Business Insight Zone

My humble contribution to the Cluetrain Plus 10 project . . .

The Cluetrain Manifesto contains 95 theses intended to challenge old ways of thinking about how companies relate to their audiences. The thesis in the title comes in this context:

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.
39. The community of discourse is the market.
40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

We’ve come through a long period when MASS was everything in marketing. Marketers have concerned themselves with exposing their products to the most viewers, the most households, or the most eyeballs, often with limited regard — or limited ability — to target that exposure very well.

The Cluetrain invites us to get past eyeballs . . . and past “targeting.” If I have something to offer you, I’m going to talk with you about it — emphasis upon both TALK and WITH.

Look at the picture of the vegetable souk above. People, food, a marketplace. “How fresh are these melons?” “Can you get oranges this month?” “How’s your sister’s baby?” It’s easy to understand why, say, Coca-Cola has taken a different approach for 100 years . . . but that doesn’t mean it’s the ideal approach, or the ideal approach for every product, or the ideal approach for your company/product/cause.

If what you’re offering is a good thing, people will want to talk about it. They should talk about it. You should talk about it. Sure, some people won’t get what you’re doing, or they’ll reveal that they’re soreheads in general. No doubt the vegetable vendor runs into that, too. But the vendor — the old-fashioned face-to-face merchant — also knows that you can’t ignore the conversations going on around your offerings. So embrace those conversations.

One more thing: the explosion of the social media in the past few years means that it’s easier and cheaper and better to do this sort of talking — more so than the Cluetrain authors could have known ten years ago. (That said, they did a pretty good job of foreseeing the future.) Today more than ever, you can identify your market niche, the people who want to talk about and buy your vegetables, be they ever so far-flung around the world.

Those people talking about your wares — they are your market. Find them and talk with them.

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Photo by Verity Cridland, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Internet, Management, Marketing & Sales