Marketing as Crowd Surfing
May 25th, 2008, 1 Comment »
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.