 |
| Sell Thee Well |
I am old enough to remember a time when music was (a) not something
you could download, or (b) not something you could access at any point in the
program. In addition to this dating moment, this: as a kid, I had the first
Sony Walkman cassette player, with headphones, and used it relentlessly while
delivering newspapers. Everything about that sentence probably made everyone
under the age of 50 do a double-take. But from this old-time start, modern
marketing takeaways await.
Any number of people in my feed and life have been talking
about the Grateful Dead’s final show at the end of a 50-year career. There are
obvious lessons for modern marketers, about community, authenticity, craft, and
so on. However, what is important is that the content went deep, with merit
beyond the immediate hook. Ask any Deadhead what their favorite song is, and
few will be able to keep their list below five, and will usually qualify it
further by detailing the time, place and line up. While the Dead are a bit of
an extreme example of this, you can get similar experiences from any band of
the era.
For deep content bands like this, songs exist, and even to a
limited degree, singles, but the more valuable unit of time is the album side. I
am not a huge Dead fan – that is my older brother and sister’s domain – but the
front side of “American Beauty” is a more or less perfect mix and experience,
and I can not, to this day, feel satisfied with just the opening cut (“Box of
Rain”). Ask a Pink Floyd fan about the first side of “Dark Side of the Moon”,
or Dire Straits’ “Making Movies” (first album I ever bought), and you will get
looks of reverie.
Compare this to the modern music experience, where you will rarely
hear an entire song outside of your dedicated purchase, because no one wants to
hear anything more than the hook, or at most, the chorus. Songs or sections
that might reveal themselves to the listener on multiple listens (“deep cuts”,
in the lingo) do not really exist, and it is not just a matter of short
attention spans. The commerce dictates that most new music will break in soundtrack
moments, in hook increments only, with only a very small percentage of the
audience ever getting a chance to engage in deep content. Trust me on this: the
modern bands would *kill* to have the Dead’s financial wherewithal.
Now, compare this to general e-commerce plays. In travel,
the equivalent of a hit single might be a low price on a route that is useful
to the traveler… but unless they get to a club membership, or start to engage
with upgrades on a routine basis, they will just slide to the artist that has
the next hit. Same with e-commerce with retargeting plays based entirely on
price, or the “winner” in a search engine push, or buyers from a coupon site.
Getting to the deep content is not just good marketing, an opportunity
to sell on customer service, or a chance to justify a CRM program. Rather, it
is the key to transitioning away from shallow sales and limited lifetime value,
and into sustainable profit margins, true word of mouth secondary sales, and
growth that goes beyond the business quarter.
There is, of course, no shortcut to this stage. Just as it
took the Dead decades to get to a self-sustaining community that meant filling
live venues was rarely a problem, it will take a similar commitment on the part
of your brand.
It is also not optional, assuming you are in business for
the long term.
Fare thee well…
* * * * *
If you found this helpful, please like or share this
column, connect
with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right of this page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy,
along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are
always free. Hope to hear from you soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment