Title:  The Cluetrain Manifesto

Chapter four: MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS

 

Amazon Link:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204315/thesearlsgroup

 

Quotation:

 

“Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.”

 

 

LEARNING EXPECTATIONS:

§                     To know why markets are said to be conversations

§                     To find use of the things learned from this chapter

§                     To be able to apply to real life situations the things learned in this chapter

 

 

REVIEW:

 

The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell, and to talk. For thousand of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Social, based on having interests, open to many resolutions, essentially unpredictable, and spoken from the center of the self, are the kinds of conversations people were having since they started to talk.

 

 The arrival of Industrial Age did more than just enable industry to produce products more efficiently. Management’s approach to production and its workers was quickly echoed in its approach to the market and its consumers. The economies of scale they were gaining in the factory demanded the economies of scale in the market. By the time it was over, we had forgotten the one true meaning of market. In the twentieth century, the rise of mass communication media enhanced industry’s ability to address even larger markets with no loss of shoe leather, and mass marketing truly came into its own. With larger markets came larger rewards, and larger rewards had to be protected. More bureaucracy, more hierarchy, and more command and control meant the customer who looked you in the eye was promptly escorted out of the building by security.

 

During the Industrial Age, the movement of materials from production to consumption was a long and complicated process. The development of new transportation systems eased the burden and the global systems flourished. Business began to understand itself through a new metaphor: Business is shipping, where producers package content and move it through a channel, addressed for delivery down a distribution system. It was effectively applied not just to the movement of physical goods, but also quickly applied to the packaging and delivering of marketing content. It was efficient to manage, delivery of different type of content to consumers, where one size could fit to many, and the distribution channel which was the broadcast media was more than ready to deliver. The symmetry was perfect.

But, there is no demand for messages. That’s the awful truth about marketing. It broadcasts messages to people who don’t want to listen. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption and Anti-conversation.

So, marketers tried to disguise their messages as entertainment, commercials disguise themselves as one-act plays, press releases play the part of an important stories, and advertising masquerades as education.

We launch marketing campaigns based on strategies; we bombard people with messages in order to penetrate markets. In short, business became a constant war with the market, with the Marketing Department manning the frontlines. Markets once were places where producers and consumers met face-to-face and engage in conversations based on shared interests. Now, business as usual is engaged in a grinding war of attrition with its markets. No wonder market fails.

 

We know that the real purpose of marketing is to insinuate the message into our consciousness, to put an axe in our heads without our noticing. They will teach us to sing the jingle and recite the slogan. If the axe finds its mark, we toe the line, buy the message, buy the product, and don’t talk back. For the axe of marketing is also meant to silence us, to make conversation in the market as unnecessary as the ox cart. This system was quietly maintained, and our silence goes unnoticed beneath the noise of marketing-as-usual. No exchange between seller and buyer, no banter, no conversations.

 

The long silence—the industrial interruption of the human conversation—is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getiing more connected and more powerfully vocal everyday. These markets want to talk just as they did for the thousand of years that passed before the market became a verb with us as its object.

The internet is a place. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, mare than content, more than push and pull clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation, at last and again.

These conversations are most often about value: the value of products and of business that sell them. Not just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position and ecery other quality that is the subject to rising or falling opinion. In one sense, the only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than a conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global.

Networked markets are not only smart markets, but they’re also equipped to get much smarter, much faster than business-as-usual, as stated in the Cluetrain Corollary, wherein the level knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of the conversation.

Business-as-usual doesn’t realize this because it continues to conceptualize markets as distant abstractions and the Net as simply another conduit down which companies can broadcast messages. But Net isn’t a conduit, a pipeline or another television channel. The Net invites your customers in to talk, to laugh with each other, and to learn from each other. Connected, they reclaim their voice in he market, but this time more reach and wider influence than ever.  

 

The power of conversation goes well beyond its ability to affect consumers, business and products. Market conversations can make and unmake and remake entire industries. We’re seeing it happen now. In fact, the internet itself is an example of an industry built by pure conversation.

The process of building the Internet was a little like building a bridge: start with a thin wire spanning a chasm, then spin that single wire into a thick cable capable of supporting heavy girders and the rest of the structure. Incredibly, no one directed this effort. No one controlled it. The people who incrementally built the Internet participated solely out of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm driven by a shared and growing vision what this strange thing they were building might ultimately become. Conversation may be a distraction in factories that produce replaceable products for replaceable consumers, but it’s intimately tied to the world of craft, where the work of hands expresses the voice of the maker. Conversation is how the work of craft groups proceeds. And conversation is the sound of the market where creators and customers are close to feel each other’s heat.

 

People are talking in the new market because they want to, because they’re interested, because it’s fun. Conversations are the “products” the new markets are “marketing” to one another constantly online.

By comparison, corporate messaging is pathetic. It’s not funny. It’s not interesting. It doesn’t know who we are, or care. It only wants us to buy.

So what becomes of marketing? How do companies enter into the global conversation? How do they find their own voice? Can they? How do they wean themselves from messaging? What happens to PR, advertising, marketing communications, pricing, positioning and the rest of the marketing arsenal?

Ironically, public relations have a huge PR problem: people use it as a synonym for BS. The call of the flack has never been an honorable one.

Dishonesty in PR is pro forma. A press release is written as a plainly fake news story, with headline, dateline, quotes, ad all the dramatic tension of a phone number. The idea, of course, is to make the story easy for editors to “insert” in their publications.

But an editor would rather insert a crab in is butt than a press release in their publication. No self-respecting editor would let a source—least of all a biased one— writes a story. And no editor is in the market for a thinly disguised advertisement, which is the actual content of a press release.

Public relations not only fails to comprehend the nature of stories, but imagines that “positive” stories can be “created” with press conferences and other staged events.

The best of the people in PR are not PR types at all. They understand that they aren’t censors; they’re company’s best conversationalists. Their job—their craft—s to discern stories the market actually wants to hear, to help journalists write stories that tell the truth, to bring people into conversation rather than protect them from it. Indeed, already some companies are building sites that give journalists comprehensive, unfiltered information about the industry, including unedited material from their competitors. In the age of the web where hype blows up in your face and spin gets taken as an insult, the real work of PR will be more important than ever.

 

Many Internet companies say advertising is how they are going to make their money. And the sum of advertising on the Web keeps going up. But, Web advertising is already an inside joke. While it is true that ad campaign puts your company’s name in tens of millions of banner ads will buy you some recognition, it still counts for little against the tidal wave of word-of-Web. It’s like people tend to listen to real people answering their question about a certain product, instead of reading the manufacturer’s page. The speed of the word of mouth is now limited only by how fast people can type. Word of Web will trump word of hype, every time.

Ads may still have hypnotic subliminal effects but we now have the world’s largest support group encouraging us to acknowledge that there is a power greater than ourselves. It’s the conversation that is the Web.

 

Marketing communications don’t really talk about communications. They actually spend most of their days thinking about how to hide what’s really going on in the organization. Even at their most complete—in the form of brochures and other stiff-necked paper goods- marketing communications painted a glossy picture believed. So, if you want to take your first baby step towards entering the market conversation, avoid any brochure ware on your site. But does not mean that you should put up a site that consists of nothing but the facts expressed in Times New Roman text. Your site needs to have a voice, to express a point of view, and to give access to helpful people inside your corporation.

 

Traditionally, Marketing departments engage in pricing exercises to discover a market’s ceiling. This makes obvious sense when the supply side controls the means of both production and distribution.

Pricing interchangeable products for a mass market is just a matte of testing how high you can raise the bait out of the water and still have the fish bait. Set the price, maybe tweak it, and you’re done: all the fish are going to have to pay the same price. But when it comes to prices, the Web acts like a craft world in which prices aren’t uniform across all products. Each hotel room, each Beanie Baby, and each hand-declared by the supplier was paid by the customer now becomes more of a dance, sometimes a courtship, and always a conversation.

 

Positioning was not even an issue until 1972, when Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote the book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. According to them, the goal of positioning is to own one word in your customer’s mind. The human mind is as closed as a clam and just as roomy. There are five principles of the mind: 1. Minds are limited. 2. Minds hate confusion. 3. Minds are insecure. 4. Minds don’t change. 5. Minds lose focus. In short, minds are so pathetic that they desperately need help, even if it comes in the form of an axe. That’s what positioning is for. Positioning actually is about something much more important, something that gets trivialized by those who reduce it to generating a catchy tagline. Positioning is about discovering who you, as a business, are—discovering your identity, not inventing a new one willy-nilly. Positioning should help a company become what it is, not something it’s not.     

 

Marketing has been training its practitioners for decades in the art of impersonating sincerity and warmth. But marketing can no longer keep up appearances. People talk. They get on the Web and they let the whole world know that the happy site with the smiling puppy masks a company with coins where its heart is supposed to be. They tell the world that the company that promises to make you feel like royalty doesn’t really reply to e-mail messages and makes you pay the shinning charges when you return heir cranny merchandise. The market will find out who and what you are. That’s why you poison your own well when you lie. You break trust with your own people as well as your customers. You may be able to win back the trust you’ve blown, but by only speaking in a real voice, and by engaging people rather than delivering messages to them. The good news is that almost all of us already know how to talk like real people.

 

It’s easier to locate and disarm the marketing messages buzzing in our heads than to disable the vocabulary that’s been slipped in. At a word level, we at all times slip into the old marketing-speak. Nowhere is this truer than in the technology industry. So our advice: speak real words. The new Web conversations are remarkably sensitive to the empty pomposity that has served marketing so well.

 

You might as well try to sew closed fishing net. The simple fact is that your employees are already joining the market conversation. And in most cases it’s because they find conversations about what they are working on to be really interesting. They like talking with customers. They like to help. And, they also like complaining if the business is flawed at heart.

 

If you want to hear the sound of new marketing, listen to the conversations coming from inside, outside, over, and above even the hardest-shelled companies that still think marketing means lobbing messages into crowds. Here is the same sound our ancestors heard in those ancient marketplaces, where people spoke for themselves about what mattered to them.  

 

Silence will be taken as arrogance, stupidity, meanness or all three. Talk as a person with name, a point of view, a sense of humor, and passion.

 

Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers listen to the material they’re forming; shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, and designing the house to fit with even reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing is can’t become a craft until it can hear the new—the old—sound of its markets.

By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.    

 

 

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED:

§                     Markets are actually conversations. It’s not just the process of selling and buying but rather the interaction that goes between the seller and the buyer.

§                     Business evolved together with technology, that is, transfer of products, information and services became faster as new media for transportation arises.

§                     Internet is a can now be considered as a market.

§                     The only advertising that was truly effective was word of mouth.

§                     Conversations can build markets, just as how the Internet was built.

§                     Marketing is not interesting if it’s very usual. People love to talk and to listen to funny and interesting conversations. Marketing should be that way instead of the usual ads we see.

 

§                     Advertising in the net is somehow irrelevant.

§                     Positioning seems fun. It is the foundation of an organization and allows the division of work and responsibilities to different personnel.

§                     Entering a conversation should follow certain rules. Butting in is entirely not advisable. Proper voice should be used, as well as the correct and understandable words. Also, everyone is allowed to speak. Expend rather your efforts into making building a company that stands for something worthwhile.

§                     Speak as a person with a name, a point of view, a sense of humor and passion.

§                       Listen for a change.

§                     Marketing needs to evolve, like what happened to market.

§                     By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.

§                     Shut up for a while.