a consumer. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Power swung so decisively to the supply side that market became a verb: something you do to customers.
In the 20th century, the rise of mass communications media enhanced industry's ability to address even larger markets with no loss of shoe leather, and mass marketing came into its own. With larger markets came larger rewards, and larger rewards had to be protected. More bureaucracy, more hierarchy, and more command and control meant the customer who looked you in the eye was promptly escorted out of the building by security.
The product of mass marketing was the message, delivered in as many forms as there were media and in as many guises as there were marketers to invent them. Delivered locally, shipped globally, repeated inescapably, the business of marketing devoted itself to delivering the message. Unfortunately, the customer never wanted to take delivery.
THE SHIPPING VIEW
During the Industrial Age, the movement of materials from production to consumption - from flax to linen, from ore to musket - was a long and complicated process. Potentially vast markets had potentially vast distribution needs. The development of new transportation systems eased the burden, and global systems flourished. Even huge distances could be spanned so products could be delivered efficiently.
Inexorably, business began to understand itself through a peculiar new metaphor: Business is shipping. In this shipping metaphor - still the heart and soul of business-as-usual - producers package content and move it through a channel, addressed for delivery down a distribution system.
The metaphor was effectively applied not only to the movement of physical goods, but also quickly applied to the packaging and delivery of marketing content. It's no surprise that business came to think of marketing as simply the delivery of a different type of content to consumers. It was efficient to manage, one size could fit many, and the distribution channel - the new world of broadcast media - was more than ready to deliver.
The symmetry was perfect. The production side of business ships interchangeable products and the marketing side ships interchangeable messages, both to the same market - the bigger and more homogeneous, the better.
One problem: There's no demand for messages. The customer doesn't want to hear from business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me and the rest of the earth's population has nothing to do with me in particular. It's worse than noise. It's an interruption, the Anti-Conversation.
That's the awful truth about marketing. It broadcasts messages to people who don't want to listen. Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt and giveaway engineered by a marketing department is colored by the fact that it's going to a public that doesn't ask to hear it.
Marketers felt this truth in their bones and learned to cloak their messages, to disguise them as entertainment, to repackage the content just as business learned to vary this year's product line. Commercials disguise themselves as one-act plays, press releases play the part of important stories and advertising masquerades as education.
Marketing became an elaborate game between business and the consumer, but the outcome remained fixed. As sophisticated as marketing became, it has not overcome the ability of people to smell the bull behind all the marketing perfume.
It is not hard to understand, then, that "business is shipping" at times felt more like "business is war," another pervasive metaphor. We launch marketing campaigns based on strategies that target markets; we bombard people with messages in order to penetrate markets (and the sexual overtones here shouldn't be dismissed either). Business-as-usual is in a constant state of war with the market, with marketing manning the front lines.
Consider the distance we've come. Markets once were places where producers and customers met face-to-face and engaged in conversations based on shared
