Sid Vicious - Our New Model for Marketing
Almost every generation has had their musical uprising. In the 20's, Jelly Roll and King Oliver started hips a swinging with Jazz. The 50's & 60's belonged to those "shaggy headed" (as my grampa apparently called them) Beatles and the rock n roll invasion. The late 70's exploded as The Clash, Sex Pistols and Stiff Little Fingers spawned a mini cultural revolution with the chaos we call punk rock. And the 90's flipped upside down with Nirvana the face of grunge. The "uprising" is when we sons and daughters take over our parents' monopoly on popular music. Attitudes change; styles change; sounds change. We youngs feel empowered because we have something our parents can't access. It's OUR music, our lifestyle.
Well folks, we are currently experiencing the same kind of uprising in the business world. If you think of Corporations as the parents, and Consumers as the younger "new music" generation, we youngs are snatching the monopolistic messaging power from the clutches of the olds. In true Jello Biafra voice, we're shaking down the man and hollering, "You're not the boss of me; you can't tell me what to think about your product!" We consumers are punks, and we have helped ring in a new era of what Richard Laermer & Mark Simmons call Punk Marketing
"Get off your ass and Join the Revolution!" No, that sentence did not blast (or at least I don't think it was) from Johnny Rotten's vocal chords, that sentence is actually the subtitle to Punk Marketing. What does it mean? Well, it has a few meanings. Number one, it means that nowadays, "a brand is formed in the eye of the beholder-the consumer-and is not the property of the marketer," so as consumers, we need to continue banding together to create our own ideas about products and services. Keep using blogs. Continue generating new lingo. Don't stop cyber-socializing within internetworks. We will form our own opinions about products thank you, so you corporations better get it right.
Get it right? How do companies, "Get it right?" They do so by crafting emotional connections. They do so by being excellent, not half-assedly building something and proceeding to spend millions of dollars telling us why that thing they built is special. They have to make something special this time, because if they don't, we are going to speak up. Our collective consumer voice is strong, making the slogan, "Any publicity is good publicity," nothing more than an exhibit in the Things Aint Like They Used to Be Museum of Corporations' Lost Power. This is why if you, as a business, are going to employ marketing, you better not shoot for mediocrity. You might as well do nothing, because mediocrity we will expose.
This is a revolution all right. There has never been a time when we as consumers have put so much pressure on businesses to produce. Instead of companies imposing products on us, we're making them rethink everything they do. We are insisting they change their ways. They must learn how to use and employ new technologies. They better know how to tell a story, and better give us some contests.
These forward-thinking authors wrote the perfect four chord rabble-rousing song in the form of Punk Marketing. It's a new world, and they have some great analysis and advice for marketers and business leaders, who better listen or they will really feel the sting of mediocre or negative publicity that we scream in 4/4 time.
The Offer:
This is freaking awesome. So, not only are we giving away books today, but if you look at the picture up there you will notice another thing that tends to be associated with punk - a skateboard. That's right, this book has its own board, and I have two of them to give away. Good luck everyone.
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