markets; Nordstrom (JWN) will always be the product of the family's original shoe business.
Of course, companies and products can change their identities (and even their natures) over time. Volkswagen (VLKAY) no longer bears (for most of us) the history stated in its very name: Hitler's car for the proud German people. Kellogg (K)'s Razzle Dazzle Rice Krispies no longer bears much connection to the obsessive health concerns of the company's founder.
But such changes generally are gradual and often painful. In fact, if they are too rapid and too easy, the market conversation will be merciless in exposing the phoniness it sniffs.
If a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there's an easy way to find out: Listen to what your market says you are. If it's not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the market is wrong, that it's composed of a lot of people who are too dumb or blind to understand the Inner You.
If you've been claiming to be the Time Company for two years but the market still thinks of you as the Overpriced Executive Trophy Watchmaker, then, sorry, that's your position. If you don't like what you're hearing, the marketing task is not to change the market's idea of who you are but actually to change who you are. And that can take as long as a generation: Look at Volkswagen.
THE MARKETING CRAFT
The market started out as a place where people talked about what they cared about, in voices as individual as the craft goods on the table between them. As the distance between producer and consumer lengthened, so did the gap between our business voice and our authentic voice. Marketing became a profession, an applied science, the engineering of desirable responses through the application of calibrated stimuli - including the occasional axe in the head.
Marketing isn't going to go away, nor should it. But it needs to evolve, rapidlyand thoroughly, for markets have become networked and now know more than business, learn faster than business, are more honest than business and are a hell of a lot more fun than business. The voices are back, and voice brings craft: work by unique individuals motivated by passion.
What's happening to the market is precisely what should - and will - happen to marketing. Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craft workers listen to the material they're forming - shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with and reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing can't become a craft until it is able to hear the new - and old - sound of its markets.
By listening, marketing will relearn how to talk.
Doc Searles is senior editor of Linux Journal and editor of the Reality 2.0 Web zine (www.searls.com/r2.html). David Weinberger is a regular commentator on NPR and publisher of the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (www.hyperorg.com). They are coauthors of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, to be published in February by Perseus Books. Copyright © 2000 by Frederick Levine, Chris Locke, David Searls and David Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of Perseus Books. All rights reserved.
