Marketing as Crowd Surfing
Todd recently wrote an insightful post about marketing. The bit I liked the most came near the end:
But I think the opportunities are way bigger than the risks or challenges. Instead of mass-distributing brand awareness with loud, blunt messages, the awareness of what you offer gets passed from group to group like crowd surfing at a concert. It’s not falling, but it’s sure not in any one set of hands, either.
I’m not sure who qualifies as the crowd, but I like how Todd doesn’t discriminate. Presumably some of those hands belong to marketers and some to other people behind the product (maxim du jour: everybody is a marketer). Most, of course, belong to everybody else. Call them users, customers or the people formerly known as the audience–they’re the crowd that your stuff (ideas, products, causes) surfs on.
May 26th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Thanks for the link! You’re right that I don’t differentiate who makes up the crowd, as it’s any combination of people on both sides of the vendor/customer line.
Brand communication feels more like some kind of participatory theater these days, played out across different channels at different times, rather than in a single shared time and space. Leveraging that is tricky and exciting, and as I try to get across in the post I think that being a good marketer is to be a facilitator of that experience, rather than its conductor.