What does it take to be a marketing expert? If expertise is all about familiarity, then just about everybody in America qualifies: We're all so inundated with marketing images that it's only natural that we all figure we understand the language, the rules, the way it's done. This idea has lately been taken to its logical extreme: Why not cut out the middleman and just let target customers make their own ads? Examples of what could be thought of as "the people's marketing" have been cropping up all over the place:

  • Mercedes-Benz has been running ads featuring photographs of customers with their cars -- the automaker received more than 1,000 snapshots when it solicited submissions earlier this year.
  • KFC held a contest last year asking its customers to devise commercials for the chicken chain and ran the winning spot nationwide during prime time. More recently, Coors Light had a similar contest in Canada.
  • The magazine Look-Look, put together by the well-known Los Angeles trend-spotting firm of the same name, is made up entirely of contributions by amateur artists and only accepts advertising from sponsors, such as Virgin Mobile and Pepsi, who are willing to let members of that same contributor base design their ads.
  • In perhaps the best-known case of this, the political organization MoveOn.org organized a contest that solicited anti-Bush TV ads from its user community. Not only was the response enormous, but the quality of many entries was surprisingly polished.

As was the case with MoveOn.org, some of these ad-making contests are clearly geared toward people who are trying to break into the marketing business. The Coors contest, for example, was aimed at film school students. But that does not fully explain what some experts see going on here -- or what it might mean for owners of brands large and small. More companies, it seems, are letting their most loyal customers dabble with creating and defining their brands. And even more surprising, perhaps, is that many companies' loyal consumers are eager to get in on the branding game.

What's driving this? As the CEO of ad giant Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts is in a position to know a great deal about the relationship between consumers and the brands they choose, and he has recently published a book about where he sees that relationship heading. In Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, Roberts argues that the best brands "are not owned by the manufacturers, the producers, the businesses." Rather, "they are owned by the people who love them." A related website, Lovemarks, is jammed with postings from people evangelizing for the products and services they love, from Lego to Post-it Notes.

Another take on the people's marketing notion is in the forthcoming book Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth, co-founder of San Francisco marketing firm Plan B. Wipperfurth, whose clients have included Napster and Pabst Blue Ribbon, believes that companies need to embrace brand "cocreation." By that, he means that marketers should invite consumer subcultures to help shape a brand's ideology, use, and persona.

"The real hook is to have everybody selling their experience as consumers."