Archive for January, 2007

This is the long-time-coming blog of the Punk Marketing revolution.

We have a lot to say, but we’ll be brief in these first days. First, a little background on why the heck we did this book:

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, marketing was something best left to the department bearing that name and the agencies it hired to help with the creative. Few outside that world of trendy folk sporting designer jeans and trendy glasses either understood it or wanted to.

But now everyone in business needs to be a marketer to make their product, service or piece of content survive and then thrive in a world in which consumer has ultimate control. As we said in the post “Vive La Revolution, Y’All,” purchasers are now becoming marketers in their own right, not only shaping and influencing brands but also using online destinations like MySpace, YouTube and Second Life to create brands for themselves. Ah yes. Let’s call that CONTROL.

Our book Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution is the Manifesto of this marketing revolution, describing it in the kind of lively and irreverent way that anyone who has any interest in business will totally dig. It’s not a theory manual because we hate those too!

It’s stuffed with practical advice learned in the edgy club scene of marketing.

It’s time for such a movement to travel mainstream.

As authors we didn’t feel like writing a traditional business book any more than you wanted to read one. So we got permission from a mainstream publisher, Collins, to take a fabulous idea formed out of decades of experience in a marketing mosh pit, and enliven it with attitude, humor, and illustrations. Go and buy one, read it straight through, or put it on shuffle…or just read the darn sidebars.

Even if you hate the thesis you won’t be bored. Vive la Revolution!

Oh and check out our lovely faces on HarperCollins’ New Punk Site

Like?

Let us know what you think. And stick around because we promise this Web thing will not be static in the least.

After all, how could we do that!?

Punk Rock was born over 30 years ago (the Sex Pistols first performed together on November 6, 1975). Looking back, which we seem to do a lot, the music was raw and unstructured and was created BY people and FOR people. It was loud, obnoxious … and was it ever brilliant.

Today, Punk Marketing is born. It has a similar attitude towards the establishment and its outmoded ways of thinking. So, here’s Punk in the business world…

Just as punk music told us it was OK to disregard the bollocks, the PUNK Marketing Manifesto [www.punkmarketing.com/assets/punk-marketing-the-manifesto.pdf] is a way for everyone to effectively manipulate the reality where little by little, with every new gizmo or gadget that pops up online or at Best Buy or at a Mom & Pop mobile phone distributor, consumers have been handed over the power to choose whatever the hell they want to choose.

The revolution in marketing is one in which power is slowly but surely gone from seller to buyer. It’s been going on for some time. TiVo has been its poster child but it really started long before when people realized they could easily avoid the marketing messages they didn’t like.

The marketing industries have been slow to catch on – we don’t know why – and these industries seem to have been in a stupor until recently when, thanks to this force, it’s been, well, forced to do things differently by the mounting evidence that proves beyond any doubt consumers HATE the stuff they churn out.

Marketers have known this, but of course. They just didn’t want to face up to it. So Punk Marketing is branding the revolution. We are here to give the movement a voice so that all brave marketers, smart businesspeople and power-hungry consumers everywhere can fight for a marketing style that holds intelligence and creativity and does not fall to Lowest Common Denominator thinking.

Come join us. Vive La Revolution! Damn, it’s gonna be good.

More on the way soon!