Mini me Memo to Dr Evil
mattd
mattd at useoz.com
Sat Dec 29 21:08:00 PST 2001
Gonzo Marketing
Winning Through Worst Practices
Christopher Locke
0-7382-0408-0 | Avail 2001-09-21 | Hardcover | 256 pages | $25.00 |
Business & Management
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criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meetand where the outdated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. Its
about market advocacy. It describes how the artist formerly known as
advertising must do a 180. Its about transforming the marketing message
from we want your money to we share your interests. Its about tapping
into, listening to, and even forming alliances with emerging on-line
markets, who probably know more about your company than you do. Its 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 theyve 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 businessfrom the trading floor right up to the
boardroomcan afford to ignore.
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 governments Fifth Generation artificial intelligence
project, Carnegie Mellon Universitys 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 at panix.com.
www.gonzomarkets.com
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