A marketing tactic studied
I've been thinking a lot about the MINX mess, and how it was that that the professionals could get it so wrong and be so oblivious to how and why, when customers and potential customers were trying to tell them so loudly in so many ways for so long, and something somebody said that I saw in my dowsing which I need to find and cite helps encapuslate what I want to get at in more detail, what we have been hacking away at in all our posts and threads, which is that they didn't seem to know whether they were trying to create a market or break into one - these are, indeed, totally different things, and as part of my general mercantile observations this really needs to be examined because it helps explain why attempts at "pandering" can so easily turn into floundering--
Because despite all DC's boasting of how realistic it was and how genre-cootie-free it was going to be, it turns out that MINX had a fair amount of genre in it, just as it wasn't all as white-urban-hipster as it looked, only unless you were already reading it you wouldn't likely know that, not from the titles and the way they were handling it. So, double-plus-FAIL: just like a movie trailer that shows something that's (lessay, hypothetically) a surreal Pythonesque-comedy-of-errors as a moody, profound, tragedy of manners, both the people who were attracted to it for what it was promoted as, and the ones who would have liked the actual thing it was, are going to be repelled. It's like a twofer of negative-advertising. (Conmotion? Demotion? Antimotion? We need some word for 'promotions' that do the exact opposite of what they should.)
But I haven't had time/energy to do it, plus I was working on another project (which kind of ties in to this issue of how to promote things properly) so I'm just going to toss out one other quick observation for the moment, and that's to say that I see all these people saying (not just about MINX, mind you) that "I'm not the audience for this, because I'm (__ years old) (A Guy) (A Gal) (General Zod) (A Hive Mind Being from Alpha Centauri), but I liked it a lot anyway and for these reasons."
And I think that this is not really the case: Reader Z may not be the audience that the makers/marketers were shooting for, but if Reader Z is buying it, and liking it, and looking for more of it, then he/she/it/them are indeed The Audience, because that's what being the audience for X means, and it behooves the makers and promoters to figure out who the hey their stuff is appealing to, and how to keep on making this transaction. Even if it isn't the group of sentients they imagined were going to like/want/pay good money for this particular product. Perhaps there are radically different communities of interest that like it for different reasons, and so this won't be able to be parlayed into some other similar wide-appeal product.
Perhaps, however, lots of outwardly-different people all like something for the same sorts of reasons, and thus you have these fan communities in which you have ten year olds and twenty year olds and thirty year olds and fifty year olds and sexagenarians all merrily exchanging opinions and insights on something that wasn't intended for all of them, but which serves them all, all the same. Ignoring them, ignoring this fact of split and multiple-demographic audiences and saying that you're only trying for the [teenage girls'] [teenage boys'] [20-30-something white guys'] dollars is really, really dumb.
"We want to sell Product X to single women in their 40s, so we will stick pictures of adorable talking kittens on it, since single women all like cats - hey, how come it's being bought up mostly by grade school children and biker dudes? Oh well, we'll just relaunch and relabel it with a big mean shark, since biker dudes have lots of money and we will do better with them than either the single cat-owning woman or the grade school kid, and biker dudes like big mean animals with lots of teeth! Hm, how come nobody's picking up Product X any more?"
OTOH, the Marketing Department Vodka Cooler that D. linked to explains so very, very much about so very many business decisions...
Anyway, in lieu of an indepth post, here is a case to study:
Heart and Dart, a small handcrafted soap maker which came to my attention because they had placed a blog ad on Hathor Legacy. I ignored it about five times, because "teacrafted" just sounded twee, and the art was kind of drab. (And of course I forgot to screencap it when it was up!)
OTOH, it was also kinda hand-hewn looking, and I like handmade soaps, and what the hell are teacrafted soaps? So eventually I clicked, so it worked so far.
And I really like the look and descriptions of their products, they're things I would buy if I had the ready, for myself and for gifts to other people, assuming they smell as nice as they look and sound. But if I were building the banner ad, I would put a silo'd picture of one of the more ornate and richly coloured bars on the banner, too, probably with a drop shadow to make it stand out from the background.
So this is a potentially-successful campaign - I don't know how many readers besides me clicked through at HL, I don't know how many had more money than I and bought, but it at least got past the "toss unopened" barrier that most bulk mail and banner ads fall at. I am the target audience, although I didn't suspect it, because I didn't realize how medievally-ornate and prettily colored most of the products were, from the promotional material. So it could be, imo, even more successful.
But now here I am, encouraging people to click through despite the drab ad. But I am a small publication, as blogs go, and I have no idea how likely my readers are to buy as a result - I have no way of tracking that. All these are the kinds of factors that marketers need to think about, and decide what to try to track and what to depend or not depend on, and the more money they have to invest in, the more they really need to do so. But instead, the more they have, the less care they seem to take, and scientific interest into the whys and wherefores, preferring to blame it on the Stars In Their Courses Being Unaligned, and so forth.
(...the Vodka Cooler explains a lot, doesn't it?)
Because despite all DC's boasting of how realistic it was and how genre-cootie-free it was going to be, it turns out that MINX had a fair amount of genre in it, just as it wasn't all as white-urban-hipster as it looked, only unless you were already reading it you wouldn't likely know that, not from the titles and the way they were handling it. So, double-plus-FAIL: just like a movie trailer that shows something that's (lessay, hypothetically) a surreal Pythonesque-comedy-of-errors as a moody, profound, tragedy of manners, both the people who were attracted to it for what it was promoted as, and the ones who would have liked the actual thing it was, are going to be repelled. It's like a twofer of negative-advertising. (Conmotion? Demotion? Antimotion? We need some word for 'promotions' that do the exact opposite of what they should.)
But I haven't had time/energy to do it, plus I was working on another project (which kind of ties in to this issue of how to promote things properly) so I'm just going to toss out one other quick observation for the moment, and that's to say that I see all these people saying (not just about MINX, mind you) that "I'm not the audience for this, because I'm (__ years old) (A Guy) (A Gal) (General Zod) (A Hive Mind Being from Alpha Centauri), but I liked it a lot anyway and for these reasons."
And I think that this is not really the case: Reader Z may not be the audience that the makers/marketers were shooting for, but if Reader Z is buying it, and liking it, and looking for more of it, then he/she/it/them are indeed The Audience, because that's what being the audience for X means, and it behooves the makers and promoters to figure out who the hey their stuff is appealing to, and how to keep on making this transaction. Even if it isn't the group of sentients they imagined were going to like/want/pay good money for this particular product. Perhaps there are radically different communities of interest that like it for different reasons, and so this won't be able to be parlayed into some other similar wide-appeal product.
Perhaps, however, lots of outwardly-different people all like something for the same sorts of reasons, and thus you have these fan communities in which you have ten year olds and twenty year olds and thirty year olds and fifty year olds and sexagenarians all merrily exchanging opinions and insights on something that wasn't intended for all of them, but which serves them all, all the same. Ignoring them, ignoring this fact of split and multiple-demographic audiences and saying that you're only trying for the [teenage girls'] [teenage boys'] [20-30-something white guys'] dollars is really, really dumb.
"We want to sell Product X to single women in their 40s, so we will stick pictures of adorable talking kittens on it, since single women all like cats - hey, how come it's being bought up mostly by grade school children and biker dudes? Oh well, we'll just relaunch and relabel it with a big mean shark, since biker dudes have lots of money and we will do better with them than either the single cat-owning woman or the grade school kid, and biker dudes like big mean animals with lots of teeth! Hm, how come nobody's picking up Product X any more?"
OTOH, the Marketing Department Vodka Cooler that D. linked to explains so very, very much about so very many business decisions...
Anyway, in lieu of an indepth post, here is a case to study:
Heart and Dart, a small handcrafted soap maker which came to my attention because they had placed a blog ad on Hathor Legacy. I ignored it about five times, because "teacrafted" just sounded twee, and the art was kind of drab. (And of course I forgot to screencap it when it was up!)
OTOH, it was also kinda hand-hewn looking, and I like handmade soaps, and what the hell are teacrafted soaps? So eventually I clicked, so it worked so far.
And I really like the look and descriptions of their products, they're things I would buy if I had the ready, for myself and for gifts to other people, assuming they smell as nice as they look and sound. But if I were building the banner ad, I would put a silo'd picture of one of the more ornate and richly coloured bars on the banner, too, probably with a drop shadow to make it stand out from the background.
So this is a potentially-successful campaign - I don't know how many readers besides me clicked through at HL, I don't know how many had more money than I and bought, but it at least got past the "toss unopened" barrier that most bulk mail and banner ads fall at. I am the target audience, although I didn't suspect it, because I didn't realize how medievally-ornate and prettily colored most of the products were, from the promotional material. So it could be, imo, even more successful.
But now here I am, encouraging people to click through despite the drab ad. But I am a small publication, as blogs go, and I have no idea how likely my readers are to buy as a result - I have no way of tracking that. All these are the kinds of factors that marketers need to think about, and decide what to try to track and what to depend or not depend on, and the more money they have to invest in, the more they really need to do so. But instead, the more they have, the less care they seem to take, and scientific interest into the whys and wherefores, preferring to blame it on the Stars In Their Courses Being Unaligned, and so forth.
(...the Vodka Cooler explains a lot, doesn't it?)