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Thread: Marketing of Modern Jive

  1. #21
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    Re: Marketing of Modern Jive

    Going back to basics. Marketing is broadly defined as anything you do to communicate your product to actual or potential consumers. A more cynical definition is that marketing is about manipulating the information available to the market to increase the revenue generated from the product. Like all good definitions, there are a bunch of useful and/or interesting points that stem from it.

    Firstly, the experience of people coming to a class is the most critical part of your marketing. All the people who've talked about word of mouth advertising have implicitly reinforced this point. If people have a good experience, they are more likely both to return themselves and more likely to tell others about their experience. This then raises the rather thorny issue of what constitutes a good experience.

    That segues nicely in to the second point: market segmentation. There are six billion people in the world, about 60 million of them in the UK. Not all of them are going to be interested in dancing. The trick is to work out which sort of people are likely to come along to a dance class.

    An important set of market segments that's often ignored are people who have done modern jive. Within that set, we have people who come a few times, then stop; people who've been regular dancers and then give up; people who come infrequently; people who come along regularly to one venue and people who dancer whenever and whereever they can. Retaining people who come along to a class and increasing the involvement from people who are retained are probably the easiest and cheapest ways of increasing revenue.

    The next big point is the message. If you've split your market into the various segments, the next step is to decide what message you need to communicate to each segment. The key point here is the message is likely to be different for each segment. Trying to tell a whole lot of different people the same thing is likely to be rather ineffective (they're very unlikely to hear the same thing anyway). So, what messages are effective to each part of the market you're trying to communicate with.

    Word of mouth is wonderful - but you have little control over the message. You get good feedback from people who come along, enjoy themselves and bring friends. What about the people who come along, don't enjoy themselves and talk others it?

    Fourthly, there's the communication channels. This is working out the appropriate way of communicating with each part of the market. There are a bunch of channels, ranging from the class itself, word of mouth, busking, and various forms of advertising.

    One great thing about word of mouth is people tend to know and talk to people more alike to themselves than different. So if they enjoy dancing, the people they talk to are more likely to enjoy dancing than the general population. That makes it a hugely efficient channel.

    Finally, marketing that doesn't generate action - people coming along to a class - is wasted. More specifically, marketing that doesn't generate revenue is wasted. Of course, that's complicated by the fact that the link between the the marketing and the revenue is messy and very hard to pin down. Part of marketing is to establish the brand image; that is almost impossible to link directly to revenue, but a good brand is hugely valuable.

    This is all fairly broad advice - good, but light on specifics. So, one example might be useful. I'm going to pick on busking.

    Firstly, busking is going to be most effective if you busk in a place frequented by the sort of people you want to target. Understanding the demographics of your busking location are important.

    Secondly, busking will be most effective if the people seeing it see people like themselves (monkey see, monkey do). So try and convince the right sort of people to come along and take part in the busk. The other great attention grabber is to have attractive people busking.

    Thirdly, busking is only a small part of the message. You need to reinforce it with other elements - brochures, talking, and the like. Once again, designing the other communication to be consistent with the expected audience is a smart idea.

    Fourthly, one needs to use the busk to inspire action from the audience. So whatever the busk is, it would be great to associate it with specific action. What action do you want from the people. Immediacy helps: what if you use a busk to get people to come along to a class right away? Or at the same location the following week?

    Repetition is very good - people might wonder past once, then look more closely if they see you again. Then actually pay attention the third time. Or fourth time. This suggests multiple busks in the same location in a short period of time. The point is to consider the marketing approach as a process. It's rare people go from the first encounter with the product to action. So, how is that process managed?

    This has turned into a long post - as is my habit. One hopes that I've not been too abstract and has included some practical ideas. And not too many typos.

  2. #22
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    Re: Marketing of Modern Jive

    A long reply to a long post vanished into cyberspace
    I will try again later.

    Meanwhile a tip from a pro Busker - get paid to busk. Sell your services to liven up events like fetes and festivals. Most councils have budgets for street entertainment. A dance display does attract customers.

    ---

    My own idea would be to try and link a busk to a dance dress display and seek cooperation with big stores. I would treat it as a priority to recruit people who have a lot of contact with the public as dancers. I want to have shop assistants say "You would look good dancing in that."

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