Future of Marketing?

I normally enjoy Robert Cringely’s insightful articles, but the one I heard today was nothing like his other works. In fact, my first reaction was “Grow Up, not the whole World revolves around you!”. But few seconds later it hit me – this is a modern reincarnation of Sales Pitch!

I’ll give you my two sentences summary, or you can read the entire post on his blog. It starts of by complementing Google for their focus on efficiency. Then proceeds to emphasize the importance of the relevant component (hard-drive), and ends with “why not check out this awesome product” pitch. Classic Marketing Formula: Gain Favor via Complement, Gain Trust by presenting logical arguments about importance of “X”, and finally mention a better “X”.

Brilliant or Sleazy? You decide… But sure way to get the message across, which is the hardest part of any marketing effort. I am sure that Google employees monitor the “tubes” for their company name, and certainly one or two (likely more) will forward a link to relevant Senior decision maker, and with enough incoming emails, that decision maker will take notice, enough to probably learn more about this technology. This is 90% of the sale effort, right there! Think about how hard it would normally be to get senior management’s attention to even agree to hear out your Sales pitch?!

Everyone is talking on the web about Social Marketing (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and other such silly obvious things. For me, as soon as I see someone continuously taunting their own product(s), I un-follow, no matter how fancy the product is.

Maybe I am approaching this completely wrong, and Bob has nothing to gain personally from Google buying all these (apparently yet Non-existent) MFD drives. Either way, this approach is definitely novel, especially the ending, turning the discussion away from product and into personal unjust conflict?

Sensational (pun intended)!!!