From marketing to placemaking: my odyssey in the book Authenticity continues

I said in the post before last that I was going to continue on my path in the book Authenticity, and that I was slothful in not keeping up. Well here we go!

In the work I have been doing for clients recently the idea of Inbound Marketing(versus the usual 'push' outbound email and direct mail marketing which is becoming less and less profitable) has intrigued me to the point where I attended a webcast by Hubspot about "How to Combine SEO, Blogging, and Social Media for Results". So in picking up Authenticity again, we are greeted with the concept of Buzz Marketing, 'where the marketer is invisible'.

This is interesting in itself, but not for the reasons I mentioned. Buzz marketing without authenticity is a 'buzz kill' if it sets up expectations that are not fulfilled, and is the primary problem with advertising, that is "a phoniness generating machine". Wouldn't we love to actually fly somewhere in the way American Airlines(or anyone else) advertises the experience to be like(as a sidebar, I had a surprisingly unsatisfactory experience with Virgin Airlines coming back to Boston from London last month, topped by a REALLY unsatisfying flight on American, but we'll leave that for now. The authors point out(and this is the main premise of the chapter) that 'companies need....is a new approach to demand creation that actually enables-make that forces- a company to be what it says it is(authors' italics) and that discipline is called 'placemaking'. This proscribes to be whatever the experience you created is the marketing(which until November is how I looked at Virgin Atlantic).

I look forward to continuing this path, but for now I need to go into a conference call so I will come back to this shortly....