Gonzo Marketing
"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!" from Gonzo Marketing
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commerce meet...and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are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, Chris 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 call 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.
CHRIS LOC KE is co-author of
The Cluetrain Manifesto, president of Entropy Web Consulting, and editor/publisher of the
widely acclaimed and justly infamous webzine, Entropy Gradient Reversals. He has worked
for Fujitsu, Ricoh, the Japanese government's "Fifth Generation" artificial
intelligence project, Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, CMP Publications,
Mecklermedia, MCI, and IBM. Named in a 2001 Financial Times Group survey as one of the
"top 50 business thinkers in the world," he has written for a wide variety of
business and technology publications, including Forbes, The Industry Standard, Information
Week, Harvard Business/Review, and Release 1.0. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. He can be
reached at clocke@panix.com.
240 pages