The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs or seats. Most of all, not consumers.
The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates. They were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers met, looked each other in the eye and connected. The first markets were places where people came to buy what others had to sell, to exchange - and to talk.
The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some was news, opinion and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone.
Often there were conversations about the work of hands: "Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm." "The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?" "Taste this apple. We won't have them next week. If you like it you should take some today." Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don't let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.
Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names by which they were known: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith. For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. The buyers had as much to say as the sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising or the shading of public relations.
These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk: They were social, based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self.
"Markets were conversations" doesn't mean "markets were noisy." It means markets were places where people met and talked about work. Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So are markets.
THE INDUSTRIAL INTERRUPTION
The advent of the Industrial Age did more than just enable industry to produce products much more efficiently. Management's approach to production and its workers was quickly echoed in its approach to the market and its customers. The economies of scale they were gaining in the factory demanded economies of scale in the market. By the time it was over, we had forgotten the true meaning of the market, and replaced it with industrial substitutes. In The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler wrote that the rise of industry drove an "invisible wedge" between production and consumption, a fact Friedrich Engels had noticed 100 years earlier. As production was ramped up to unheard-of rates, the clay pot of craft work was broken into shards of repetitive tasks that maximized efficiency by minimizing difference: interchangeable workers creating interchangeable products.
In the market, consumption also needed to be ramped up - not only to absorb the increased production of goods, but also to promote people's willingness to buy the one-size-fits-all products that rolled off mass-production lines.
And management wasted little time noticing the parallels in efficiencies that could be achieved all along the production-consumption chain. If products and workers were interchangeable, then interchangeable consumers began to look pretty good, too.
The goal was simple: Customers had to be convinced to covet the same thing - the same Model T in any color, so long as it was black. And if workers could be better organized through the repetitive nature of their tasks, so too were customers more easily defined by the collective nature of their tastes. As management developed a new organizational model to enhance economies of scale in production, it developed techniques for mass marketing to do the same for consumption.
So the customer who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market was transformed into
