A marketing tactic studied

[bellatrys]

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

Comments

[deiseach]

Oh, those are gorgeous soaps.

(Okay, stop being distracted by the pretty, pretty soap and make an intelligent comment)

"they didn't seem to know whether they were trying to create a market or break into one"

Yes, I can see how that would be a problem, right enough. I would have imagined that you first try to break into the market, get yourself known, and then work on the creating a new market, once you have a basis to start from - but what do I know?

It really is sounding as if they said "Hey, look, all these teen girls with disposable income! If we slap something pink'n'fluffy together, it'll be like picking up gold from the streets of London!" They wanted to attract the non-comics readers (whom they thought were exclusively young females), so they went for what is not traditionally comics/genre material - only they also threw a bit of that in as well.

Then, having fallen between two stools, and succeeded only in having turned off the comics-buying females and failed to attract the non-comics buying ones, they blamed the target audience for not buying the bad product.

Correct so far?

I imagine there must be teen girl magazines in America along the likes of "Jackie" and "Just Seventeen" and "Cosmo Girl" - is that what they researched as being the kind of thing girls buy? Or did they even do that much work?

I think that is very close to what must have been,

[bellatrys]

but it gets even weirder when you look at the specifics.

For instance: Regifters - what the hell kind of a title is that? What story does it suggest? To me it says something dreary about Ordinary Girls (probably white upper-middle-class suburbanites) trying to avoid getting in trouble (and failing) by giving away unwanted presents from relatives or friedns without getting caught, probably with some uncomfortable embarrassing sequences that are supposed to be 'humorous."

It doesn't say "Korean-American heroine trying to become successful martial arts champion in California," which isn't necessarily something I would go out of my way to read, but is more interesting than the Angst of the Unsuccessful Yankee Swap, and would likely appeal to quite a few teenage female readers, based on how popular Tae Kwan Do etc are here for kids of all ages, boys and girls.

But it turned out, according to an actual Korean-American reviewer, that they didn't bother to do basic research and thus got the personal names and the places and the Korean equivalent of kanji wrong - and the creator confirmed but blithely dismissed the reviewer's disappointment by saying that they didn't have a research budget so they just faked it, and anyway everybody got ethnic settings wrong, so so what?

So another check in the "halfassed effort" column. But some readers said that some of the titles in the line were well done and interesting, and again there were more genre cooties overall than they let on - were they trying to trick non-genre fans into reading genre, by stealth means, or what? Bait-and-switch is a dangerous game to play with audiences!

But I have some complex thoughts re breaking into vs making a market, based on my experiences in retail, resale and manufacturing both, that I need to bang away at a little more to get past the point-and-flail "FAIL!!!" stage...