How would you market a rock band? (Economics and Management, Oxford)

The days when a band could just hone their music, play a few gigs and wait for word to spread are largely gone. Nowadays, if a band is not to simply fade away, ignored and forgotten, behind the bedroom door, it pretty much has to become a marketing organisation, too. Indeed, for some bands, marketing actually comes before the music – quite literally. A band I know launched a successful marketing campaign and raised enough money from fans through crowdfunding to pay for studio time – all before they’d ever played a note together!

There’s no doubt we live in a world where marketing is king. When the Industrial Revolution rolled into the world two centuries ago, business was about products. ‘Build it right,’ industrialists sagely advised, ‘and they will come.’ But by the 1930s, there was so much product that businesses had to go out and sell! sell! sell! to beat the competition. Today, with choice and information making consumers more discriminating, the stress is more and more on marketing.

Indeed, many businesses nowadays are actually little more than exercises in marketing, geared wholly to identifying what customers want and when they want it, and trying to meet those needs. And it’s not just the marketing staff engaged in marketing, but everyone from creatives to production staff. Even writers like myself are pulled into the marketing frenzy. What most publishers want from us, essentially, are not great books but great hooks. And that’s so for rock bands, too.

So my very first task when marketing a rock band would be to identify the band’s ‘hook’, their USP (unique selling point) – that distinctive and special quality that’s going to tell the fans this is who they want to listen to, hang out with and buy the music of. Until I’ve got that hook shaped up, I can’t begin to market them properly.

I’m going to talk about marketing a new totally unknown and unsigned band, using only my own and the band’s meagre resources for a marketing campaign, not a mega budget from a big record label.

The band I want to market is an all-girl metal band that call themselves the Cleaners, because they got together when bassist Su and vocalist Imo met working at night, cleaning offices, to bring in the cash – something they still do. Their music is sombre but there’s a real sly sense of humour. So, assuming they agree, I’m going to get them to change their name to the Night Shift Zombies, and describe them as the (rock) spirits who come out at night to clean up the crap of the human day.

I don’t want to play up the zombie side too much, since that’s been done to death, as it were, but the idea is to make cleaners, and other low-paid young night workers (of which there are millions), just a little bit cool. I’m going to help the band appeal to those who feel marginalised, exploited, futureless, driven to the dark places – and of course night shift workers. It’s a niche market, but a very big one, and tightly focused. The Night Shift Zombies’ music is already coming from this place, so all I’m doing is targeting their market rather than turning them into something they’re not.

Brand-building will be key, assuming the music is good (though that’s not vital). So before I start on the outreach side of marketing, I need to ‘develop the product’. I’ll need, for instance, to get the band develop their look and dress sense – subtly, not overly theatrical to keep a sense of authenticity – with just hints of the zombie cleaners. I’m going to get a stylist friend of mine to select items from their wardrobe to give them a glam but slightly nightmarish cleaner look – and I’ll get some very moody, cool-looking shots of them in an office late at night surrounded by cleaning products and a pile of sad rubbish left by all-too-dull daytime office workers. I’ll need them, too, to showcase and develop the songs which connect most with the target audience. Rock bands’ appeal is tribal, so I want a tribe of alienated night shift workers to identify with them, and make them aspirational. Humour and a tongue-in-cheek approach will be important. ‘Yes, we know night cleaning is a rubbish job and not a mission, but we’re all really cool people …’

What I hope I’ve done here is identify what some marketers now call a solution – that is, I’ve spotted a need in the market and tailored a product to suit it. The three other elements I’ll then need to develop, according to some market theorists, are information (telling people about it), value (the value it has for users), and access (letting people access the band’s music where and when they want to), creating the acronym SIVA – solution, information, value, access.¹

For a rock band, making money is a long-term goal. So value is less of an issue. The aim has to be to first create a following for the band, then monetise it later. So it’s information and access that are the priority elements in marketing after the solution. A great deal of this is going to come via the internet, of course, as I’ll come back to. But it’s a mistake to forget about traditional methods altogether. Tangible products like T-shirts, badges, stickers and so on, do have an impact, because they linger in a way that briefly read internet mentions don’t. A cool girl or guy walking around wearing a striking T-shirt with the band’s name and logo on can bring the band’s name to attention quite effectively, for instance.

But of course the internet is where I’ll need to put the bulk of my marketing efforts, because of its huge power to reach the target market. Setting up an attractive website for the band, plus a Facebook page and a Twitter account are crucial first steps. Then I want to step up access to the band’s music by sharing certain tracks on sites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. The more people that listen to the Night Shift Zombies, the better. Sites like NoiseTrade could work really well. You give users of the site free access to tracks, but in return you get their email addresses – and emails addresses are gold dust for marketing, enabling personalised marketing that even social media can’t manage. In the early stages of a band’s career, it’s going to be emails that matter more than social media. I’ll need to recruit a dozen or so keen supporters to act as starting points to continually generate internet traffic among their friends and their friends’ friends to get the ball rolling. The social media and email traffic about the band needs to be continuous and escalating. That’s why I’ll lean on the band members and their supporters to put effort into blogging and tweeting.

What’s also important is to identify and target the media and internet outlets that are likely to have a specific interest in the NSZ, rather than wasting time with blanket marketing. I will approach the bloggers, interest sites, radio stations and so on that take a particular interest in their brand of music – and try to establish as a good a personal relationship with each one of them as possible, so that they listen to the band, play their music, follow what’s happening and so on. Marketing today is about personalised relationships with the customer – or interested parties.

Live gigs are going to be important, because these are crucial in establishing the dedicated fan base that moves things forward – and also provide news items to keep people interested. So I will try to get the band gigging in as many venues where regulars are likely to appreciate their music as possible.

And of course YouTube videos are probably the single most valuable marketing tool. They needn’t be expensive, but they’ve got to be really distinctive to make an impact among the many thousands of band videos uploaded each day. I want to make the video an event. I’m going to find a suitable office space we can use out of hours – it can be abandoned rather than in use – and shoot the band playing a gig here in front of as big an audience as we can get of suitably attired night shift workers. The song we select will be one with a bit of humour, and we’ll edit it to make the most of the humour, since this seems to be key in getting videos to go viral. We’ll contact all the cleaning firms and other businesses doing similar night shift work, and also put an ad in the ‘cleaners wanted’ section of outlets like Gumtree, inviting them all to come along and participate in the making of the video. We’ll also send out a press release to all the media outlets, telling them about this event.

After that, we’ll be on a roll. O2 Arena here we come. With luck, in half a century, people will look back on the 2010s as the era of the Night Shift Zombies just as they do on the 1960s for the Rolling Stones …

Footnote

1 Marketing theorists have been rather hung up on such abbreviations ever since 1960, when E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the four Ps – product, price, place and promotion. In 1990, Robert Lauterborn updated the four Ps with the four Cs – consumer, cost, communication, convenience. Lauterborn argued that customers didn’t only consider price of a product, but the total cost, such as the cost of accessing it, the cost to their image of buying an uncool product, and the cost to their conscience of buying something harmful to the planet. They also resented being manipulated by pushy promotion and marketing worked best if it communicated with the customer, establishing a dialogue. Now many marketers talk about SIVA, which emphasises a softer, more interactive kind of marketing more appropriate to today’s internet-savvy, more sceptical consumers.