Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Again.

Image courtesy of nswlearnscope

Over the holiday I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s new book ‘Meatball Sundae’, in which he argues that we stand on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution. His chronology goes something like this (I added the clock stuff):

• Industrial Revolution 1.0 – 1760-1840: The big one. Where steam, water-power and pocket-watches begat production and employees.
• Industrial Revolution 2.0 – 1840-1950: Production on a massive scale in more efficient factories. Think Henry Ford, the wristwatch and *much* bigger clocks.
• Industrial Revolution 3.0 – 1950s-present: Time-punch machines. The moment the Service Sector took over. Mass-marketing created demand and communication technologies connected people and ideas with stuff being made. The age of what Seth might call ‘the TV-industrial complex‘.
• Industrial Revolution 4.0 – Now: Welcome to the ‘Web-industrial complex‘. Ten years in, there’s a clock in your face pretty much all of the time. Look at your screen right now. Nevertheless, the technology finally starts working properly and becomes ‘enjoyable’ and cheap enough for everyone to join in. Seth describes 14 trends that result from this, including: infinite on-demand access to just about everything, infinite channels of communication, the atomisation of information (as it can be represented, sliced, diced and piped the way you want it). Most exciting are the effects of power shifting from top-down to bottom-up and consumers getting direct access to producers and each other. Welcome to The New Marketing.

Seth’s new book is full of Oreo Cakester-esque anecdotes that support his slightly cultish ‘New Marketing’ ideology. The “handy table” below comes from his book and will no doubt help you spot the difference between the old marketing and this new stuff.

The New Marketing, according to Godin, demands understandably novel ways of thinking about products and services, and how they are invented, designed, produced, distributed and purchased. The technology of the assembly line, he argues, revolutionized factories during the ‘third industrial revolution’ just as the technology of the Web is re-making business today, not to mention changing the shape of our heads.

The distance between the brain of the designer and the ear of the consumer is now much, much shorter than it ever was before… New Marketing is about fashion and stories and permission and promises. New Marketing doesn’t understand top-down command-and-control thinking. It’s actually caveman marketing, the sort of marketing that existed before money and corporations took over.

Much of Godin’s thesis seems very similar to Kevin Kelly’s 1998 ‘New Rules for New Economy‘, even down to the use of lists: ‘trends and principles’ for Godin, and ‘rules’ for Kelly. I found Kelly’s incredible optimism about the Web really inspiring then and, looking at it again now, it feels like Seth has basically elaborated Kelly’s ideas and added some new case-studies that make it more relevant for marketers. Meatball Sundae is worth reading though. It won’t take you long. It’s quite frothy. Covers a lot of ground very quickly. Ideal for a short flight.

Kelly’s ‘New Rules…’ is really good fun, but if you don’t get round to reading it you can at least enjoy his website’s excellent ‘selected maxims page‘, from which this insight is taken:

In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley’s greatest “product” is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile email culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.

And not forgetting his perplexing take on the wisdom of crowds:

The surest way to smartness is massive dumbness.