Connect, Connecting, Connections

I was going to write about Eliza today but I've been thinking about my theory of marketing and about an interesting debate I had with one of my key stakeholders at work. I contend that marketing is about connecting buyers and sellers and that there are dozens of ways to do that. He believes that all we need to do is crack the cabal and we'll be invited to every deal we want. I have some thoughts on this.

Cabal: that secret (or not so secret) inner circle in any given market that is connected to every major player in that market.

Crack the Cabal: if you (the seller) get in with this group, you will be able to connect with all the buyers you need or want.

Now my first reaction to this was definitely from a place of female minority. Cracking the cabal sounds distinctly exclusionary and perhaps a bit conspiratorial as well. I should mention that the word choice is mine. He called it the network which is far less inflammatory a word than cabal. That I heard cabal when he said network tells you a lot about my perspective.

Since I am occasionally aware of my biases and sometimes even recognize that I am being crazy, I gave his notion some consideration. There might be something to this idea. After all, the parable started as a story of market making. What's more of a cabal than wall street? So I decided to do some Internet research.

I found some interesting sociological and economic papers on the subject. There is apparently an entire field of thought dedicated to cracking the cabal. It's called structural embeddedness. This guy Mark Granovetter made a plea to economists and sociologists in 1985 to view economic action in ways that take into account its strong links to social structure. He argued that the economy is structurally embedded in social networks....

Another thinker on the subject (Dalhia Mani) takes the connection beyond the firm's immediate network and looks at the overall network of ties in which firms are embedded. It becomes a veritable spider web of connections, doesn't it?

After finding and reading a series of scholarly papers on the subject I realized we are just talking about social networks. I figured there must be some books out there that have translated that scholarly work into English.

There are. May I recommend Linked and Bursts by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Nexus by Mark Buchanan and Six Degrees by Duncan J. Watts?

Now you say: ah ha! Who hasn't heard of six degrees of separation?

I haven't actually finished any of these books yet. They are not the point of this post except to say that this concept is not only not new, but also is getting some serious attention given our newly connected mobile world.

How does this relate to cracking the cabal? Anyone heard of LinkedIn? It's the same principle. Duh, if you just make more connections, eventually you will have a network big enough to reach whoever you need to reach to exchange that something of value with relative ease.

This is kind of stating the obvious: the more people in your market, the more likely you'll find a buyer. The more people in your network, the more likely you'll find just the connection you need.

That may not be getting in with the in crowd but it does give credence to the notion that there is a network - a core network - that is connected to the entire market. It might be a really big network and it might not be located in Tammany Hall but it probably exists.

I no longer think that cracking the cabal equates to an evil empire seeking to oppress the masses and exclude most sellers from the market.

Instead I think there are probably some interesting and surprising connections that might give the appearance of a network. Probably there's not a singular network that is connected to all business in a given market, but I may be proven wrong even on this radical notion. Several of the books seem to think there's some truth to this idea.

Still, from this view, cracking the cabal becomes a simple numbers game - similar to connecting buyers and sellers. The more people you touch, the more connections you make, the more likely you will find the person who wants to buy what you are selling, or the connection who will invite you to sit at the table with the in crowd.