The network is me
Preface
This text is about marketing. It won't tell you how to do your business, though it got some observations and arguments that can be translated into methods. After that it is your business. It's not a marketing management book per se. It's a book about doing business with me. I will tell you what I like and what I don't like. In a sense it's more like an essay, immature ramblings even and I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks. Before you do that, you should know that I used to hate marketing with a vengeance, so I'd better to share with you how that changed.
It was the week after Easter 2000. A shop owner was taking out the garbage. There was this giant one foot high PE plastic egg that had been sitting on the counter for a month. I asked him if I could have it, took it back home, stuck in a few blue Xmas LEDs on a power cord. The result looked like a contraption that came straight from an episode of Star Trek.
Next day's conference had an audience of 200 SMB owners. Being a somewhat successful geeky e-business engineer I had to do a keynote on tech stuff. There I was on the stage. After a short introduction I presented 'the Egg', heralding it as the next generation SMB office server. It had no hardware interface, no chords except this one Ethernet-over-power-chord. Hidden in its hard shell was a disk-less, remotely administered, terminal/e-learning/file/print/VPN/DECT-telephony/fax/ antivirus/web/IMAP/Radio/TV NTSC/WIMAX-router. All the way through my speech the fake-egg-server hummed silently as an airport express avant la lettre so to speak. Glowing in the dark. One just had to put it on a desk, plug the cord in et presto all clients would automatically download the necessary software to do PC and DECT phones connectivity. And then some.
The egg was a completely imaginary machine of course, but I presented it as the real thing. After the presentation I answered a couple technical questions with complete and utter wishful thinking answers. For instance, since the Egg backed-up on cloud computers (i.e. remote servers) a 24/7 pizza delivery type of scooter service would simply change your Egg in case of break down, or just now and again with a newer hardware version. Processor speed and capacity were on tap. Monthly plans would effectively decimate existing total cost of ownership of the whole IT and telephony. All UTP wires would be obsolete because of the integrated wimax. There was no need for an hardware IT department, since organizing computing power was as simple as changing a bottle on the water cooler.
My thinking was, if I could envision an fully automated, remotely serviced, button-less, 'Egg' doing all that stuff (that even back then was easy for linux machines) then why would SMB owners want to stick with their MS Windows 2000 server-client solutions? They would flock to the clearly more efficient solution. Right? I made sure it was the most efficient imaginable solution. Of course they didn't. Not because they didn't believe it had the features I said it had. Though the machine was imaginary it was completely feasible. Not because of price because clearly it would be cheaper to throw everything else away. So why then? Why do SMB owners buy stuff? If I take away all your reasonable objections, what is left? Better question can I model that?
Maybe it was the umpteenth time the SMB owners heard this utopian story of a solution to end all solutions, so they relied heavily on what everybody else was doing. What I was aiming for was a clear message that IT decisions rely on something else then experience and benefits but more on something else. Social proof, hearsay and authority seemed to play an important role. The point is that I did not know. Why is innovation an adoption of new technologies so slow? What is holding these people back? Why does it take so long for people to not believe in anything. That witchcraft is not real, Obama is a Christian, evolution is not a theory, the united states of America is not the best country in world (neither is Malawi). Why don't they buy into it? The ultimate question.
It must have been around that time a friend emailed me copy of Seth Godins Unleashing the IdeaVirus. It all fell into place. To sum up Godins work: Ideas that spread win. Now I could see from the start that Godin clearly read up on memetics. But memetics is boring. Seth tinkered with the name, the form, the essence and concocted something that, well, spread. (That or he is more brilliant then I thought he was...) Anyways, memetics was the key to understanding why the Egg didn't sell. The conceptual Egg was to embryonic, outlandish an idea to spread. Convincing people has to do with snowballing social proof. Not even just the testimony of an expert. It's not that consumers don't want to believe. Believing is a more nonlinear social process than straightforward personal utility. Since that time I have been exploring and explaining new perspectives. Marketing became something I believed in but more in the sense how organizations relate to audiences and customers.
Marketing used to be all about one way promotion and I cannot begin to explain to students why that era has gone. Giving lectures and keynotes on marketing innovation and new marketing the last couple of years left me with the same empty feeling. Even marketing professionals still feel that marketing equals advertising equals branding equals social proof equals personal utility. And they probably will burn witches too, given a chance. The first observation I share in class is that successful brands don't advertise much anymore. What mental model can be used to explain that? Why do I type this book in Firefox with Google docs (powered by Google gears) on my MacBook. None of these brands have been pushed along by advertisements. It is like the Egg 2.0. Same story all over again. Why can we be so contentious in the midst of clear misconceptions?
Yes, I feel like I am a marketing guru. I too will rather go for the easy way out, reducing complexity through story telling, anecdotes, and guru observations. Heaps of them, actually. Just the way you like it. I'd rather be a liar too. Either that or intentionally stupid. Telling everybody that thinking shouldn't feel complex and oversimplify.
One thing I wont do, though, is lie about how complex it really is. Just lie about the fact that I cannot explain it in simple terms and cut corners. Hopefully convincing some readers in the process that lying and stupidity is, yes, going to solve problems. You just won't, no, be aware which problem is solved and how. In short, the aim of this book is to debunk a few old myths and add a few new. As books do. Maybe I lack the skills or inner motivation to explain why paradigms shift. I keep excusing myself by telling everybody that the new ways cannot be explained in old terms. In fact it is a lame excuse for not being sharp, diplomatic, charismatic enough to start the snowballing effect just by pointing it out in class. That is why I wrote a book. I am pissed off. Because book tends to snowball. And you should buy Marillion CDs because these guys rock.
I like to feel what new media is. So I explicitly do away with the old. It's not that I don't read books. But whenever I finish reading a book I give it away as soon as I can. As a birthday present or as a business card plus (clients love it). Recommending a book personally, making a match, is a joy. And I do it often. In any case I do not own books, they own me. So please give away your copy of my book. It sounds maybe somewhat counter intuitive but I believe it helps me sell more. :) It is called snowballing. Anyhow, theway group behavior influences individual buying decisions is still largely unmapped. Changes in media technology and hence the way consumers and producers interact needs constant reevaluating. Recognition needs paradoxes. Needs birds eye view. Needs deliberate fuckups.
You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
Joseph E. Levine
It was the week after Easter 2000. A shop owner was taking out the garbage. There was this giant one foot high PE plastic egg that had been sitting on the counter for a month. I asked him if I could have it, took it back home, stuck in a few blue Xmas LEDs on a power cord. The result looked like a contraption that came straight from an episode of Star Trek.
Next day's conference had an audience of 200 SMB owners. Being a somewhat successful geeky e-business engineer I had to do a keynote on tech stuff. There I was on the stage. After a short introduction I presented 'the Egg', heralding it as the next generation SMB office server. It had no hardware interface, no chords except this one Ethernet-over-power-chord. Hidden in its hard shell was a disk-less, remotely administered, terminal/e-learning/file/print/VPN/DECT-telephony/fax/ antivirus/web/IMAP/Radio/TV NTSC/WIMAX-router. All the way through my speech the fake-egg-server hummed silently as an airport express avant la lettre so to speak. Glowing in the dark. One just had to put it on a desk, plug the cord in et presto all clients would automatically download the necessary software to do PC and DECT phones connectivity. And then some.
The egg was a completely imaginary machine of course, but I presented it as the real thing. After the presentation I answered a couple technical questions with complete and utter wishful thinking answers. For instance, since the Egg backed-up on cloud computers (i.e. remote servers) a 24/7 pizza delivery type of scooter service would simply change your Egg in case of break down, or just now and again with a newer hardware version. Processor speed and capacity were on tap. Monthly plans would effectively decimate existing total cost of ownership of the whole IT and telephony. All UTP wires would be obsolete because of the integrated wimax. There was no need for an hardware IT department, since organizing computing power was as simple as changing a bottle on the water cooler.
My thinking was, if I could envision an fully automated, remotely serviced, button-less, 'Egg' doing all that stuff (that even back then was easy for linux machines) then why would SMB owners want to stick with their MS Windows 2000 server-client solutions? They would flock to the clearly more efficient solution. Right? I made sure it was the most efficient imaginable solution. Of course they didn't. Not because they didn't believe it had the features I said it had. Though the machine was imaginary it was completely feasible. Not because of price because clearly it would be cheaper to throw everything else away. So why then? Why do SMB owners buy stuff? If I take away all your reasonable objections, what is left? Better question can I model that?
Maybe it was the umpteenth time the SMB owners heard this utopian story of a solution to end all solutions, so they relied heavily on what everybody else was doing. What I was aiming for was a clear message that IT decisions rely on something else then experience and benefits but more on something else. Social proof, hearsay and authority seemed to play an important role. The point is that I did not know. Why is innovation an adoption of new technologies so slow? What is holding these people back? Why does it take so long for people to not believe in anything. That witchcraft is not real, Obama is a Christian, evolution is not a theory, the united states of America is not the best country in world (neither is Malawi). Why don't they buy into it? The ultimate question.
It must have been around that time a friend emailed me copy of Seth Godins Unleashing the IdeaVirus. It all fell into place. To sum up Godins work: Ideas that spread win. Now I could see from the start that Godin clearly read up on memetics. But memetics is boring. Seth tinkered with the name, the form, the essence and concocted something that, well, spread. (That or he is more brilliant then I thought he was...) Anyways, memetics was the key to understanding why the Egg didn't sell. The conceptual Egg was to embryonic, outlandish an idea to spread. Convincing people has to do with snowballing social proof. Not even just the testimony of an expert. It's not that consumers don't want to believe. Believing is a more nonlinear social process than straightforward personal utility. Since that time I have been exploring and explaining new perspectives. Marketing became something I believed in but more in the sense how organizations relate to audiences and customers.
Marketing used to be all about one way promotion and I cannot begin to explain to students why that era has gone. Giving lectures and keynotes on marketing innovation and new marketing the last couple of years left me with the same empty feeling. Even marketing professionals still feel that marketing equals advertising equals branding equals social proof equals personal utility. And they probably will burn witches too, given a chance. The first observation I share in class is that successful brands don't advertise much anymore. What mental model can be used to explain that? Why do I type this book in Firefox with Google docs (powered by Google gears) on my MacBook. None of these brands have been pushed along by advertisements. It is like the Egg 2.0. Same story all over again. Why can we be so contentious in the midst of clear misconceptions?
Yes, I feel like I am a marketing guru. I too will rather go for the easy way out, reducing complexity through story telling, anecdotes, and guru observations. Heaps of them, actually. Just the way you like it. I'd rather be a liar too. Either that or intentionally stupid. Telling everybody that thinking shouldn't feel complex and oversimplify.
One thing I wont do, though, is lie about how complex it really is. Just lie about the fact that I cannot explain it in simple terms and cut corners. Hopefully convincing some readers in the process that lying and stupidity is, yes, going to solve problems. You just won't, no, be aware which problem is solved and how. In short, the aim of this book is to debunk a few old myths and add a few new. As books do. Maybe I lack the skills or inner motivation to explain why paradigms shift. I keep excusing myself by telling everybody that the new ways cannot be explained in old terms. In fact it is a lame excuse for not being sharp, diplomatic, charismatic enough to start the snowballing effect just by pointing it out in class. That is why I wrote a book. I am pissed off. Because book tends to snowball. And you should buy Marillion CDs because these guys rock.
I like to feel what new media is. So I explicitly do away with the old. It's not that I don't read books. But whenever I finish reading a book I give it away as soon as I can. As a birthday present or as a business card plus (clients love it). Recommending a book personally, making a match, is a joy. And I do it often. In any case I do not own books, they own me. So please give away your copy of my book. It sounds maybe somewhat counter intuitive but I believe it helps me sell more. :) It is called snowballing. Anyhow, theway group behavior influences individual buying decisions is still largely unmapped. Changes in media technology and hence the way consumers and producers interact needs constant reevaluating. Recognition needs paradoxes. Needs birds eye view. Needs deliberate fuckups.
You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
Joseph E. Levine
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