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Date: Thur, 20 July 2006 00:22:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - July 20




                                 SuitWatch -- July 20
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  Markets Without Marketing

   Next Tuesday at OSCON in Portland, I'll be giving a 3.5 hour tutorial titled
   Open Source Clue Training: How to Market to People Who Hate Marketing
   ( http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/9317 )

   As I prepare for that, I thought I'd share some of the curriculum I've come
   up with.  I'm looking for constructive feedback, suggestions and Stories
   From the Real World that might be useful to the tutorial.  You can post
   those as comments starting tomorrow (Friday), when this piece goes up on the
   Linux Journal website.

   I.  The Matrix is a metaphor for marketing

   In his post about the movie Brazil ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000059 ),
   Nicholas Petreley says some very kind things about my upcoming  (October)
   Linux For Suits column, calling it "a must-read for anyone who cares about
   free software and free speech".  Without giving too much away, here's the
   case it makes:

     Just as "The matrix" was a virtual world manufactured by machines to
     occupy the minds of humans whose only real purpose was to serve as living
     batteries, silo'd markets do the same for the minds of real humans in the
     real world.

     We -- even many of us in the free software and open source worlds --
     actually believe that a free market is "your choice of silo", and that it
     is both natural and okay for whole markets to be controlled by just a few
     vendors, each of which attract and hold customers in closed habitats
     maintained by customer relationship management (CRM) systems that have
     more in common with zookeepers' manuals than with anything a free human
     being would call a "relationship".

     This is why far too much of what we call "marketing" is about capturing
     and holding customers, rather than "finding and satisfying customer needs"
     or other ideals taught in marketing classes.

   We need to start seeing, and understanding, markets as free and open places
   where, as Neo so correctly put it, "This is about choice".

   II.  As Markets become truly free, we don't have much if any need for
   marketing.

   In technology businesses (which are what we're talking about here, though
   much of what we're learning is relevant to other categories as well),
   marketing currently serves three purposes.  I'll quote a Linux-savvy techie
   with vast experience both inside and outside the vendorsphere:

   What marketing does:

    1. decide what to make
    2. infrastructure to support transferring info from people who make stuff
       to people who are trying to decide whether to buy it.
    3. bullshitting

   Any more?

   In a world of highly networked markets -- with more and more public
   information about everything, where everybody is in a position to publish
   information about anything, or to ask questions about anything and get them
   answered by anybody in a position to know those answers -- people who make
   stuff need to relate directly with the people who use that stuff.  We don't
   need a separate corporate organ to "relate" indirectly between engineers and
   customers or users.

   Yes, there is a need for customer support, and for tech support.  Engineers
   can't be bothered with every support call that comes through.  But isolating
   engineers behind a bureaucratic wall, and preventing them from relating to
   customers and users also has a price.

   Look up "Dell" or "exploding laptop" on Google and you'll find lots of wild
   and free info about how the company's products suck.  From inside Dell we've
   heard almost nothing, until the company started doing a blog recently.
   Letting engineers talk will make a huge difference, I guarantee it.

   Put simply, bullshitting doesn't work well with techies anymore.  "We can
   fact-check your ass", Ken Layne famously said.  Good example: The Cheater's
   Guide to Network Testing ( http://www.spirentcom.com/documents/4240.pdf ).

   On the supply side, compare Ubuntu Launchpad ( https://launchpad.net/ ) to
   what the same writer above calls "any big dumbass marketing document".

   III.  Advertising is going to die.  PR is already dead.

   Advertising has a problem.  It's not efficient.  Yes, you can buy
   results-only advertising, but the waste-to-results ratio runs in the same
   range as lotteries.  And yes, Google has revolutionized advertising by 1)
   making results affordable to nearly everybody, and 2) moving the waste to
   where it's best tolerated, which is by servers pumping out stuff most people
   don't mind ignoring.  But it's still waste.  The day will come when
   something new will connect demand and supply directly and efficiently.
   (Maybe Google will do that too... who knows?).  Then advertising as we know
   it will be a goner.  I've been predicting this for a generation, by the way,
   so I'm not holding my breath.  But trust me.  It will happen.

   I know a lot of terrific PR people who are doing great work at moving their
   business from the Age of Spin to the Age of Full Exposure.  I wish them luck
   in their mission.  But when it's complete the result won't bear any
   resemblance to PR as we've known it.

   IV.  The operative word is Relate.

   In The Cluetrain Manifesto ( http://cluetrain.com/ ) our first thesis was
   Markets are Conversations.  But we wrote that seven years ago.  Today the
   better phrase might be Markets are Relationships.  Those relationships have
   to be direct, and human..  On both the vendor and the customer side.  Yes,
   this will be chaotic.  Much falling apart will happen before something that
   works comes together.  But it's better to get ahead of this curve than behind
   it.

   There are new skills to develop here.  We can't tell customers to read the
   bug lists and check the man pages.

   We'll have help from technology, specifically social software.  Wikis, blogs
   and IM are three obvious ones.  But we need more.  Especially around
   corporate websites.  We need to get marketing out of the website
   construction game.  Company websites should provide the shortest possible
   routes between customers and useful information.  Period.  That goes for
   both prospective and existing customers.  There should also be ample linkage
   outside to other sites that are useful to customers.  A site that's "sticky"
   is busy failing.

   Trade shows are an especially useful way for companies that don't normally
   relate in meat space to do that in meet space.  Again, the purpose here is
   to be useful, not just to sell and push stuff.  A great example of how to
   improve trade show booths comes from the large body of public debugging
   found at places like this one for Debian, after LinuxTag 2004:
   ( http://lists.infodrom.org/debian-events-de/2004/0697.html ).  Favorite line:
   PLEASE! If you are at the booth: DON'T SHOW VISITORS YOUR BACK! AND DON'T
   SHOW THEM YOUR ASS CRACK!

   Here's what I wrote about trade shows several years ago:
   ( http://linuxjournal.com/article/7352 ) .

   Don Marti followed up with The Cheap Bastard's Guide to Technical Trade
   Shows ( http://zgp.org/~dmarti/blosxom/business/trade-shows.html ).  One of
   his best points: Marketing's job is done before the show.  Leave them home
   and send at least two people: one big cheese (that's you) and one sales
   engineer who knows the products inside out, can answer questions about them,
   and can fix them under pressure.  Marketing people  might look cute in a
   company shirt, but why fly and house someone just to have him or her say,
   "Hold on and I'll find someone who can answer that for you.'"

   V.  There's no substitute for a good product.  Or the only people who can
   improve it.

   Vapor is worse than worthless.  Yet marketing, and other imperatives, often
   force companies to market something before they actually have it.  And to
   suffer consequences when reality fails to agree with marketing's BS.  Here's
   how Don puts it.

      Dumb dot-com:
      1. Hack
      2. Market ("position", "message", all that bullshit)
      3. Sell
      4. Big fight because Sales tried to sell something that customers wanted
         and instead of what Marketing thought the product was.

      Smart:
      1. Hack
      2. Hack some more.  When someone throws money at you, take it.
      3. Build the social software and other information infrastructure needed to
         handle communicating with customers.

   Two more things.  One is great bug reports.  The other is validation.
   Getting direct customer feedback on a great product is not only highly
   encouraging but can be used for obtaining wise venture funding.

   VI.  Work the Because Effect.  You'll make more money that way.

   I don't know why, but marketing is often the corporate organ saddled with
   the obligation to answer the question "How are you going to make money with
   that?"

   Marketing often doesn't know.

   Engineering often does.

   Engineering knows because engineering, more often than not these days, is
   pickled in a world of free software and open source goodies that have
   enormous leverage while making very little if any money themselves.

   Far more money is made because of the Net than with the Net.  Or because of
   Linux than with Linux.  No offense to Red Hat -- a fine and successful
   company -- but Google got bigger faster because it used open source goods,
   rather than sold them.  Same with Amazon, Morgan Stanley, and countless
   other companies.  The examples are everywhere now, and not just in
   technology.  We all make more money because of our cell phones than with
   them.

   Engineers can help management (though not necessarily marketing) by saying
   "Don't ask how we can make money with this technology.  Ask how we can make
   money because of it."

   There are many more things I can list, but I'm running out of time, and I'm
   still on vacation, at The Beach in North Carolina.  Look for more when I
   post the next draft of this on the Linux Journal website on Friday.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The
     Cluetrain Manifesto.  He is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of
     California, Santa Barbara.
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