Matthew Revell

Today has thrust me into a world for which I was thoroughly unprepared.

At every turn, gaudy intrusions have barked bleak promotional blather into my eyes, as I shudder in the knowledge that my value lies as a point on an Alexa graph.

Following a Firefox 3 beta update, I’ve stumbled - unprepared and blinking - into a world without Adblock Plus. From my employer’s head office I can see Piccadilly Circus, all flashes and scrambled images. Today, the web has taken on a similar uncomfortable urgency, compelling me to consider breast augmentation, a new mobile phone, life insurance to help my family after the visual onslaught finally destroys my neural paths.

Even that most faux-anti-corporate of organs, The Register, is so determined to force my eyes from their latest rant that I found myself in a new tab watching a flash animation about the latest Ford Mondeo.

And yet I support commercial media. I believe in advertising as a way to fund things I want to enjoy. So, why do I take the apparently hypocritical route of running Google Ads on my own websites and yet blocking adverts on the sites I visit?

Here’s a list:

• Pop-ups: even though true pop-ups have largely gone away, at least from the sites I use, equally intrusive ads are still around.
• Web ads are mostly crap: TV ads in the UK are often both entertaining and creative. Web ads replace creativity with intrusion.
• The ads I run are, for the most part, subtle Google text ads.

I disable AdBlock Plus on sites that I particularly care about and whose advertising respects me. Today, though, has felt as disorienting as putting my head out of the window of an aeroplane. I’m going to leave AdBlock Plus off for a while to experience more of the noise that most people I know now block without a second thought.

Morrisons - the UK’s fourth largest supermarket chain - is an odd one.

Reports in the media have long suggested that Ken Morrison - who recently stepped down as Chairman - believed in the supremacy of all things Yorkshire. From the sounds of it, he knew what he liked and liked what he knew. Fair enough.

Perhaps that’s why Morrisons mostly sells pies and really fresh veg. Love the veg, hate the pies and the poor quality own brand range. It probably also explains why the standard format for a Morrisons store features fake market stalls, Oh, and the miserable staff (ha, joke - I’m half Yorkshire and Yorkshire people are proud of how blunt they are, so I’m only living up to my heritage, or something).

So, along with the pies, the crap own brand stuff and the weird Disneyland-style grocery section, Morrisons has a pretty naff logo. Big black typewriter-font M on a yellow oval, on a black square. Nice.

With the announcement of the new chairman came the promise of a new brand identity. The years-old slogan “More reasons to shop at Morrisons” - genius - was out, so was the Tyne and Wear Metro tribute logo.

Well, it seems that the new logo and slogan are creeping into use. In true Yorkshire-fashion, they’re not making a fuss; instead, they’re just gonna pop the new logo on anything they print from now on.

I had high hopes for the new logo. I love to watch a new brand take shape. According to a Morrisons press release the new slogan is:

Fresh for you every day.

To use a chic term: meh. It could be worse but it’s certainly no equivalent to “More reasons to…”

But it’s the logo where Morrisons have really pulled one out of the bag, to use another cliche. Look:

Patrick Finch - OpenSolaris marketing chap - has an interesting post about why open source companies need to protect their trademarks.

He touches on something that annoys me almost every day: that a vocal minority of, often ill-informed, people think commercial == bad. I think Patrick has a point in laying part of the blame at Naomi Klein’s door.

Patrick’s main point is that trademarks are an important way for people to know what to expect. He quotes Richard Stallman:

“Trademark law … was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.”

As an aside, Stallman’s next sentence, in the source article, doesn’t make so much sense, to me at least:

“Legislators under the influence of “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.”

I’d like to add one thing to Patrick’s post: a trademark can be revoked if the holder doesn’t defend it (yeah, I’m not a lawyer, etc).

We should expect to see open source companies defending their trademarks. We should judge them on how they defend their trademarks. Linden Labs showed sense of humour when they granted permission to use their Second Life trademarks on the Get a First Life parody site.

As Patrick sums it up:

“Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all”.

Marketing sits awkwardly between art and science.

Trouble is, big money goes into marketing and, if successful, even bigger money comes out. If you’re a business-person and about to hand 10% of your budget to a spangly-suited marketer, you want some reassurance. Marketing, as an academic discipline, provides this reassurance through theories, frameworks and studies.

Human beings are an awkward factor in marketing: you can’t guarantee that one set of inputs will result in a specific outcome. The closest that marketing can get is to say, “customers did this, we believe they did it because of our marketing activity and we have these studies to back that suggestion”. You can’t have a genuine control experiment. If you want to know why someone chose Nescafe over a brand of instant coffee that isn’t quite so foul, you can perform all sorts of studies to determine how much influence promotion, price, distribution or, unlikely as it seems in this case, product had. Despite your best efforts, two things get in the way:

1. People can’t always tell you why they make certain purchasing decisions.
2. Your marketing activity isn’t the only influence.

So, marketing people continue to come up with ever more elabourate, and often very useful, ways to measure their effectiveness and to help make success reproducible.

If we’re to introduce marketing to open source software projects, these theories and frameworks can help us greatly. While it’s important to remember that marketing isn’t a true science and that there are no guarantees, they can teach us what mistakes and what good decisions people have made previously.

It leads us, though, to the frustrated philosopher. Usually with good intentions, one or two people in an open source project point out that marketing is a well established discipline and that there are things to be learnt from other people’s experience. There are ways of doing things, they say, and that random marketing activity is of little use. In traditional business marketing, if you can’t measure your results, you’re wasting your time.

This is where I have to make my confession. A while back, I got stuck into frustrated philosopher mode. I was concerned that the Ubuntu Marketing Team needed to set SMART objectives, to have a strategy. After all, OpenOffice.org has a nice fat document in which they describe their five year marketing strategy.

Open source projects don’t necessarily work like that, though. OOo is, probably, an anomaly, for the time-being. I don’t advocate the eradication of plans, objectives, measurement, etc, as Pinko Marketing does. Instead, I think we marketers can learn something from the open source process: do it, share it, make it better, formalise it when appropriate.

People working on open source projects are giving out of limited time. Many of us want to see quick results, to reassure us that what we’re doing is worthwhile. With code, my impression is that the satisfaction of writing something and seeing it work is what makes a lot of people tick. Those of us interested in marketing open source software need that same kind of reward to keep us motivated.

There is also the rather odd relationship between community marketers and a commercial sponsor. More than likely, the commercial sponsor will have marketing plans and, quite probably these days, professional marketers. Commercial realities, professional marketers who are unfamiliar with the FOSS community and lack of time mean that true collaboration between a community marketing team and the sponsor’s marketers can be rare. Agreeing a common, mutually beneficial strategy can, therefore, be nigh-on impossible for commercially sponsored projects.

Although you’re taking a risk, because your marketing activity is likely to be outward facing, open source marketing should come from the bottom up. The same community processes that iteratively improve code can apply to marketing. It’s still important to aim to have a strategy and to be able to measure what you’re doing. However, to put that before all else will mostly only prevent any actual marketing activity from taking place and, if imposed by one or two vocal people, will probably fail to gain acceptance.

Marketing theory is important and useful. Strategy is important. However, while one or two people grow ever more frustrated because no one wants to set objectives, some other project is wowing everyone with its highly visible grass-roots promotional campaign.

Think about town criers:

• They grab attention: loud bell, booming voice, crazy outfit.
• They stick to a script: someone else pays a town crier to deliver news, advertising and so on.
• They’re broadcasters: their message is given indiscriminately to whoever can hear them.
• Their audience is small and local: in fact, it’s limited to the people within earshot.

Before mass-literacy and mobility, they served a useful function. Now that we have mass-media, town criers are inefficient.

Newspapers, radio and websites have wider geographic reach, allow people to develop specialised skills, can be targeted at specific groups.

Town crier marketers often do a great job. They speak with passion, they share common language and experience with their audience, they have authenticity. Word of mouth has long been one of the most powerful forms of marketing promotion and, as we all know, is ever more important now.

To bring the full benefits of marketing to an open source software project, though, we need to make a step forward similar to that from the town criers of old to the mass media of today.

A true marketing orientation allows to us gain:

• Empathy: know who you’re talking with, understand their expectations, desires, needs and world view.
• Specialisation: if your project is lucky enough to have several marketing team members, divide work amongst yourselves according to your skills.
• Targeted reach: blogging isn’t always enough. Find the people that need your software and take your message to them.
• Feedback: marketing isn’t just about promotion. There’s a hell of a lot more. Seek feedback and use that to improve your software and your marketing communication.
• Satisfaction: plan your marketing and it’s easier to see what works and what doesn’t.

Marketing is about matching people’s needs with ways you can help. It’s an attitude of considering what’s most appropriate to the people you’re dealing with and putting that before your own preconceptions.

If you find out what your users need, feed that into your software and consider how to take your message to those users, you’re already hundreds of years ahead of the town crier.

There are five broad types of marketer in the open source world:

• Town criers: shout loudly but not always clearly, don’t listen, make a big noise but actually only reach a tiny number of people.
• Frustrated philosophers: so interested in the academic niceties of marketing that they mostly fail to communicate with anyone.
• Secondary practitioners: they fell into marketing-like practices by doing something else and probably wouldn’t think of what they do as marketing.
• Professional visitors: one of the small but growing group of professional marketers employed by open source software companies, for whom open source is just another job. Further divided into those that engage with the community and those that don’t.
• The people that get it: they know the difference between free software and open source, they’re a part of the community and they know marketing.

I reckon professional visitors and town criers will be the two groups that grow fastest over the next year. Increased commercialisation of open source will feed the professional visitors. Increased interest in open source by non-coders will add to the town criers.

There’s nothing wrong with the people in either group; we just need to help them become the people that get it. We should take the lead by engaging the professional visitors. We should establish a marketing meritocracy and learning path to help the town criers become more effective.

I moaned, a couple of days ago, about how the NTL:Telewest to Virgin Media rebrand seems to be less about the substance of the brand and more a quick paintjob.

Virgin Enterprises is famous for successfully applying its brand to disparate products and services. While not every product is a roaring success - e.g. Virgin Cola - Branson’s team has previously molded the brand to the relevant segments’ needs and expectations. While Virgin Money is clearly targeted at above average earners 25 - 45, Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic are sufficiently broad not to alienate any of their massive potential customer-bases.

So, it’s a surprise that the Virgin Media brand is so poorly targeted. Visit the website. It’s all 19 year old models in heavy eye make-up, with ridiculous hair-dos and a “look more weird than handsome/pretty” smugness. Since launch, they have thrown in a couple of stock photos of perfect families staring glibly at laptops, but their jarring presence only highlights how poorly the Virgin Media marcomms reflect the incredibly broad range of people whose house is passed by cable.

The worst offences lie in the copy: it patronises the hell out of the reader, its saccharine chumminess is likely to alienate rather than make people think they’ve found a friend and, oddly for a company so keen on ramping up average revenue per customer, it relentlessly makes references that would have been embarrassing in student-targeted ads.

“Hello you…” is how the rebrand announcement greeted existing NTL:Telewest customers. Phone deals talk about calling Aunty Doris in Australia. The website offers to help you “tell your ADSL from your ELBO”; every copywriter has come up with something equally as ridiculous, spent ten minutes trying to convince themselves that it can work, then given up and got back to work.

The problems, I think, are that Virgin Mobile people have no doubt been heavily involved in the rebrand. Virgin Mobile has always been about teenagers, and as a MVNO with no network investment and a saturated market, it’s okay to be that specific. Virgin Media, though, has to squeeze every last penny out of the network that costs billions of pounds to build and resulted in previous incarnations going down the pan.

But this clearly is just old NTL, with some Telewest influence, cracking through a Virgin gloss. The Virgin brand doesn’t yet fit and it shows.

The logo, the copy, the colours are all meant to be evidence of the true brand - i.e. the philosophy that informs everything the company does. Once the NTL:Telewest people start living the Virgin brand (sorry, horrible phrase), then perhaps it’ll come together a little more and, instead of appearing like Virgin by numbers, the company will work out who it’s talking to and what it’s trying to do for them.

In 1999, at the height of the dot-com craze, The Cluetrain Manifesto made two observations:

1. The internet makes it easier for people to talk to each other.
2. The internet makes it harder for organisations to control what is said about them.

Ninety-five stream of consciousness “theses” rammed these two points home in increasingly self-congratulatory and obtuse language, combined with a touch of confusion between marketing, marketing communications and markets.

Now, we’re blessed with Pinko Marketing: “the new age of marketing (post-Cluetrain)”. It’s hard to find a concise, coherent summary of Pinko Marketing, so here’s my attempt:

The internet has removed the distinction between consumer and producer. Therefore, traditional marketing communications practice is meaningless. The only strategy that marketers now need is to encourage the customer-base to promote the product.

The train’s return journey

Pinko’s central theme, that the internet has killed traditional marketing, would be unremarkable in itself. That idea is much like a mad uncle: however crazy or offensive his utterings, repetition has eroded his ability to shock and, most importantly, you know he’s mostly harmless.

Here’s what makes Pinko noteworthy:

• Some interesting observations, buried beneath the “too whacky for editing” style.
• An almost teenage-like rebelliousness.
• An in-built retort to people who don’t get it.
• The idea that any form of marketing could be a homage to Marx (Karl, not Groucho).

The interesting but obvious

Taking the lead from the Cluetrain boys, Pinko’s creator, Tara Hunt, outlines her vision in her own thirty-two point manifesto.

If I quote a few of the highlights, you’ll soon see why I had to create my own summary.

“1. Pinko Marketing is about the end of the Marketing Manager, Director and anyone else who thinks they have control over the message, market or ‘brand’

2. The commons…the producers…will decide what makes it ‘to market’, what flourishes, what dies, what is ignored, what is celebrated…whatever.

5. The ‘masses’ will decide what is ‘mass’ and what is not…whatever the hell ‘mass’ means…wait a minute? We aren’t being stuffed into a overarching classification? So, we can divorce ourselves from any notion that we are some monolithic mass of consuming beings? Cool.

25. Content may be king, but community is the kingdom it serves.Mike Sansone

26. Forget kings! The audience is the content. Bob Robertson-Boyd”

And so it continues. Just as with Cluetrain, this is no manifesto: it’s an outpouring of thoughts and sentiments, seemingly without the benefit of review or editing.

Has Hunt’s work “in marketing for just over 7 years” taught her nothing about the value of clear communication? To be fair to her, she admits that it’s “a very rough beginning” but, y’know, this thing’s been going for five months now.

If you’re prepared to work to get beyond this ‘language as barrier to communication’ style, it’s possible to distil some interesting observations from Pinko:

• Online communities can be powerful ways to get things done.
• If you want to harness online communities, it’s not enough to pay lip-service.
• Honesty and openness are great ways to inspire trust in your product/company.
• A good product will often sell itself.
• Centralisation is not always the best way to work.

Okay, so none of that amounts to a staggering revelation but it doesn’t hurt to restate good ideas.

The rebeliousness

Two more quotes from the Pinko Marketing manifesto:

“14. Put down the marketing plan and walk away slowly. It’ll be alright. I know. You have a tough job ahead of you. It’s called killing your inner control freak. I have the same issue.

29. Refuse to report: reporting on your Pinko Marketing wastes time describing a situation that has already changed; worse, it allows the team to delegate their responsibility to engage with customers. If the team wants a record of events, tell them to hire a documentary-maker. OK, maybe I just hate writing reports…”

This is where Pinko really exposes its naievity. Planning isn’t glamorous. Accountability highlights your weaknesses. They are, though, the two things that separate highly-paid successful marketers from amateur chancers.

It’s the equivalent of only ever eating birthday cake: it might be fun at first but soon you’ll get giddy on all the sugar, then you’ll do something stupid and throw up on your party shoes. The difference with marketing is that you’re dealing with other people’s budgets and aspirations. The story ends with you getting fired, rather than vomition; unless you’re very lucky.

If you disagree, you’re one of “them”

The conspiracy theory aspect of Pinko Marketing nicely links its misdirected rebellion with its cherrypicking from Marxism.

From Why Pinko Marketing:

“There are several levels of stakeholders who stand to lose a great deal in this commons-based rising. For such a long time, the top-down approach to business has served them well. We have been kept at bay for too long. You can smell their fear. They sue us. They jail us. They try everything in their power to silence us. The stronger we become, the more desperate their tactics become.”

By personalising the conflict - in which even the telcos are out to get us - Hunt introduces an emotional appeal and creates an exclusive club of those who get it, versus those who don’t.

Suddenly, Pinko Marketing becomes a declaration of faith and, so, no longer needs to stand up to critical reasoning. You either get it, or you’re one of them.

From her blog post, They hate our way of life:

“Anyone who wants to make a buck off of you and me hates you and me. Think about it. We are ‘target markets’.”

Can there be a marketing for Marxists?

Pinko Marketing values the collective above all else. Let’s go back to the manifesto:

“4. Amateurism means passion, curiosity, intrigue and growth. What the hell is a professional? You get paid for doing what I’m doing right now? Cool. How do I get that gig?

20. Karl Marx said “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Amateurs are gaining the same abilities as the professionals. They outnumber the professionals, so with the levelling of the playing field their voices will become the dominant ones. You’d better be nice to them.

21. Your customers are incredibly smart, and remarkably creative. They’ll create great content that will showcase your brand better than you ever could — if what you do is any good.

31. Everyone becomes a creator — designers, developers, writers, musicians, etc. — and the marketing happens all by itself.”

Unlike Wikipedia, which aims to draw on the expertise of many individuals, Pinko actively devalues individual expertise: the mob knows best.

The “collective unconscious” is a strong theme in Pinko:

“The underlying desire that is bubbling up through an almost universal ‘a-ha’ sentiment from seemingly unrelated points all across the world. It doesn’t appear, on the surface, to have a common language, experience or character. But, more than anything, it is a desire of the commons.

We see it expressed through the spontaneous eruptions of BarCamp, coworking discussions, Web 2.0 frenzy and on sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist”

In other words, this is a special time in which people are, independently, having the same ideas and then suddenly collaborating to realise them. Even if we assume that is the way Ubuntu, Wikipedia, Firefox etc have worked - which of course it isn’t - then it’s still only the experience of a technologically super-literate minority.

Walk down your local high street and count the number of people you spot having “a-ha” moments. Or perhaps you’ll just see people making small buying decisions based on information led by marketing communications professionals.

You may have guessed, I’m not a fan

Every so often, fads come along in marketing. I think it is because marketing is the alchemy of the consumer society.

We’re trying to understand why people do things and what they want. Then we find different ways to talk to them, and make our best attempt to measure the results in a scientific fashion.

In truth, we can’t ever really know why someone bought a bar of chocolate or a particular car. Even if people tell us why they think they made a particular choice, that brings us no closer to understanding the unfathomable range of influences that led to it.

This mix of unavoidable pseudo-science, with rich rewards for the successful, takes some people into the realm of faith. That’s why companies can build a pseudo-religious experience from selling over-priced cleaning products door to door, or why Pinko Marketing has inspired many.

I do see some value in Pinko Marketing. Honesty, community and respect for customers are great assets for any brand. Real life experience shows, though, that however much we wish it weren’t true, ‘nasty’ companies still succeed.

Here’s my summary of, what I believe to be, the problems with Pinko Marketing:

• It is expressed lazily and hastily.
• It is far too assured of its own worth and relevance.
• It is far too dismissive of proven marketing practice.
• It seeks revolution for its own sake.

I am sure that I will be accused of being unkind, or I’ll be told that I don’t get it. Pinko Marketing deserves criticism: it is framed as the saviour of marketing and, besides, without criticism, ideas are never improved upon.

More importantly, I think Pinko Marketing is a seductive ideas, so we at least one voice on the contrary. And I hate to say it but Hunt has recently left the company where she developed Pinko partially because they wanted to take a traditional approach to marketing.

“Shifting your attitude to Pinko Thinking today will not only put you ahead of the curve, it will mean your survival.”

And besides, lines like that are far too smug to be left alone.

What is it about marketing that leads people into flights of fancy?

More importantly, what is that allows other people to suspend their disbelief long enough to buy into those flights of fancy?

This isn’t rhetoric; I’m genuinely interested in hearing your thoughts.

I think of marketing as a, reasonably, sober management discipline. Fluttering around the edges, though, are candyfloss ideas, whose substance dissolves to nothing as soon as they’re subjected to critical thought.

So, why does marketing provide the cloak that allows the ill-conceived and banal to dress up as brilliant insight?

One of the big four ideas of marketing is distribution (or place, if you want to make the four ideas into four Ps).

How your customers get your product is crucial to its success. In response to a Newsforge article, which glances at some of the most obvious aspects of marketing communications, an anonymous commentator makes two essential points:

1. “Marketing is not just promotion; it’s all decisions about price, product, placement, and promotion.”
2. “One of the most important aspects for a software is ‘placement’ — in other words: its distribution.”

Ubuntu’s ShipIt scheme - where thousands of free CDs of the Linux distro have been given to anyone requesting them - has been key to its success. Similarly, when pre-Novell Suse gave LUGs free copies of their boxed Linux, they were buying mindshare.

I don’t agree with everything the commentator says but it’s great to see, although the main article was a disappointment, another free software voice stating that marketing isn’t all shouting yer mouth off.