Marketing Is Dead, Long Live Marketing

The idea of marketing dying is a joke.  As human societies we will always trade and therefore always need markets.  However, their nature is undergoing total redesign and that is why it's soooo interesting to be involved in marketing right now.  Of course, what people rail against are the techniques associated with the particular marketplace forged in an industrial hearth and then exported around the world through newly globalised capital.  We all know what this mall looks like.  But we now have a wide range of established bazaars that look nothing like the global brand cathedrals of StarBucks, McDs, Tescos and Wal-Mart.  Amazon has created a $38bn market by focusing on never-ending niches of the longtail.  eBay created $45bn worth of value by letting people swap the content of their attics. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis created enterprise-weight P2P software that meant people could bypass traditional markets altogether and do it themselves with Kazaa, Skype and Joost.  And, of course, Google created a new market by studying what people were doing on the open web, organising it with PageRank and raiding the world's advertising palaces to underwrite its eye-watering growth.  And now we have Etsy.  The values behind this almost totally female marketplace are laid out brilliantly by the NYT.  Robert Kalin's vision is remarkable - and highly successful to the tune of $4m a month in revenues.  But it's the way in which Etsy taps into people's distrust of the bland global mall-model that's the secret sauce.  "The women who have led the craft movement don’t want to work for the Man. But many are also motivated by having reached adulthood at a time when the Man is slashing benefits, reneging on pensions, laying people off and, if hiring, is looking for customer-service reps and baristas. This is not a utopian alt-youth framework; it’s a very real-world, alt-grown-up framework."  Reminds me of another market-buster I know....