Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices: Amazon.ca: Christopher Locke: Books

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Book Description

Publication Date: Oct 11 2001

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is a knuckle-whitening ride to the place where social criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meet…and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are being left in the dust.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. It's about market advocacy. It describes how "the artist formerly known as advertising" must do a 180. It's about transforming the marketing message from "we want your money" to "we share your interests." It's about tapping into, listening to, and even forming alliances with emerging on-line markets, who probably know more about your company than you do. It's 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 they've 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 business-from the trading floor right up to the boardroom-can afford to ignore.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (Oct 11 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0738204080
ISBN-13: 978-0738204086
Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 15.3 x 22.9 cm
Shipping Weight: 544 g

Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,525,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

From Amazon

The coauthor of the no-more-business-as-usual blockbuster The Cluetrain Manifesto--which basically told Net-age marketers to stop talking at their markets and start conversing with them--follows up with a book that's more a highly entertaining, nimbly erudite screed against our current mass-market, mass-media culture than it is a recipe book for e-commerce marketing success in the post-cyberboom era. Writing in a paler imitation of the profanely irreverent, freely associative "gonzo" journalism style pioneered by his obvious idol Hunter S. Thompson, Locke starts with the by-now-familiar idea that old-style mass-marketing "broadcast" advertising just won't work on the Web. Indeed, he says, conventional print-ad tactics as embodied online by banners and pop-ups might actually generate more ill will than sales, and that's why companies must use the Web to somehow enjoin their products and services to the quirky niche interests of the gazillion individual cybercommunities (or "micromarkets") whose greatest advantage for marketers is how freely and speedily their members talk among themselves, touting a brand when and if it's truly deserved.

Useful examples of such enjoinment don't appear until a slim, penultimate chapter, and they are mostly theoretical in nature, e.g., what if Ford, after giving its employees worldwide free home computers and Net access (which it did), got all of them who were into organic gardening to infiltrate organic-gardening Web communities to push (via the subtle art of persuasion, one supposes) the niftiness of Ford pickups for organic gardeners? Truth be told, Locke seems more like a social critic or humanist at heart than a marketing consultant, and his essential disdain for corporations (which are anti-human, he declares, despite all their philanthropic tootle) leaves the reader wondering whether he really wants e-commerce to effectively pervade the Web's truly democratic, populist microcommunities for its own purposes. As his wonderfully cranky cult Web zine, Entropy Gradient Reversals, and his alter ego therein, RageBoy, have proven, the man's a smart, witty, broadly read cyberpundit. In Gonzo Marketing, he tweaks everyone from Disney, Time Warner AOL, and IBM to fellow biz-book writers like Seth Godin (Permission Marketing), and if you read it first for its own eclectic, acerbic delights and second for a postboom e-marketing primer, you'll be rightly pleased. --Timothy Murphy

From Publishers Weekly

This latest offering from the coauthor of last year's The Cluetrain Manifesto puts a new spin on the age-old approach to marketing, which says businesses need to establish common ground with potential customers before they begin to try to sell anything. "At its heart, gonzo is animated by an attitude of deeply principled anti-professionalism in the best sense," says Locke, who purports to offer a new business template and a futuristic view of the marketplace. Although this work suffers from frequent dead-end tangents, hopeless self-indulgence and endless references to Locke's last book and his former coauthors, it does have a few shining moments. His theories are intriguing; in Locke's world, for example, employees of Ford Motor Co. who like organic gardening would be given space on the Ford Web site to communicate with other organic gardeners, thus reaching people who eventually could become Ford's customers, thanks to their online relationship with the gardening Ford employee. To his credit, Locke's nine maxims ("best practices usually aren't"; "storytelling is the path" to marketing success, etc.) do make sense, and his avoidance of Internet advertising and embrace of community involvement are refreshing. (Nov.)Forecast: Perseus will have to do a little gonzo marketing of its own to help this title break out of the saturated new business category.

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Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Getting It Mar 14 2004

By roy christopher

Format:Hardcover

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.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Where's the revolution? Jan 23 2004

By "mbowman2"

Format:Hardcover

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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars It's working for me, but not the way Locke meant it to Dec 2 2003

By Zach Everson

Format:Paperback

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.

Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices [Hardcover]