Marketing On A Shoestring

Another week, another AIM event. This time the topic was Marketing… On A Shoestring. Given the fact that I walked in with my slip on Vans (black with golden skulls) that don’t even have shoestrings, the tone was set low. Street level, in fact.

The evening kicked off with Mark Mitchell of King Harvest, a marketing consultancy for indie labels, taking us on a general tour of the UK music market. Lots of stats. More than 80% of the market is controlled by majors. We indies are truly living on crumbs… a slightly depressing thought, that.

Mark’s main point seemed to be that there is no point in trying to compete with major labels who can outspend, outrun, and outgrease-a-palm you on all counts. An eyewatering fact: the first week spend on the TV advertising of AC/DC’s new album was £40k. The gentleman sitting to my right, a fellow indie label owner, muttered: that’s more than my annual turnover.

Then the marketing guru pulled out a bell curve chart that showed what kind of people get into music and buy records. Early Adopters at the very beginning of the curve, Pragmatists on the upward slope, Conservatives on the downward slope and Laggards at the very end of the curve. The bit at the top of the curve where pragmatists and conservatives meet is the bit that costs shitloads to reach. That’s your mainstream audience who will buy that big record by that big artist because they’ve seen the big billboards, seen the big TV ads and so on. These are the guys at my squash club. Regular guys with regular tastes: the bulk of the record buying public of 20-39 year olds.

And this is the crowd that indie labels should ignore.

Instead, they should concentrate on the early adopters. These are people who like spotting the new thing to like before everyone else likes it. They respond to a groove that doesn’t cost a lot to create. It’s about being cool and hip and trendy. What’s more, they don’t really respond to marketing messages and advertising anyway, so a poor little indie is onto a winner: they should approach the segment of the public who aren’t going to respond to stuff that costs a lot to create!

The nuts and bolts of how to reach the early adopters were discussed. The usual line up of suspects were introduced. MySpace, Facebook and all the other social networking sites play a big role. Radio does. Print media does. Blogs do. Live performances play a huge part. There is a process. Got to get the specialist guys in on the act first, then move it on. Get the blogs before the front cover of Time. Of course, this is bloody obvious to anyone with a brain, but it helps to be reminded of this stuff, even if you have a decent brain untroubled by excessive substance abuse.

The message was that getting the message out, letting people discover the music is a process that is not to be forced. Just let it out. Let people discover the artist. If it’s good, it will stick. If it’s not sticking, it’s not getting people excited.

It’s like if you’re in a band playing gigs in your home town and with every gig you get less and less people. Something inside you should say “uhh… people aren’t liking what we do… let’s get better.” Instead, the inner voice of many seems to say “dude, we have to get a manager who has contacts to get us on an arena tour supporting a big band.”

The almost comforting piece of information from an indie label point of view was that one’s quest to introduce one’s artistes to audiences is not necessarily a process where having loads of money makes a huge difference - if you remember to concentrate on stuff that’s within you control, within your reach. If it ain’t sticking, it’s pointless spending money because no amount will convince these early adopters that they should like a band.

Ben Watt, who used to be the guy in Everything But The Girl, gave a talk on how he runs his abel Buzzin Fly. The coolest thing he said was that marketing is something you do when you know roughly how much you’re going to sell and to whom, and you’re able to prepare a budget based on that sales projection, and then work out a plan accordingly. He went on to say that most of the artists on the start up indies present at the event aren’t yet in a position to do that. Why? Because they haven’t built their audience yet, so they don’t know who to sell their records to. Guys in that position are just taking a punt on something to see if they can find an audience for their stuff. Good point that.

Summa summarum: believing in something is vastly overrated when you compare it to the power of working towards something. Put that in your book!

This entry was posted on 05/11/2008 at 04:53 pm and is filed under News At Zen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.