No Size Fits All: From Mass Marketing to Mass Handselling

by Tom Hayes, Michael S. Malone

Overview

Today’s markets have splintered into millions of powerful consumer communities— how can businesses adapt?

It’s no secret that traditional mass marketing— network television, newspapers, direct mail—is dying. Consumer markets are increasingly fragmented, even as they become more connected, transparent, and global. The future of business is about penetrating selfforming niches, from affinity groups on Facebook to thousands of satellite channels and millions of private online communities.

So how can businesses reach new customers, win their trust, and earn their loyalty? Tom Hayes and Michael S. Malone urge an entirely new approach, embracing small, trust-based online groups as powerful vehicles for creating customers and gathering invaluable feedback. But what they call “marketing 3.0” isn’t as simple as setting up a YouTube channel.

Drawing on many case studies, the authors offer a new set of tools for a world where attention is harder than ever to capture, but even more lucrative to hold. They explain how to use social media for a new kind of marketing—bottom-up instead of top-down, personal rather than public, subtle rather than full frontal.

The payoff is a return to the power of oldfashioned handselling—turbocharged by bleedingedge technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101155707
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/12/2009
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	287 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tom Hayes is a former senior marketing executive for Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials, and AMD. He is the author of Jump Point: How Network Culture Is Revolutionizing Business and writes an awardwinning Blog.

Michael S. Malone, is one of America's most distinguished technology journalists. A former editor of Forbes ASAP, he has written many books, including Bill and Dave and The Virtual Corporation.

Editorial Reviews

Hayes (Jump Point) and Malone (The Virtual Corporation) present a compelling picture of a society irrevocably changed by the Internet age: while we retain our need to connect with one another, we're more likely to base those connections on mutual interests than on geographic proximity. The Internet has fundamentally changed group forming; we use our new tools to splinter one traditional institution after another—commercial, cultural, social, religious—then re-sort ourselves by our affinities and our passions. When challenged by an increasingly bewildering world (and array of consumer choices), we huddle into small, trusted groups. And reaching those groups is not always easy. Marketers must see their customers or constituents in a new social context—they are using social networks to form small, self-selected communities of interest, and the one-way broadcast, mass media consciousness of the past century is rapidly being replaced by a mass-connected social information space. More theory than specific proscription, this is an extraordinarily well-researched look at a market where word of mouth or a nod from Oprah have a much greater impact than an expensive marketing campaign. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly