Marketing as we know it is dead.
Okay, now that I have your attention, let me take a step back from that somewhat Nietzschean assertion and explain what I mean. Web 2.0 (the Open Source movement or whatever you want to call it) is the next major inflection point for business. Evidence of that abounds with the flurry of media attention, the increased hyperactivity of deals, and perhaps most critically, the focus of the blogosphere. There are a number of provocative articles and posts on the topic, including Tim O’Reilly’s white paper and John Hagel’s recent post.
O’Reilly’s definition is technology-centric, based on (among other things) the concepts of the network as a platform and of software as a continuously updated service. Hagel offers a broader perspective with profound repercussions for business infrastructure and processes:
“an emerging network-centric platform to support distributed, collaborative and cumulative creation by its users”
Given this momentous shift, what are the implications for marketers? In other words: what is Marketing 2.0? Simply put, it turns marketing inside out. Rather than creating messages and sending them out, or creating products and services and inducing “consumers” to buy them, we open companies and marketing processes to the experiences of thousands of micro-segments of participants, actively listen to where and how they participate, and harness that collective intelligence and passion to create products, services and brands.
There are three fundamental elements of Web 2.0 which serve as catalysts for this change, and are the foundation of Marketing 2.0 programs:
- Architecture of participation
- Distributed, collaborative and cumulative creation
- Network effects and exponential value creation
Architecture of Participation
Marketing 2.0 creates processes, mechanisms and environments that engage consumers as participants. In fact, we need to stop thinking of them as consumers, and now view them as producers and collaborators. Instead of several segments of thousands (or millions) of consumers and a handful of product and brand managers, there are thousands of micro-segments of innovators. These innovators are already thinking and dreaming, designing and building your product or service (or something darn similar). Marketing 2.0 harnesses this collective energy, innovation and passion. Marketing 2.0 devises methods of active listening, and of integrating what we hear into the product, service and brand design cycle. BMW has been using a Web-based toolkit to solicit ideas for two years, with as many as 15 consumer-innovated designs finding their way into services now in the prototype stage. Amazon has made a business out of customer engagement, with an order of magnitude more user reviews than its competitors, invitations to participate on virtually every page, and use of observed activity to produce better search results.
Distributed, Collaborative and Cumulative Creation
Marketing 2.0 reshapes product development activities to engage these innovators. It leverages Web 2.0 applications to let them design, sample, rant, reject and rejoice, and assimilates the insights gathered from all of these activities to create a richer perspective, and ultimately better products and services. Current, Al Gore’s new post-politics focus, is an early example of consumer-generated television. Current is a new, independent cable and satellite TV network, available in 20 million homes around the United States. They’ve embraced the Janus-like aspect of Web 2.0, by making the user both viewer and producer. Ning, Marc Andreessen’s latest venture, is a free online service for building social applications. According to Ning, these applications enable anyone (regardless of technical proficiency) to match, transact, and communicate with others.
Network Effects and Exponential Value Creation
With all due respect to the authors of our fresh new ways of thinking, in some cases there is nothing new under the sun. The ancient philosophical principal of synthetic dialectic meant that opposing ideas come together to form a new, better idea. Marketing 2.0 harnesses collective intelligence (and product development and distribution) to accelerate and exponentially increase value creation. Rather than having a handful of marketing experts or distribution channels, there are thousands. This new approach allows marketers to attenuate offerings and the way they’re offered (e.g. communications media, messaging, etc.) to specific market opportunities, and to adapt quickly in rapidly shifting environments. Wikipedia, Google AdSense and eBay are all examples of this, though CafePress and Zazzle take it to its logical conclusion by integrating manufacturing, shipping and back-office functions such as billing and customer service to enable innovators to become micro-entrepreneurs.
It’s hard for marketers to give up control. But even the old broadcast dogs are starting to embrace new tricks as they begin to experiment with mobisodes, podcasts, and blogs, and start to have real commitment to measurement and accountability. And of course another crop of gurus is out on the circuit touting this as the new, new thing. I would argue that it’s the next inflection point on the continuum. We’ve been moving away from a simple broadcast model for years, towards what was dubbed “one-to-one marketing”. Marketing 2.0 is the next step: many-to-many marketing. It solves the greatest dilemma of one-to-one marketing (disruptive, large-scale, enterprise-wide implementations) by having micro-segments of participants do the heavy lift.
Ironically it was actually one of the crass, mass-marketing companies that made an initial entrée into this way of thinking, when MCI launched its “Friends & Family” program in the early ‘90’s. Friends & Family was simply a referral program, which relied on personal relationships to sell one of the most highly commoditized, low-interest consumer products: long distance service. Now technologies and society have evolved to expand beyond sales to brand creation, and beyond technology to every type of product or service. Viral marketing, buzz marketing, blogs and consumer generated content are elements of this emerging marketing discipline, and surely there are new ones on the horizon.
So maybe marketing isn’t dead. Maybe we’re just finally figuring out what it really is.
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