, this wasn’t everyone, its just a few bad apples, but they certainly make the rest of the barrel full look unattractive.

Over time, the focus shifted for many companies to serving the stock market and the shareholder as opposed to serving the market itself. Research shifted to finding ways to tug at heart strings and wanting to be hip with trendsetters. Market researchers put people into “fish bowls” to observe their behaviour under fake conditions measuring their responses as if they were real and pure.

In short, and putting it bluntly, the science of marketing has for too long been focused on manipulation, not value creation.

The shift away from traditional marketing is finally gaining steam as a few brave souls lift their heads from our economic situation to once again think more optimistically instead of defensively. As the pilot projects of competitors become long running programs even though we never seemingly have enough B2B case studies, the increase in activity across multiple sectors is clearly evident. It is also seemingly proof enough for many in what Geoffrey Moore would call the early majority phase of adoption in “Crossing the Chasm“.

Serving the market requires you to have real relationships with the people within that market, just as you did if you were trading in the original souqs. Your reputation both preceded and followed you… everywhere. It requires the development of trust, that only comes with time and experience and that can never be created competely in a 30 second commercial.

As social media continues to make more information visible and the increasing market transparency shows us the little man behind the grand curtain working the controls isn’t all that he claims to be, the number of organizations not operating from a place of integrity will diminish. Of course there will be those that obfuscate, that wear their masks well and that pull the wool over our collective eyes, but they will hopefully be fewer in number.

Perhaps if we are successful at getting more companies to serve the market, the end of marketing as we know it won’t be as far away as it still seems today. Or perhaps, I am just overly optimistic about the level of change we can really have on this very well entrenched industry.

Let me know what you think, share your thoughts below.

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  1. #1 by adam - October 6th, 2009 at 00:39

    Excellent post. I completely agree.
    I love it. "Serving the market requires you to have real relationships with the people within that market, just as you did if you were trading in the original souqs. Your reputation both preceded and followed you… everywhere. It requires the development of trust, that only comes with time and experience and that can never be created competely in a 30 second commercial."

  2. #2 by Debbie - October 7th, 2009 at 02:20

    by jove, i think he's got it!

    nice post and a great way to sum up izeafest09 🙂

  3. #3 by alevin - October 7th, 2009 at 04:04

    The challenge, even in the online world, is one of scale. The reason that business switched to impersonal brand marketing was because the economies of scale afforded by mass production meant that companies could sell products to many more people than they could talk to. The internet lets marketers listen to and talk to more people, but for mass-market products it's still a lot. And social behavior tends to get worse at scale. More people will act anti-socially in settings where they do not personally recognize others. The world of social media contains people genuinely seeking to understand and connect with customers, and people with the latest get rich quick schemes. There is a lot of work to be done to explore and describe the practices that scale to customer communication and keep trust, following the formulation in the post about NetTrust. http://www.briansolis.com/2009/10/market-engageme

  4. #4 by Murray Newlands - October 11th, 2009 at 22:03

    Chris great to see you again at Izeafest. Your ability to connect people was inspiring.

  5. #5 by Milind Vartak - October 13th, 2009 at 06:19

    Chris,
    I agree with you in that in B2B space repeat orders will be generated from trust that you build.
    Word of mouth publicity and references so essential to brand building also would be built on trust, that comes out building real relationships with people within that market.
    Milind Vartak.

    http://www.valueaddservices.blogspot.com

  6. #6 by Susan Payton - October 13th, 2009 at 15:55

    You just blew my mind. Marketing isn't real. I'm going to have to chew on that one for a while. But you're right, we're marketing TO and AT each other, rather than with one another.

  7. #7 by juan batista - November 2nd, 2009 at 02:51

    I feel this is only a piece of the puzzle. I'm trying to get a hold of the topic, but somehow seem to fall short of truly understanding it. Every little bit I do understand helps me to see the whole picture. You helped me to understand a little more. Really appreciate the lesson.

  8. #8 by Richard Randolph - June 23rd, 2013 at 11:53

    Interesting and provocative – and it seems to me that we are attempting to return to where we came from…  If you look at the world in, say, 1900, life then was pretty similar to the “desired state” you describe here. For most people, then, we lived in rural, small, close communities where people knew each other and anyone’s reputation was created and maintained locally. The Industrial Revolution “changed everything” and made mass production possible – so it became necessary to find markets for everything that could be produced. The mantra in the 1930s through the 1960s (and possibly beyond) was, “The sale begins when the Customer says ‘NO’.”
    In the late 1960s “The Marketing Concept” was born – let’s try to honestly match Customer need/want with what we make and sell. Enter big Research and ultimately predictive sciences. Mass Marketing! The idea of a Customer subsumed into the concept of The Market.
    With the internet, “everything changed” again. Now we have the ability to engage on a personal one-to-one level (Peppers & Rogers) and satisfy our unique, individual needs (The Long Tail). Reputations are now tracked and shared on-line. But doesn’t it seem that we’re kind of “back where we started” – the only significant difference being that a hundred years ago the locus was geographic; today it’s electronic. We now have “communities” based on interest and appeal, and we have the capability and capacity to move freely wherever we want to go.
    Welcome home!    //Richard

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