Great post, Joe.

And at least one great line in there:

“Markets without marketing” is really just sales. It is nothing new.

A thought, and perhaps an oversimplified one… Markets are conversations and Brand are relationships. Also, brands can be personal as well as corporate. They’re reified forms of familiarity and trust.

I can think of three challenges here, all to established ways of doing things.

The first is to deal with the simple need for demand to find supply, when the demands are often too narrow, and in some cases too personal, to be addressed by conventional large-scale sales and marketing processes — but which can be addressed by what we might call manufacuring. Such was the case with the code required by OS X users with Blackberries, and the demand for that expressed by Alan King and his bounty.

The second is to deal with the fact that markets are no longer under the command and control of marketing. Even the brilliant Steve Jobs, for all his and Apple’s success with Macs, iPods and Apple Stores, can’t keep customers inside the company’s walled garden, or control the flow of information about what’s right and wrong about the company’s products. Apple is getting a hard lesson right now on that very subject, with the MacBook shutdown problem. What we need here is not to do without marketing, but to give marketing a new job, re-intermediating between customers and the parts of the company that can stand to use a lot more customer contact, including engineering. There are huge political problems here. As I’ve said before, there’s a reason most Sales & Marketing VPs are sales rather than marketing people: it’s sales’ job to touch the customer. Marketing’s job is to be “strategic” about “messages” and such. And, in some cases, to do the research and planning that drives new product development. This is where marketing often runs into problems with engineering. This is where mediating — in two directions — between engineering and customers is critical for good marketing depatments. And this is where the lessons in your last paragraph are critically important. How can marketing help technologists participate in the markets conversation when both marketing and engineering have long been (for different reasons) non-conversational with customers?

The third is for branding itself to shift from a process that subordinates individuals behind a brand to one that celebrates the contributions of those individuals — including individuals on the customer side as well. For all the good that branding has done, the term was borrowed from the cattle industry. Its first and most enduring meaning was provided by Procter & Gamble, which won shelf wars in grocery stores by putting the same soap in six different boxes and singing about the difference. Since then branding has gathered newer and better meanings, but on the supply side the need to unify the “message” and the “experience” can deafen marketed brands to market conversations.

I see marketing as a way of figuring out how to do a one-to-many relationship, which is a very difficult thing to do, and fundamentally different from a one-to-one relationship.

Here’s where I think Doc’s vernacular breaks down. He is trying to force one-to-one relationship qualities onto one-to-many relationships.

He is trying to figure out how a Tequila distiller can have the same relationship with me that I have with my bartender. Frankly, I don’t want to be friendly with Jose Cuervo; I just want good Tequilla at a good price. My relationship/conversation/tip is for my bartender.

Marketers are trying to figure out how to do the best one-to-many relationship. Cult leaders come the closest to achieving it, and those marketers who come the closest are more like cult leaders (Jobs/Apple), and unless you drink the same Kool-Aid, it is rather creepy.

I see advertising as a means of communication with a whole bunch of strangers, some of whom will come into relationship as customers, but some will not. Most advertising is HUGELY innefficient because it mostly falls on deaf ears, and imposes a cost on consumers in the form of noise pollution.

Of course I can’t finish without a pitch: MyMindshare is a tool that sets up incentives to enable advertisers and consumers to get together more efficiently, and also mitigate noise polution by compensating consumers for their mindshare.

Doc,

Great points.

I definitely agree that supply meeting demand is happening and will continue to happen in more and more ways in more and more “places”, often without traditional marketing. This is, I would say, actually just a form of long tail markets resolving themselves semi-autonomously.

Your second and third points are also spot-on. As famously presented by you and others before, markets are conversations and to the extent that control-fixated marketers get in the way of that, they aren’t just missing the latest buzzword, they are destroying real value.

Unfortunately, the entrenched positions in the political battle can make it incredibly hard to make headway here, especially at companies that have had success with the status quo. Apple is a great example. They definitely get marketing’s value to product development and to branding, but I keep seeing more and more evidence that they don’t know how to have an honest conversation, as an institution. Results vary. Which, I think is a harder challenge that has been discussed in the context of the Cluetrain.

In fact, I see your third point as a recommendation for how companies address that challenge. Branding and marketing must change its role from a drum major to a jazz band leader. Micromanaging every touchpoint in the marketplace is both Orwellian and Sisyphean, opressive and impossible. Stop doing it.

Markets as conversations isn’t just about “getting it” at the top, it also requires building a consistent system for engaging the customer conversationally, every time they talk with someone at the firm. This is large scale procedural and cultural re-engineering. You have to not only realize how conversational markets changes the role of marketing, you have to build the internal infrastructure to make it work for your company. That’s hard. And it will take a while before more than a small percentage of companies are able to execute effectively on that. The good news is that for companies who do succeed, they are standing at the head of the line when it comes to establishing new, more profitable relationships.

But how?

If you can’t directly manage your touchpoints, how do you do branding at all?

By forging a company-wide understanding and appreciation of the value you co-create in the universe with your customers, training and trusting your people to maintain integrity with that value, and having an organic mechanism to respond and learn from your failures along the way.

[…] In response to a thread on IT Garage , Joe Andrieu summed up brand as a tool well: No matter how disintermediated you make the markets, people must make a final decision about buying or not buying. That decision rarely comes down purely to price. People incorporate a wide range of factors when making a purchase and at the end it boils down to whether or not they trust that purchase to create more value in their life than any other option, including buying nothing. That trust is a reflection of the brand and their purchase an expression of faith in that brand. […]