Ones and Zeroes

With the big news about Apple's new iPad, I figured now was as good time to examine the collosal marketing effort thata is surrounding this hot new device.  As far as the product itself goes, the iPad definitely hits some notes which point in a good direction, but it also presents some aspects rather poorly, making it a very risky product.  What it does give us is a relatively inexpensive open platform to connect to the internet wirelessly and integrate all of the major functions of a computer into a lightweight, easy to transport device.  It combines the keyboardless navigation of the internet and text documents that is a hallmark of the iPhone, with the large, high definition screen of a laptop computer.  Apple is pushing the marketing on this product pretty hard, but I think they've made some pitfalls on the way. 

 

On the positive side, Apple has employed the effective tactic of thinly veiled false secrecy.  By denying any information about the device while allowing a steady stream of rumors and "leaked" information out into the internet, Apple built a powerful viral marketing campaign that had the entire tech industry in a froth priror to the official unveiling.  This has become a mainstay of most electronic and media companies who have embraced the reality of internet information leaks as an asset to their marketing model.  Given incidents of this occurrance in publishing (most notably the final Harry Potter novel which was leaked in its entirety before its release date, yet still had record breaking sales) it may be important for publishers to follow this model in the future in order to make the viral nature of online information work for the publisher instead of against. 

 

Apple has also showed a few bad cards when dealing with the media frenzy surrounding the press release of the device.  Most notably their mistargetting of the devices audience.  Rather than push it as a consumer electronic with a low price point, they attempted to make this into a new business device, capable of creating spreadsheets and editing text like a regular laptop.  The problem is that its functionality in this market is limited, and they may see quite a bit of resistance from businesses that can get cheaper laptops for their employees rather than buying this less useful gadget.  Apple's failure to make a convincing case for general consumers may be the nail that seals the iPad's coffin.  This is highly reminicent of the "if you build it they will come" conundrum we saw when looking at publisher's websites.  Having a device that is new and interesting doesn't necessarily guarantee an audience unless it provides functionality to back up the hype. 

 

So from the news we can take several different lessons about marketing a new big, high risk product.  Viral marketing may be the wave of the future for all entertainment outlets, including publishers.  But even new and exciting ideas don't make up for a lack of the fundamentals.

 

Holistic Marketing

Greetings!  Today we are talking about brand marketing vs. product marketing.  What are they?  Why are they important?  Is one more important than the other?  The answers may surprise you (but probably won't.)

When most people think about marketing their first thought is probably more in line with product marketing.  Comercials, newspaper and online ads, billboards.  All of these things are used for product marketing.  Technically defined, product marketing is any kind of marketing that increases public awareness about a particular product.  Brand marketing, by contrast is any kind of marketing that increases public awareness about a company or line of products.  Brand marketing includes putting logos on ads, passing out swag with logos on it, and generally positioning products in order to make your company well known in a certain area.

In the publishing field, product marketing would involve giving press or attention to a specific book.  Producing printed or media ads, putting out press releases, organizing release parties, and getting the book placed in a favorable place on the shelf are all product marketing strategies.  This type of marketing is highly important because it makes the public aware that the work is available and draws new readers to the product.  Ideally, a publishing house will combine this with brand marketing in order to create repeat buyers.

Brand marketing in publishing follows two separate courses.  Marketing the publisher to vendors and distributors and marketing the author (and to a lesser extent the publishing house) to the book buying public.  In order to get major book buyers to take you seriously, the publisher must have reputable status.  Buyers aren't going to purchase from a publisher that has a series of failed books.  Therefore a publisher must ensure that the name of their house is circulated around the trade favorably.  Doing this includes face to face meetings, careful correspondence, and simply keeping up a good name.  By choosing proper marketing tactics, the house can make sure that the first impression a major distributor gets from their publishing house is a good one.

The second phase of brand marketing is marketing the common factor that connects several products to the consumer.  In publishing this is usually the author, but can be a common setting or theme that connects multiple titles.  By marketing these commonalities, you can create repeat buyers who will continue to buy books that share that common thread. 

While brand marketing may sound like a more important undertaking than product marketing, it must be remembered that brand marketing cannot succeed without successful product marketing.  Product marketing lets people know that the book is out there and that it is interesting, brand marketing gives people a criteria by which to decide upon future purposes, thus making the future product marketing more effective.  They are twin sides of the same coin, and it would behoove any company to pay equal attention to them in order to achieve success. 

But wait, there's more!

Today we're talking about giving it all away.  That's right, You get a bestseller!  You get a bestseller! Everyone gets a bestseller!  I get a lawsuit for blatantly stealing Oprah's schtick.  What am I talking about?  I'm talking about the Kindle's ebook bestseller list.  Presently, more than half of bestsellers on Amazon's Kindle list cost exactly $0.  While some of these are public domain content, several of the titles are actually authored by writers who are trying to earn a living through their craft.  The New York Times posted an article recently describing the marketing reasoning behind the free books, which you can read here.  

What I'd like to talk about isn't why they would be giving these books away, as I think the writer of that article did a fine job covering those points.  What I'd like to talk about is how the internet, and eBooks changes the way we sample new media.  In earlier days if you wanted to try a new author's work, it was necessary to either purchase one of their books (as reading in a store was and is still frowned upon) or borrow a copy, assuming one was available, from the local library.  This system worked, but certainly kept new readers from branching out too much with new authors or trying newer publications.  I generally don't want to spend my money and my time on a book from an author I've never heard of, and usually the library's selection is limited and the books are not always in the best condition.  Often I find myself unwilling to check out a book if it looks well worn, attracted instead to the shinier new titles.  As such, despite being an avid reader, I find that I spend very little time checking out up and coming authors or newly started series.  Instead I spend my money and my time on established writers who I know will provide me with a certain level of quality.

Enter the Kindle.  Presently, my iPhone kindle app is filled with a number of books that I would probably never think to purchase in a normal bookstore.  I've downloaded these books simply because they were free, instantly available, and in a genre I enjoy.  This is only possible because the internet allows instantaneous transmission of a document that takes up no physical space and takes a fraction of the cost of a normal book to make.  I can thumb through the entirety of the text, and discard it if I don't like it, or save it if I think it's worth reading.  The advent of this technology has actually made it possible to sample an entire product instead of just a small teaser of it.

This isn't restricted to just books either.  Websites like youtube and hulu have made available whole movies and episodes of television series at no charge beyond your monthly internet connection fee, and if you happen to be in a wifi hotspot, you don't even pay that.  Like  Ms. Rich said in the Times article, the thinking of these campaigns is to drive sales of other content by allowing the consumer to get a free trial, but while the free trial is nothing new, providing complete content as a "trial" is something entirely unheard of. 

An exciting idea would be if the next step of this process would involve allowing users to download any book they want for only the cost of a single subscription fee.

Publishing Sites

The internet has become ubiquitous in the was people do business in the modern world. It is difficult to think of any successful modern American business that does not possess some sort of online presence. So it comes as no surprise that most publishing houses, big and small, have their own websites. The question I've been posed today is about how these sites target their audiences. Orders placed on a publisher's website make up a tiny fraction of sales made on any book. Publishers work mostly as a wholesale business, catering primarily to retail sellers. Yet for some reason publisher websites are still primarily targeted at end users. This fact has thrown me for a loop for the past few days. If publisher's can't expect to sell books to consumers through their websites, why do they target the website at consumers? Why not tool the website towards the needs of the booksellers that comprise most of their business? After giving it a lot of thought I've come up with three possible reasons that satisfy my own logic.

The first is the least exciting, that publisher's simply aren't connecting with how to best use their sites. The internet is generally seen as a tool by which one can address the masses. It is any given person's way to connect to millions of other people. This thought may be clouding some publisher's judgment into thinking that a website is primarily for reaching out to the general public rather than considering the possibility that the website might be a good tool to reach more small, local shops which may want to stock the publisher's books. While this might apply to a few publishers who are struggling to modernize, I hardly think that this trend would apply to every publisher's site out there, so it remains only a partial explanation.

The second reason I came up with is that publisher's expect growth in this area. They may perhaps believe that by making the material available, they can later drive traffic to the site through other marketing stratagems in order to reap the benefits of direct to buyer sales. Direct sales certainly hold a higher margin for profit, and as such a hopeful publisher may not want to close that door.

The third, and what I believe to be the most likely reason is that publishers want to show their booksellers, which they have already approached through traditional means, what kind of consumers the publisher itself is targeting with its material. By providing this information, publishers may hope that the booksellers will be able to get a good idea of what the publisher and the publisher's material is all about and how to best position their merchandise. This especially makes sense with online sales venues like Amazon, which can use the publisher's website as reference for how to best place the merchandise and what products might also sell well with it.

This final reason seems to me to be the most logical explanation for why a publisher would want to market towards end consumers, as doing so will help to connect with the book sellers and drive the final sales of the product.

Three Wolf Moon

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about irony.  Above is posted a picture that I think a few of you might be familiar with.  The three wolf moon t-shirt is every business’ dream:  A product that required no ad dollars whatsoever to change it from a cheap product that barely turned any profit into a massively successful product overnight.  This shirt currently stands as one of the top selling apparel items on Amazon.  It has spawned a major internet sensation that includes videos on collegehumor.com and Youtube, as well as a myriad of parody images.  All of this was not caused with a strong or catchy marketing slogan.  It doesn’t owe its success to a room full of savvy marketing experts who hit upon a golden formula.  The Three Wolf Moon shirt owes all its success to an ironic comment left on the Amazon.com review board.  User “Bee-Dot” wrote the now famous review, concluding:

”Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.”

The highly amusing review has led to an avalanche of further reviews from people looking to get in on the joke.  Currently the shirt has over 17,000 reviews, most of which reference the themes in Bee-Dot’s review. 

While Three Wolf Moon is certainly the most recent and successful instance of ironic internet meme turned marketing gold, it is hardly the only such instance of this happening.  In February of 2008 Australian eBay entrepreneurs George Patterson and Y&R Melbourne purchased a BMX bike off of eBay for 27.50 Australian Dollars.  They received the bike, and without making any changes to the product, reposted the item with the following description: 

“This is a max wicked sick BMX. It's a Reliance Boomerang and it's done heaps of maximum extreme stunts. I have mostly done stunts on this bike since forever. Once I did a boom gnarly stunt trick on it and a girl got pregnant just by watching my extremeness to the maxxxx. Some details about sickmax BMX: Comes with everything you see including: TOPS AS SUSPENSION REAR FORKS!! 2 x wheels 1 x seat I will even thrown my sick BMXing name for FREE - Wicked Styx. Has minor surface rust on handlebars and front forks (easily removed). More rust on rear forks (as shown in pics). Tyres hold air but are pretty old. Basically, it's an old BMX, but it's radness is still 100% in tact. Tricks I have done on this BMX: Endos - 234. Sick Wheelies - 687. Skids - 143,000. Bunny Hops - 2 (my brother dared me to do them, which I did because I'm Rad to the power of Sick). Flipouts - 28. Basically if you buy this bike you will instantly become a member to every club that was ever invented, worldwide, because you will be awesome. Pick up from Richmond in Melbourne. Throw your hands in the air like you just don't mind.”

Right away the pair received bids for higher amounts.  But the story gets more complicated.  The description was noticed by several blogs and internet forums and was lauded for its creativity.  By the time the final bids came in, the seller had released a statement letting buyers know that the whole thing was designed as a marketing experiment, yet the simple irony of the whole situation continued to drive the price up, until the bike sold for a staggering $134.50!  A 500% increase with absolutely no change in the product!  These examples and a whole lot more just go to show that the power of irony cannot be underestimated when marketing in the new age.  Knowledge of internet culture can prove to be a great benefit to anyone looking to sell products online.

What floats and what sinks

The question of the day is what makes a publisher’s website stand out in its methods of marketing to a target audience.  There are a lot of publisher’s websites out there; the modern age practically demands that a publisher have an online presence in order to survive.  To bring more focus to the topic I am only taking a look at publisher’s for whom I myself fall into the target audience.  I mainly looked at adult science fiction and fantasy, as these are the genre’s I most often read.  

For starters, I was surprised by the different strategies employed by the large publishing corporations and the small to medium sized presses.  All of the sites I visited utilized the format of placing a news column or blog on the front page with links to content surrounding the most recent news. Large publishing houses like TOR filled their pages with splashy graphics and constantly changing ads that plug their best sellers, while the majority of their books require you dig deeper to see.  By contrast www.orionbooks.co.uk, a smaller British publisher allows you to browse their entire catalog of titles by simply clicking one menu.  I was generally impressed with Orion’s site; it is simple, clean, and easy to navigate.  For each of the titles in their library, the cover art, professional reviews, author information, and even e-book download options are readily available and easily accessed.  Another impressive point was their company logo, which is small, tastefully designed and artistically interweaved with their pages.  The logo actually seems to fit into the page rather than seeming slapped on.  Choice of fonts and color schemes serve to bring the whole thing together in a rather aesthetically pleasing manner. 

I was very surprised when I saw the site for Bantam Spectra, one of the largest publishers in the science fiction genre.  While the site initially looks clean and well designed, there are some flaws in their system.  The site has a clean white theme, with genre listings easily enough accessed.  My problem with the site is that if you want to browse through their publications for any given genre, you must know either what you are looking for or select a month or year in which you wish to browse.  You cannot simply browse by genre.  When you do find their browse function, which is not very obviously placed, you must browse through all of the books published by Random House in a certain period (Up to two years back) and even then only bestsellers appear.  This means that they really don’t intend for you to shop around for direct buy.  I can only assume that they keep the site up as a method of delivering news to fans and expect sales to be generated through bookstores or Amazon, which is linked off the site.  While Random House is obviously big enough and powerful enough to do things this way without losing out, it still shows poor design that isn’t likely to sell a lot of back orders or new authors.

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