Marketing from the bottom up?

In the new dynamic it has become fashionable to talk about conversational marketing – different from ‘word of mouth’ marketing – in so far as this is marketing not driven hierarchically by the company from the top down, but by their recently enfranchised customers connected by internet. A world of individual customers inhabiting the blogosphere, connected by hyperlinks and acting from the bottom up. On the other hand few marketers seem to have embraced blogging, suggested by some as a crucial forum for conversational marketing. The Cluetrain Manifesto attributed by some observers as an early starting point for the notion of conversational marketing offers this opinion – ‘Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.’ Certainly there has been a major movement towards the use of the Internet as a research tool to discover product information as a prelude to buying or specifying. In some industries users have long swapped information about experience with products and become a useful source of knowledge in identifying and fixing faults for example. What is suggested now is that this is no longer a one way street but indeed a conversation between company people and their customers. It implies greater transparency with companies opening up more information in return for greater customer loyalty and input of requirements but most importantly customers spreading the word about the company’s products in a positive way. Early days maybe, but could this be a glimpse of the future or merely a hopeful wish?