Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices

Rating:
Summary: It's working for me, but not the way Locke meant it to
Review: A friend getting her Masters in marketing recommended this book to me. I have a website of columns and stories - essentially an organized blog - and have been trying to increase my visitors. That was the perspective through which I read the book: how can I use the suggestions Locke makes for business to improve their online presence to grow my own audience. While Locke doesn't focus on personal website, the book did get me thinking. As I read, I constantly had to pt the book down to jot down some new ideas.

The book got me to start thinking about who my target audience is. That's harder than it sounds, as I don't write about a specific subject, rather whatever I like. Locke recommends that companies let their employees become active in online groups about what interests them in an attempt to build credibility with these micromarkets in lieu of annoying web advertising. Effectively communicate with a plethora of micromarkets and all of a sudden the company has a significant online presence that doesn't irritate people. I followed that advice and started posting on sites that pertain to my interests. I don't blatantly promote my articles, but just participate in the conversation, figuring if someone is interested by my post he or she will click on my URL in my signature file or click on my bio, see my URL, and follow it through. Plus, I enjoy it.

Locke doesn't get too specific on his gonzo model until the next to last chapter. It covers only 20 out of 214 pages of the book. The rest of it is spent philosophizing and critiquing other forms of marketing. Did this help me? Yes. But it doesn't do much to push his model. He'd do a better job of selling it to businesses if he had a case study or two. The chapter on the model would've made a good article in a business magazine, asking for a company to work with him on this approach. Chronicling the advantages - and limitations (which he glosses over) - of the model would make for a more convincing argument. What he's calling for is radical and to a non-business person, it makes sense. But without a few examples, I doubt any business is going to start restructuring its approach to online marketing.

After all that criticism, why did I give this book four out of five stars? Well, it is a good read and it's working for me.

Rating:
Summary: Gonzo Marketing indeed
Review: After reading about half this book, I just put it aside. Chris makes good points and hits home on the need to steer marketing in a direction that is better aligned with peoples' needs, helping them do what they want to do instead of bombarding them with junk.

It's rather philosophical, too much so for my taste. If you like that style of writing and have an interest in Locke's ideas, you may love this book.

Personally, I loved Cluetrain, and one day may pick up where I left off in Gonzo. If you're thinkin' about buying Gonzo, go for it. It's cool, it's different, got some great ideas, but just wasn't my style.

Rating:
Summary: All filler, no killer
Review: Christopher Locke is known for his online rants against traditional corporate systems, and his last book Cluetrain was a hit with marketers looking to engage, rather than target, potential consumers. While I haven't read his rants or his previous book, I did have the dubious pleasure of receiving his new one, Gonzo Marketing, which apparently builds upon his ideas from Cluetrain, but adds more scattered filler.

Like his idol Hunter S. Thompson, Locke's writing is all over the place. Uptight suits might find his prose amusing and cutting-edge, but to me it seemed like a lot of hot air. After almost 200 pages of random etymology, philosophy, and sociology in the vein of Robert Anton Wilson, but spliced with embarrassing dad humor, he finally gets to his theory, which is that companies looking to market on the web shouldn't think about marketing. Rather, they should build personal relationships with potential consumers, but still not push their products or services, since that would still be a form of marketing (one-on-one, or personal selling). As an example, he suggests that Ford pay employees to stay home and build web sites based on their own personal interests, such as organic gardening. And instead of linking Ford to their site, Ford would link the gardening site and encourage people to visit these underwritten - but not sponsored - sites. The hope is that organic gardeners might somehow become interested in Ford's products.

While he makes some good points about consumers' repugnance of all forms of online advertising, and the overall ineffectiveness of mass communication on the web, his solution doesn't seem to hold much water or make any financial sense. And even if a company did use its resources to underwrite completely unrelated web sites to create these micro-communities and forums around unrelated fields, consumers would STILL be distrustful of the company. No matter how much Locke tries covering it up with his "zany" writing style, the fact remains that anti-marketing is still marketing, and in the end, his theory would, in practice, appear even more dubious and dishonest than traditional marketing.

However, Locke does succeed at selling himself, and while I didn't find his "hey-look-at-me-I'm-not-wearing-a-tie!" shtick very entertaining, his charisma (or penchant for quoting dorky classic rock songs) will definitely win him over with the balding, stuffy suit set.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the revolution?
Review: Gonzo marketing was going to be the death of 'marketing as usual' in much the same way, I presume, that Cluetrain represented the "death of business as usual." neither happened so I guess either the world didn't listen or the author's didn't quite "get it".
Gonzo marketing is not an enjoyable read - it can be entertaining but that doesn't make it enjoyable. Just when Locke ought to settle down and actually build on an anecdote supporting his beliefs of a new framework of marketing he digresses (disingenously disappears?) into an aside and we're left wonder exactly what just happened.
The publication doesn't need to be written in dry corporate style to support it's thesis. However, it doesn't and the apparent liveliness of mass-media marketing suggests that this publicatioin was more internet evangilism than a practical means of getting your message across.

Rating:
Summary: Good points, but too much rambling
Review: I bought the book because I liked the ideas mentioned on the back cover. Reading it is a different experience, though. I find it difficult to wade through all the rambling and extract much of use out of it, and I'm having trouble finishing it because one chapter is so much like the next I keep losing my place. I'm starting to think I shoud have let myself be satisfied with the back cover; I haven't learned much since then.

Rating:
Summary: Sweep Away the Cobwebs & See What's Behind Them
Review: I disagree with the recent review that thinks this subject only deserves an "article" instead of a book. The reviewer seems to think that because Locke does not provide a nice neat little well annotated map of the future of the Net as it relates to business and marketing that he hasn't done a service worthy of "book" status.

Just because you recognize that something is wrong doesn't mean you know precisely what right is. We all know that the torrent of spam that we are daily assailed with is the wrong way to market on the Web (how many of you have really bought anything that was so advertised). But while Gonzo Marketing does not spell out the precise ABCs of what is developing in this New World, he does a very exemplary job of talking about it's roots and realities. I think perhaps the most important single word that is used in both Gonzo Marketing (and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is "voice". The Net and it's derivitive, the Web, are forums for the individual voice to speak quietly but to a huge audience. It is this voice, this individual human communication that matters, because while we'll all trash a spam email within milliseconds, most of us will responed to a truly individual message from another human being. This takes the market back to what is originally was before it was usurped by corporations to mean masses of blank faces, and present it as the simple aggregation of people who wish to have discourse about their daily needs and perhaps exchange a few items for a few other items. Never mind that we're not really a bartering economy anymore, the character of that ancient market place is still deeply embedded in our psyches and most of us feel comfortable on that more personal basis. Locke even points out that Amazon is participating in his view of the current Net market by the very fact that it lets it's buyers review the books they purchase and thereby pass on to others a personal account of the value of the product.

So I say that you should buy the book if you are prepared to think for yourselves and project what Locke says onto whatever micro world you live and make money in. There simply are no books that can tell you extactly how to do it, although many claim to, but this book reminds you of lots of truths that you may have let slip into the sub-conscious realm, and once you have brought them back into view it is quite possible that you can apply Gonzo principles to whatever it is that you do with your life.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: I got to page 26 and gave up. Lockes writings lack focus and are void of humour. I read as much as I could with patience until it became clear this book was simply someone rambling on about nothing. Save your money for something worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: I got to page 26 and gave up. Lockes writings lack focus and are void of humour. I read as much as I could with patience until it became clear this book was simply someone rambling on about nothing. Save your money for something worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Getting It
Review: To bring humor to a topic requires mastery beyond that of a mere expert. In Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices, Christopher Locke exhibits a lot of things, but most of all, his hilarious wit shines bright over the often drab concepts of business. His mastery is not of how business is done best, but how it's done worst.

While his feet might be firmly planted in the box, his head is decidedly unboxed. Locke evokes Esther Dyson's aphorism 'Always make new mistakes,' inviting corporate marketers and consumers alike to realize that markets aren't clean and tidy; they're messy and ugly - quick and dirty even. His ideas don't lend themselves to conclusive be-all, end-all solutions, but to random, dangling loose ends. And that's the point really, isn't it? The fault lines in the mass mind don't divide the markets, they are the markets. Their rumbling and shifting is where Gonzo Marketing collects and analyzes its data, like a seismograph of the new economy's undulating and ever-changing landscape.

While corporations scramble to make sense of the paradigmatic wreckage of the Web, Locke sits back laughing. The Web has reconnected consumers with each other. We converse online about everything. "Markets are conversations," asserted The Cluetrain Manifesto (of which Locke was one of four co-authors), belying any established attempt to contain or coerce them. Gonzo Marketing invites business types to abandon their old ideas about markets and just join in the conversation, dammit!

Don't come 'round here looking for answers to your marketing problems. Yes, we have no new panacea for your demographic woes today. But, if you're looking for an engaging romp through - and an enlightening rant about - the way business is done in the now, Gonzo Marketing is the blinking Exit sign on the box in your mind.

Rating:
Summary: I Want to Believe
Review: Upon finishing Cluetrainer Christopher Locke's masterful Gonzo Marketing, I said, "I want to believe."

I suppose I should clarify. After all, I'm a diehard, card-carrying, seen-the-light Cluetrainer. I signed the dotted line. I was among the first to buy the hardback. I wrote a glowing Amazon review. I weigh potential clients by scanning their shelves for that familiar Cluetrain cover. I've referred to it more times than I can remember.

So yeah, I am a believer as far as that goes.

And, yeah again, I'm a believer in what Locke says in Gonzo Marketing--and he says it so well! Mass markets and their accompanying top-down mass media "buy it" pleas are dead or dying. Business is scurrying to find out why advertising--its lifeblood--is increasingly barren. Fatcat media execs scramble to discover where their audiences have gone as ratings continue a downward plunge, trying ever-more-desperate measures to attract a crowd. Slice-and-dice market segmentation doesn't cut the mustard any longer; niche marketing has broken down under the assault of emerging micromarkets, too tiny for giant marketing campaigns to reach.

What's happening to the world we've known for a hundred years?

It's simple, says Locke. People are fed up with hype, mass marketing, force-fed selling and its accompanying falderol. We're dying for the sound of a human voice, not some artfully-but-painfully-obviously-crafted tagline. We're tired of the repeated efforts of corporate rustlers to sear their brands in our hearts and minds. We're not mindless automatons who idiotically dispense greenbacks every time we see a commercial!
We want to be known, to be heard, to be respected as individuals, as living, breathing valued human beings,

We're finding this on the Web.

In Gonzo Marketing, Locke picks up where Cluetrain left off and begins to lead us to the Promised Land. But not by the most direct route. He leads us to various fields of green, to waters still and waters turbulent. He rants, he raves, he whispers and laughs. He laughs a lot--and he cusses too, or he wouldn't be our RageBoy. At times we wonder exactly where it is we're headed...

But resist that temptation to jump ahead to the last chapters. For you shall miss many and sundry wonders--wonders that will shed golden light when Brother Chris finally brings us to his apocalypse, his revelation.

It's good. It's right. It's even practical (something that Cluetrain wasn't quite ready to be). It might even work.

But...

I know that corpocracy and its media high priests still haven't got a clue. I've been in the maw, the very belly of the beast. Like Locke, I've buried my ideals and worked in the salt mines of giant firms and media monsters.

And while I've found hundreds, nay, thousands of people of like mind, people seeking to express their voice, their ideas, their passion for their work, yearning to actually benefit their employer by employing their gifts and talents and voices on the Web as Locke suggests.... the giant bronze doors to the executive suites remain hermetically sealed, guarded with a flaming sword that bans all entry. Even worse, should we ever reach the inner sanctum we will find that the very foreheads of the top-down, control-at-all-costs commissars are like brass.

That's why I say, "I want to believe!" For Locke is right, and his ideas can bear great fruit for companies, workers and employees. Yet the thirst for power and the hunger for dollars and the terror of failing the institutional stockholders hold business and media executives in thrall. I fear it will take a catastrophe of epic proportions to shake them loose.

So buy this book. Read it. Now. Before it's too late.