Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices

...It was better than CATS - I'm going to read it again and again.Are you tired of trying to figure out who moved your cheese? If so, maybe you might want to hearken to the siren call of Gonzo Marketing. Like a latter-day Copernicus, Christopher Locke once again asserts that individuals, not corporations, are the center of the commercial solar system. This heterodoxy might seem counterintuitive, especially to those brainwashed by years under corporate auspices, but I think he's on to something when he writes: "The embodied-corporation metaphor allows corporations to mimic human beings. To act as if. But the corporation has no heart. The cries will go up at this one, I know. But the reaction is based on another misplaced metaphor. Forget how much your business gave to charity or how it's planting trees or teaching ghetto kids to use computers (so you can hire them later at minimum wage). I mean, the corporation lacks the physical organ we call the heart. That thing in your chest that goes thump-thump. Here, I'll make it easier for you: the corporation has no sex. Those who protest even this obvious truth need to be reminded: it can only screw you *metaphorically*. But this is serious. This is important. Embodiment is a very big deal. Bodies don't come into being through mergers and acquisitions. They are born of woman, as King James put it. Bodies don't file for protection under Chapter 11. They die." "No corporation has ever fallen in love. Reflect on that a moment. Roll it around on your tongue, in the back of your mind. Does it seem like a non sequitur, irrelevant? It's not."This type of thing makes some folks uncomfortable. They seem to think that there's no point to reading Locke's ramblings, since he doesn't use the now-ubiquitous bulleted PowerPoint presentation, hermetically sealed and sanitized for your protection. What's more, he makes offhand references to movies, literature, and rock 'n' roll, for crying out loud! The critics howl, "How could his thinking possibly be valuable without clear action items? I don't have time for this kind of rubbish. Time is money, and the business of business is business. Just tell me what I need to do so I can go back to kissing up to my boss, terrorizing my subordinates, and giving our customers a good rogering."Well, sometimes connecting the dots is more than half the fun, and Gonzo Marketing is some of the dottiest prose you've ever read. It's enticing to think of business as an easy, formulaic proposition, but the reality is that it's anything but. Locke doesn't have a pat little recipe for selling soap, but he does have a lot of interesting ideas. As an added bonus, he's brutally honest and awfully entertaining. Other business book authors might take note - business books don't have to be boring.*Personally, I agree with Locke's thoughts about the importance of voice, the power of conversation, and the pending re-emergence of micromarkets. Don't take my word for it, though -- buy the book, r

Marketing -- especially online marketing -- is a wasteland of failed strategies, bogus gurus and overused hype. This book is, at long last, a marketing book that moves past such (...).Gonzo Marketing -- at its heart -- dares to put business in the bigger context of life. In light of 9/11, this may be one of the few business books to come out this year that can stand in the face of the radical recontextualization of business. Smarmy background music and hushed, reverential speech wasn't all that effective before -- but now it seems downright offensive. Yet, here we are --- just weeks out from the worst disaster in American History and Global 1000 corporations are resorting to just that kind of marketing. Why? Because they cannot even conceive of an alternative.Gonzo Marketing provides that alternative. Don't be fooled by those marketing types that spew nothing but derision for this book -- they do so because their interests are threatened. Walk into this with an open mind, and emerge with an entirely new way of doing marketing -- and indeed -- business.

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-)

Gonzo Marketing is just as audacious and outrageous as I'd hoped. But Locke also manages to sample enough material from the leading strategists of traditional and non-traditional marketing to ensure that his bold statements have to be taken seriously. Read the book closely, and you'll see that there has been a method to his madness over the past years. As a regular reader of Locke's EGR newsletter posts, I sometimes wonder if, well, the air is getting a bit too thin in the mountains of Colorado. Of course, I still read every post, because in between the rants comes writing so eloquent and insightful it makes me shake my head with envy.But as he reveals here, it's all been something between a calculated strategy and a social science experiment. In the process, he's learned - and shares here - quite a bit of value about the way business works, or doesn't.Not to be too serious about a book designed to shake the trees and see what falls off, but this is a remarkable achievement.