I recently re-read John McLachlan’s post on the quest for authentic arts marketing, and the comments it drew from other readers, and got me thinking. As I began to write my own comment, it got longer and longer and I realized I was actually writing a post for my own blog (D*mn you, John! making me blog on my own blog!!) John ended his post with these questions: Care to join me on the quest? What does arts marketing mean to you? and here’s my response:
Ah, the old conceptual/interpretive problem rears its head again. Words like marketing become associated with the most negative imagining of one’s experience, and then – bad logic being support for avoidance – to do the thing the word represents must inevitably force the purest of artistic intent to descend into evil. To state the worst case, of course.
Must the process of finding buyers for your work be a process of shoving beauty through a pipe to spit out at a market (John asks)? I think this is a mild image compared to what is evoked by the language of marketing used by advertising firms. It has been so aggressive (targets and launches and campaigns and so forth) that many of us associate the process of marketing with having to be that aggressive. That ‘mass’ stuff, the kind of marketing campaign that is like an air strike on consumers, creating a demand by force. And therein lies much of the problem.
Does the marketing process resemble the conquering thrust of a military campaign, or can it be a hero’s quest? To succeed financially, must one ‘crush’ the competition for an unsuspecting and vulnerable market, or can one carry the ring of power and remain whole? How can an artist market their work without compromising their integrity, or worse, the integrity of their art? These issues really do keep artists (and many other people whose work is intimately connected to their personal self-identity) stuck and reliant on others to do the ‘dirty work’ for them. And dirty work is what seems to get the filthy lucre.
Over the fifteen years or so I’ve worked with artists, I have repeatedly seen this IS the sticking point. Not ‘marketing’ itself, but what people associate with the word. I have seen this kind of distortion before. It’s similar to how some people hear ‘artist’ and assume ‘flaky’, ‘entitled’, or ‘elitist’ or when the conversation turns to ‘arts funding’ and becomes more about ‘meat dresses’ and the ‘Piss Pope’ than investment in creative people. If we hate this kind of lazy ignorance when it is turned on us, we have got to stop being so limited in our assumptions about the business side of our work.
In reality, I believe good marketing is an act of storytelling, of you being a troubadour for your work. Make your story available to those who really need to hear it so they can make a choice: for you or something you make or a service you provide to join them on their journey. This is a better container for thinking about what authentic marketing does for you.
To craft and tell your story effectively you must know who needs to hear it, and what language they speak. It’s easy to work hard at marketing and yet miss the mark. Stand on a box in Speaker’s Corner and say whatever you want to whomever passes by (playing the odds). That might gather a crowd (opting-in?) but are they merely entertained (unqualified?) or are they learning, changing, adopting (buying)? You may never know with marketing methods like this.
Yet the post-creation spray-and-pray method is frequently the default for people who have something special to offer and no clue about the marketing process. This method keeps you keep busy mailing and postering, and gets some attention you can’t follow-up, and certainly expends your resources, but if the money doesn’t come, can you tell if people just hate your work, or the right people just weren’t there? If you forget to put out a hat (your offer), you may not gather any coins at all. And you certainly can’t figure out with any certainty why you are not getting what you hoped for (research, plan, evaluate and adjust).
The best stories are told in response to a question, I think. Especially if the question is emerging in someone’s mind, is personal to them and they haven’t yet spoken it out loud to anyone. So marketing stories are usually best when you understand the question that someone (your ‘ideal client’?) is asking themselves and you know their context well enough to make your story available to them where and when and how they will best be able to hear it (market study). Have you ever felt someone had read your mind? That’s how your ideal market will feel, if you do this right.
This process is invitational and responsive, and can only be so authentically if you have a genuine desire to understand the context, concern and need driving that person’s ‘quest’ for solutions, help, ideas, resources, art, beauty, learning, whatever you have to offer. Paintings, performances, healing, classes, or driveway shovelling, you have to consider their need for these things, what is THEIR question, and speak to what you know about that.
The greater the number of people who share that need, who are pondering that question, the larger your potential ‘market’. And the better you understand how you can help with the solution, the greater the likelihood that your story will resonate with them. In addition, they’ll tell two friends and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on…
Creative thinkers are good at de- and re-constructing. It’s time to use these skills on our OWN thinking to de-construct these outmoded concepts and reclaim The Market as an Agora, an open space where creative offerings (products/services/?) are made available for appropriate buyers to explore, and the terms of exchange are clear so they CAN buy. This is what the internet offers those who wish to have a more direct connection to their audience, if it is used as a tool for authentic marketing. Although the contact may be brief, it can be direct, and form an important link in initiating a relationship.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with exchange, with doing business together, with building trust among sellers and buyers. If we let the stereotypes we hold about business activity being inevitably evil, and letting others do it for us while resenting their commissions, the arts and artists will remain in a state of dependent yet rebellious adolescence.
And creators will continue to be last in the chain of trickle-down funding, benefiting only indirectly from our original work. The closer you can be to the purchaser of your creative product, the easier it is to see that no matter how large the financial transaction, there will always be a gift in the exchange. Divested of the opportunity to market your work directly, you miss this part. When you impose agents to distance yourself from the buyer, your creations truly become commodities. It isn’t the market that does that, it’s you.
It’s a mindset shift, and faith in one’s self that overcomes this. Learning how to market your work in this way, defining marketing as “creating relationships based on trust” as Rebecca Coleman states in her comment to John’s post, is the key to authentic arts marketing. It can be done, and a living made.
What is the question out there for which your offering is a welcome and delightful solution and who is asking it? How does your story represent an answer, how is your journey a metaphor, how can your learning be a guide? That’s the starting point of your marketing plan.
Trafalgar? or Tolkien? You choose. Now get out there and share it!