Entries tagged “marketing”

Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean that’s a bizarre business model in any arena. But particularly in the cultural arena, the idea that the system through which culture is transmitted is dictated entirely by profit should concern us, because that’s going to narrow the types of culture that are transmitted. And then, on top of that, the alternative venues of distribution are stuck in the shadows of these major labels.

That's Dr. Bethany Klein, in an outstanding interview about her research into the commercial licensing of pop music, and its impacts on artists and the music industry as a whole.

The interview is in support of her upcoming book As Heard on TV and you can read her dissertation on the topic as well.

If you're so inclined, a few years ago I'd ranted about Bob Dylan's appearance in a Victoria's Secret ad, which certainly marks a nadir in the realm of musicians licensing popular music for commercials. Not because he was "selling out" (I don't believe in that idea), but because he is so damn unsexy.

I like to drink tea, either from my neighborhood tea shop or from what I brew at home, a nice cup of Darjeeling. "Darjeeling Tea" means more than you might think.

According to the Tea Board Of India - "Darjeeling Tea" means: tea which has been cultivated, grown, produced, manufactured and processed in tea gardens (current schedule whereof is attached hereto) in the hilly areas of Sadar Sub-Division, only hilly areas of Kalimpong Sub-Division comprising of Samabeong Tea Estate, Ambiok Tea Estate, Mission Hill Tea Estate and Kumai Tea Estate and Kurseong Sub-Division excluding the areas in jurisdiction list 20,21,23,24,29,31 and 33 comprising Siliguri Sub-Division of New Chumta Tea Estate, Simulbari and Marionbari Tea Estate of Kurseong Police Station in Kurseong Sub-Division of the District of Darjeeling in the State of West Bengal, India. Tea which has been processed and manufactured in a factory located in the aforesaid area, which, when brewed, has a distinctive, naturally occurring aroma and taste with light tea liquour and the infused leaf of which has a distinctive fragrance.

All that is according to the friendly dictates of the Tea Board of India, which is hell-bent on making this insanely detailed litany of geographical peculiarities acquire the same cachet as, well, champagne. As the Tea Board is fond of saying, "Darjeeling Tea cannot be grown or manufactured anywhere else in the world. Just as Champagne is indigenous to the Champagne district of France, so is Darjeeling Tea to Darjeeling."

Hmm. Perhaps.

This is one of those "how to market a product effectively" examples that's been kicking around in my brain for a while, I thought I'd share it. About half a decade ago, Microsoft implemented a technology called Volume Shadow Copy, which maintains old versions of your files (or the difference between the current version of a file and its past revisions) so that you can restore past states for a file if it gets corrupted or deleted.

It's a smart, automatic way of doing backup, and takes smart advantage of the fact that disk storage space is so cheap. The user interface for enabling Volume Shadow Copy on a Windows 2003 machine looks something like this:

In the upcoming Leopard version of OS X, Apple has introduced a similar feature. In Apple's case, it's called "Time Machine" instead of "Volume Shadow Copy". And while I strongly recommend that you check out the Apple's own marketing for the feature, you can probably tell the whole story from the screenshot of Apple's implementation of the same feature:

Now, the whole starry-background thing is way over the top, to the point that it's off-putting. But Apple will get credit for innovation for a feature that Microsoft shipped almost half a decade ago. And they'll deserve it.

I've been amused for weeks by 37signals marketing for their upcoming micro-CRM app Highrise because of the example contacts they've been using.

Every single screenshot has a list of contacts including the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon founder (and 37signals investor) Jeff Bezos, and Newsweek scribe Steven Levy. The big product shot is a full-screen profile of Walt Mossberg that has DHH reverently quoting Wired calling Walt a "kingmaker". I'm sure it's gonna be a good product, and I've always been alternately pleased and bemused by the swaggering chutzpah of the Chicago boy band. But the real lesson I'm reminded of here is that you can do a lot worse than name-dropping those whom you want to impress.

This could be considered tending to the blank slate of press coverage.

From the New York Times story about Stallone's new Rocky Balboa, Peter Sealey, who is a former film exec-turned-marketing prof a UC Berkeley, offers:

It’s a high-technology, Google-blogging, iMac-type of premise going on there mixed with the classic underdog versus the establishment.

This is why I, clearly, could never be a movie exec.