I’ve written quite a lot about Marketing 2.0, and I’m glad to have the chance to pitch in here and compare notes with friends old and new.

For me, the idea of Marketing 2.0 has always quite appealed: what if marketing in future was more about creating genuine, authentic engagement with customers, if it levelled the playing field, embraced ideas of co-creation and farsighted inventions like VRM? In the shiny world of Marketing 2.0, we’d see the back of all that advertising and direct mail - the 99% of noisy clutter that interrupts our viewing and travelling pleasure with its crude efforts to flog us stuff we don’t need.

But maybe we’re just kidding ourselves. Us marketing types have always had a real talent for that, haven’t we?

I wonder if we’re just repeating that tired old solution for any other substandard product with a dodgy customer image - the rebrand! Hey folks this isn’t nasty old Marketing, this is New Improved Marketing NOW with Added Authenticity…

I wonder if it would be better to look forward to Marketing 0.0. That is, when marketing itself has been eradicated from organisations to fulfil the late, great Bill Hicks’ fondest, NON WORKSAFE dreams:

Ok, Bill said he was deadly serious and I might not be.

But I do think that most of the things marketing needs to do in future will be be about making less noise, and generally getting out of people’s way. In our networked world, the people formerly known as the audience are getting smarter, often have better technology, less constrained by corporate IT bureaucracy - and basically trust their mates a whole lot more than they’ll ever trust anyone in the marketing department

Or let me put that another way, using Annie and Aretha as my proxies:

(There’s a whole other post I could write about the feminisation of marketing, but that’s for another day)

We all know how bullied many CMOs are, and we’ve all read the pep talks on how to make those bullying CEO take us more seriously. Personally, I’ve always found that kind of chest-beating-for-the-noble-cause-of-marketing rather painful - I wonder what would happen if gave up that fight?

And whether we stick with 2.0 or try 0.0… what is it we’d really want to stand up for… and how much of the dead luggage of marketing would be like to be rid of?