John Hagel is giving rhetorical form to what I think are the most important issues at the confluence of business, economics, marketing and even epistemology. His “Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007” post from a month ago is still consuming my thoughts even when I’m trying to do other things, like eat and sleep.

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I don’t know why I haven’t posted something about this before. I find myself talking about this all the time. Here’s the gist:
Marketing is dead. You can be humans again.
No, really. Not the practice of taking things to market; I mean “marketing, the paradigm”. Marketing, of necessity, has been about dealing with customers at arm’s length. This is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. In order to pass the value of economies of scale to customers, companies had to be big. They had to talk to a lot of people. Since Gutenberg, the only tools available for—indeed the only ways to even think about—talking to a lot of people have been unidirectional. These univalent tools are the currency of marketing. They offer really no meaningful dialogue.

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The Consumerist has a post about some excellent customer service from SmartBargains.com.
Every ad agency should be making every attempt to sell some kind of customer service initiative with every campaign. An authentic interaction. If the marketing is going to tell a compelling story, it had better be congruent with the customer’s experience when something inevitably goes wrong.

We’re back on Broad Street. Morning engagements kept me from the first two presenters, and I’ve come into the middle of a presentation on “Entertainment.” The session is “curated” by Lee Maicon; Bald Guy, and Head of Planning at StrawberryFrog. The program doesn’t contain the names of the three panelists. One of the panelists is a particularly smart cat who is speaking about narrative and meaning. He (the smart dude) just walked us through some movie clips – one from Kurosawa’s “Ran”, and one from the Matrix. I haven’t been able to determine what exactly they’re trying to tell us, but I’ve only been here for a few minutes.

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I’m sitting here in the “Downtown Ballroom,” 41 Broad Street, NY, NY for the futuremarketingsummit. As of fifteen minutes ago, Scott Goodson was to begin his keynote. It has yet to begin. Okay, well he’s just starting now. Technical difficulties with projectors and computers were repeatedly met with Scott’s opening line, “Welcome to the Future.”

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