WTF does "positioning" mean for artists?

Positioning is a marketing concept meaning to define in the customer's mind.  Marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote the book on it in 1980, after originating the concept in their Madison Avenue marketing work (they were Mad Men, apparently).

Not what comes to mind

If you think of a particular person, product, or service, you probably have an almost subconscious feeling about what that thing means to you.  It is not always a conscious association, but more of a visceral reaction.  When you think of a Porsche 911, what do feel about it?  Expensive? Classy? Fast?  What reaction would you have to the person driving such a car?  Rich? Successful? Desirable?  Whatever feelings and thoughts you have about a person/product/thing constitute it's position in your mind.

Works everywhere

This mind/product association works with anything.  Try it now:  Think of Paris, France.  What reaction do you have? Do you see images, like the Eiffel Tower?  Do you hear the trademark accordian music? Think of strolling the pavestone streets with your lover?  If so, the position that Paris holds in your mind is "romance".

Opposite's a trick

The real trick for marketers is to pull off the reverse trick:  making sure that when you think of a particular word or phrase, their product comes to mind.  For example, when you think of Paris Hilton, what reaction do you have?  I am sure Paris Hilton would like you to think she was beautiful, glamorous, rich, and classy.  Personally, I think spoiled, not very bright, pretty but trashy, and many other things probably not fit to print.   Paris Hilton is a positioning failure, in this case.

However, Toyota is a positioning success.  When you think of reliability in an automobile, you probably think of Toyota.  I live in Texas, the sacred breeding grounds of American trucks.  One friend, who swore he would never buy a foreign car, found himself sinking thousands for repairs into his Ford.  "It's always like this," he said, "every year.  Next time, I'm getting a Toyota. Screw it."  He drives a Tundra now.  In his mind, Toyota stands for reliability.

Your turn

What do you stand for?  What comes to mind when people think of your music, or your name?  What is your position?

New Jack Artists

Filmmakers need to take a musician to lunch.

In the 1960s, top British rock band The Who wrote a popular song called "Won't Get Fooled Again" (I think it's the theme to CSI: Albuquerque, or some such). The opening line is: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." That sentiment was never truer than in today's entertainment business.

Give Away the Music, Sell the T-shirt
Back in the day, bands like mine were always trying to score a major label record deal. That was the brass ring for us. By 1990, the shine was wearing off, and many musicians saw that recording and releasing their own record was a better way to go: they had complete artistic freedom, and kept all the profits. Of course, they had to become distributors, accountants, PR pros and salesmen, too, but those were the trade-offs. Once Napster rocked the industry, veteran musicians realized that music would be free, whether they liked it or not, and that they better concentrate on touring and at-the-gig merch sales. "Give away the music and sell the T-shirt" (or $120 concert ticket) was no longer a joke; it was the preferred business model.

Slow Cousins
I'm a professional film and TV actor. It's amazing to me to see filmmakers who aren't hip to the lessons of the music industry. Austin is a great filmmaking community, but most all of the new jack filmmakers I meet are all about making their "calling card" short films and music videos, even micro-budget indie features, so that they can submit to Sundance, package them up as DVDs, and wait for the Hollywood offers to start pouring in.

Guess what?

Ain't gonna happen. Oh, maybe once in a while. Heck, even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. But not often enough to be a good business strategy anymore. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was viable. The barriers to entry for filmmaking were high, just as they were with music in the 1960s and 1970s. But not anymore. Now, any 8-year old with a cell phone can make a movie. And they do. And when they post it to YouTube, more people will likely see it than your MFA thesis film, or your self-important, talking heads, character-driven dramedy.

No, what you and I need is a way to differentiate ourselves, set us apart from the herd. We need a strong competitive advantage, as they say in corporate boardrooms. We need a unique position.

The "Safe" Position
Filmmakers using other people's money (OPM) try to minimize risk by hiring the biggest stars they can afford, and sticking to "safe" genre films, with formulaic stories. This at least gives them a position that is a cut above your average student fare. But it lumps them right in with 5,000 other films each year doing the exact same thing- mediocre premise, stilted writing, C-list actors, first-time directors, and no real marketing or distribution budget.

The Best Position
The best position is always to have great writing. Personally, I'd rather have the filmmaking credit for Little Miss Sunshine than Transformers. Each did well at the box office, but only LMS received critical praise and Oscar nods, even though Transformers did do well with the kiddos at the box office. Don't forget, though, that Transformers already had a strong, established position: the multi-million dollar toy and cartoons franchise on which the movie was based. You and I, Mr. New Jack Filmmaker, do not have that. We must prosper on the strength of our content.

How can we do that? Good writing.

But, I hear you ask, what about the latest HD camera, DOF adapters and lenses, newest non-linear editors, color correctors, FX generators, lighting kits, most powerful multi-core computers? Forget about it. All you need to do is get out of the way.

Get out of the way of your story, and you'll be amazed at how little equipment and crew you need. "Production value!", you scream. The audience will forgive most anything as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story. 24p film-look? Don't need it. Ultra-professional multi-layered sound? Not necessary. $10,000 lighting rig? Eh. Just give it enough production value to tell the story in a way that doesn't distract or detract from the story, and you'll be fine.

But if your script sucks, well... you're S.O.L. Don't believe me? Watch (the new) Posiedon Adventure, or Star Wars Episodes I-III. If you have good writing, good production value is a bonus. But if you have crappy writing, then good production value is sort of like polishing a turd.

And if you're an aspiring director, you don't have to write scripts yourself. Network with some screenwriting groups and find writers who want to get their projects made. That trick alone could not only drastically improve the quality of your projects, but also shave months or years off your production timeline.

So give yourself the best possible position by focusing on improving or acquiring good writing.

Sex, Violence, Pity - What are you selling?

The three most powerful things you can sell with your image/style are sex (pop), violence (rap & metal), and pity (singer/songwriter). Which one are you selling?

OK, let’s back up. Perhaps you don’t buy my assumptions about what’s being sold. If you do, skip ahead to the “Pick One” section, below.

Define your musical essence
There is an acting school of thought that a character's motivation in any scene can be reduced to the most basic of human needs: sex, power, or love. Distilling all the words and actions in your scene to one of these underlying motivations can really boost the scene's energy, and keeps the actors focused on the essence of the scene.

Likewise, most music can be reduced to just a few basic human desires: sex, violence, or melanchoy- a type of longing. Reduced to its most basic, though, melancholy is a form of pity. Pity is a transferable emotion. We can feel sorry for ourselves (e.g., broken heart songs), for a loved one, or for strangers (starving Africans, a la "Do They Know Its Christmas Time?" by Band Aid).

When music becomes too intellectualized, it feels removed from these basic needs, and the audience for it is reduced. Massively popular music appeals to the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy. The essence of your music is what underlies both the lyrics and genre.

Hard sell
For example, can you sell “social awareness”? Not really. How do you market that? Artists that try come across as "preachy" and pretentious. But artists who effectively address social injustice in their music reach us through pity. They tell stories of individuals (such as Suzanne Vega's "Luka"), which evoke strong feelings of sympathy, shame, and outrage.

A reviewer once called my music “Rock with Brains.” At first I thought, “Cool!” But I was not able to successfully translate “brainy” into a compelling marketing campaign. By it’s nature, it would have been elitist and snobby, which didn’t exactly fit with the rock/funk/blues vibe of my music at that time. Had I been trying to win over Sting or Pink Floyd’s audience, that might have been okay. I would rather he said that "Curtis Wayne is a great storyteller."

Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album, a pretty intellectual offering for a psychedelic rock band, was not a huge success upon debut. Their violent, anti-war “Brick in the Wall” album was a much bigger initial hit. It took many years for “Dark Side” to become ubiquitous.

Likewise, it’s unlikely that Sting’s intellectual jazz-pop would have been a hit out of the gate, had he not launched his solo career while the Police were still the biggest band in the world. And the Police began as an aggressive three-chord punk band!

Even the most popular folksy-roots songs of the 60’s and 70’s often tapped either violence (“If I Had a Hammer”), sex ("Sugar Magnolia"), or pity (“They Paved Paradise”).

Too many choices?
Knowing your genre is important for marketing and distribution purposes. Music stores (including iTunes) need to know which “category” to put you in, so that people can search for your music. Retail stores must, literally, “pigeon-hole” your music by putting in a particular bin.

But music has been split into so many genres and sub-genres that it’s extremely confusing to pick one to describe your music. Are you rock or country? Hard rock or soft rock? Metal or alternative rock? Death metal, power metal, speed metal, black metal, doom metal, folk metal, glam metal, grindcore, industrial metal, thrash metal, etc.?

Some fans are as rabid in their devotion to a particular sub-genre as certain religious sects are about their particular branch of Christianity or Islam (Baptists vs. Catholics, or Shiites vs. Sunnis, for example). Identifying with a particular genre can win (or lose) you fans, and help you plan a touring strategy with similar bands.

How to choose
Generally speaking, if you are a rock artist, you'll either be selling sex, violence or both. If you have a sexy lead singer who is the focus of your stage show, then you're probably selling sex (think Gwen Stefani/No Doubt, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, or the Rolling Stones). Pop-rock groups that are more band-oriented than singer-centric may also fall into this category, depending on the tone of their songs. Fallout Boy, Gorillaz, and Gnarls Barkley are some examples. Virtually every R&B artist is in this category- Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Joss Stone, Tank, Christina Aguilera, etc.

Many modern country artists are also selling sex. Shania Twain's blatant sexuality was a watershed in country music marketing. Faith Hill looked like a sultry Britney Spears on the cover of her "Cry" album. Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw continue to be two of the most popular in a long series of "country hunks".

If your band is a more aggressive "team effort", then you're probably selling violence. The style and tone of your music will probably be a giveaway here, too. Bands like Disturbed, Papa Roach, Metallica, The Sex Pistols, Rage Against the Machine, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers fit this bill. "Angry artists" like Alanis Morrissette, Henry Rollins, and others could also be described as selling violence, rage, or angst.

Singer-songwriters like Jewel, John Mayer, David Gray, Sarah McLachlan all peddle melancholy (pity) as their message. So do some bands, like The Killers, Cold Play, U2, Radiohead, and Third Eye Blind. Their songs tend to be "downers", or highly introspective songs, regardless of tempo. (I like to call them "You can't possibly understand my pain" artists. ) Many classic Americana folk singers- Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, for example- deliver socially-conscious messages in their songs, but the ones that resonate and become hits evoke a strong sense of melancholy, such as "Like a Rolling Stone", or "They Paved Paradise". For an excellent example of this type of song, check out EmmyLou Harris' "Red Dirt Girl".

These artists do play other types of songs and styles, but their bread-and-butter, the style they are known for, their essential position, falls into one of these three categories. Some of them have been able to successfully branch out, but only after establishing a strong position first.

Other
Then are the others- artists like Devo, Blue Man Group, or Weird Al Yankovic- who don't really occupy any of the above positions, but have managed to achieve success in their areas anyway. There will always be groups that are so far out of the mainstream that they do manage to carve out and hold their own niche, but the number of possible brands, categories, and positions that are minds can hold is limited. So the opportunities for artists to create entirely unique positions outside the mainstream will be limited, too. It's a function of a cognitive psychology phenomenon called categorization and particularization.

Words + Music = Position
If you're lost as to how to position your band, take a look at your lyrics. What is the common theme running through your music? Is it "I want you" (sex), "fight the power" (violence), or "love me, or my cause" (pity)? Determine your lyrical theme, and your musical genre. Doing so will take you a long way toward determining your band's ultimate position.

Behind the Music - A Reaction

Fascinating documentary. True stories from the trenches, told by major artists. Go out and buy this DVD. Through interviews with current and former top artists, from Dave Mathews to Michael Penn, the show describes the perfect storm of a major label oligopoly, radio station consolidation, and youth-obsessed culture which has rained down five hundred AM/FM, satellite, and cable channels of crap music upon us hapless consumers. The most damning evidence is the 10-minute segment whereby the producers toss out a title to a veteran songwriter, paired with a buxom but talentless 17-year old model, mix it with a seasoned producer, and voila! Instant pop hit. This alone is worth the price of the DVD.

But after all this, what’s the producers’ conclusion?

“Shame on the record industry for promoting shallow, no-talent artists, and shame on you, the buying public, for not recognizing great music. Appreciate music and musicians, and don’t pirate their stuff. Otherwise, they’ll give up and quit, and serious music will die. Dammit.”

Weak. And untrue.

First of all, musicians will always make music, paid or not, because there are psychic rewards beyond money. That’s easily demonstrated by the millions of people around the world who continue to (essentially) play for free, even when they probably should be getting paid (such as those musicians that showcase here in Austin at SXSW every year).

Moreover, the message comes across as a scolding, not only of the business tactics of major labels, but also the behavior of fans. Of fans! The filmmakers browbeat the average music fan (the “brainless” 16 year old pop fanatics, who- oh, by the way- spend tens of millions of dollars on music purchases) into feeling that their taste is crap because Jessica Simpson is a superstar, and Doyle Bramhall isn’t. Well, excuse me, guys, but if you want to complain about a lack of appreciation for “serious” music, go spend a few hours with your average classically-trained musician. You can probably find them teaching junior high band, or working as a data entry clerk in an insurance company. Those guys don’t even get groupies!

In several places, B4MD’s producers, and the musicians they interviewed, complained about being entitled to certain royalty percentages, freedom from contracts (like Prince’s campaign against Warner Bros.), or that fans should behave in a certain way. Apparently, they are as entrenched in the old business model as the very record labels they complain about.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m an artist. I danced with the major labels. I believe that artists should be paid for their work, if they choose to charge. I just don’t think that they are entitled to be paid, any more than a house painter, a television anchorman, or, uh, a blogger.

Value-added entertainment
What so many musicians forget is that, even in a digital world, the basic rules of business still apply. What ultimately determines whether or not they get paid is this: Do they add value?

“WTF?!? That sounds like Peter Drucker-ish corporate mumbo-jumob, Curtis!” I hear you say. You’re right. Except that it pre-dates Drucker just a bit.

Glass houses
Does that mean music fans should steal songs from their favorite bands, using P2P networks, or burning CD or MP3 copies for their friends? Well, technically, no. Neither should the bands making the music be pirating copies of digital recording software to record their albums, or Adobe Photoshop to make their poster art, or Microsoft Windows to run their computers, or sampling previously recorded songs to mix into their tunes, or using Web images or layouts to build their Web sites, or stealing a riff from that obscure 1970s tune that no one remembers anymore, or… well, you get the idea.

The point is, these things will happen, because it represents the path of least resistance for most people. The challenge in the new digital economy is no longer leveraging production, but leveraging distribution. Adam Smith would have called this a shift in the value proposition to music consumers: It’s so easy to make and distribute music, that there’s less reason for a music fan to buy music. They can now make their own! (YouTube has forced the same paradigm-shift on the film industry.) Economists would say that the marginal costs of music are zero, and price will inevitably be driven to the marginal cost.

Wal-Mart-ization of Music: Were you surprised it would happen?
Consolidation happens in every industry, in every part of the world. It’s how companies achieve economies of scale. It increases the bottom line. Record companies have been swallowing each other like fish in a bowl since the very beginning. It’s the only reason the major labels ever became “major”.

We can’t demand our “artist entitlements” and whine about “corporate greed” on one hand, while sipping a Starbuck’s latte from the other, and shopping at Wal-Mart. And the very fame and entitlements that B4MD artists seek are themselves a result of the ruthless corporate efficiency of the major labels.

In that sense, protesting against the self-serving machinations of the music industry is really like protesting against the economics of capitalism itself (or at least they way it’s practiced in America). Without those economies of scale that consolidation affords, most artists would never experience the superstardom of icons like Sinatra, Elvis, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, or, yes, even Jessica Simpson. And let’s face it, most of us who want to make a living playing music would give our left nut for a shot at that brass ring.

Wishful thinking is not enough
It’s not enough to try and shame music fans into doing what you want them to do. Artists who want to make a living at music need better, more specific advice. Here it is: take responsibility for your own career and success. Build your band’s brand and business from the ground up, just as you would a widget factory or a donut shop.

Bands like Dave Mathews, Hootie and the Blowfish (remember them?), Widespread Panic, and Ani DiFranco had great success by building a strong grassroots following. Sure enough, once those groups sold 50,000 units, the major labels came calling. WP and DiFranco told the labels to shove it, but Hootie and Dave negotiated lucrative deals on their own terms, because they didn’t need the money.

Because they didn’t need the deal, they had leverage, and could renegotiate the contract. They offered value to the record labels: a guaranteed audience for their music. That’s money the labels can immediately recoup on their next release, and money they don’t have to spend to publicize the band.

What kind of value are you offering?

If your answer started with “Uh…”, chances are its probably not very much. This gives you no leverage, so if you want a major label deal, be prepared to sign whatever contract they put in front of you.

Independent as a position
Ironically, being self-sufficient gives you both a very powerful financial position, and marketing position. The “self-made band” image plays well with fans, particularly college-aged fans who prefer to dig bands out of the mire of the Internet than to accept the latest radio pablam (Death Cab for Cutie comes to mind).

Hire a good lawyer
Don’t forget to hire a good lawyer and accountant, while you’re at it. If you want to avoid getting “screwed” by a record company, or anyone else, make sure you understand the contract, and hold them to it. Don’t expect that you as an artist are entitled to anything, other than what is legally and contractually guaranteed to you.

Unless you’re prepared to live with the deal, don’t sign it. I didn’t. It probably cost me a shot at that brass ring, but neither did I have to change my name to “symbol” and walk around with the word “SLAVE” tattooed across my face.

Recognize
Understand the value of your music in your resource mix: it's a loss leader, not a cash cow. It's the milk shake that brings the boys to your yard. Whether you profit from them after that depends on your business savvy, not your musical ability.

We’re all just fools, here
When musicians carry on about their entitlements being taken away, we really should remember that the music biz as we know it has only been around for about 75 years. Before that, people played music for fun. Imagine that!

How to Position Yourself as an Artist

This post, the first of several in a series, provides explanations and action steps of how to position yourself as an artist, as well as examples of and interviews with other artists who have done it successfully.

Positioning is a marketing exercise that combines elements of business analysis, psychology, and publicity. This does not mean “selling out”. It means understanding who you are, what you do best, and where the competition is, so that you can give yourself the best possible chance to succeed.

Texasrockfunkcountrypopfusionstuff
I once gave one of my CDs to an influential reviewer. He asked me what kind of music it was. I proudly proclaimed: “Texasrockfunkcountrypopfusionstuff,” not wanting to be pigeon-holed in this guy’s mind.

A week later I saw him. “We’re gonna review it in the blues-rock section.” WHAT?!? ‘Blues-rock?’ My CD wasn’t blues-rock. It was eclectic! It was unique! It was un-pigeon-holeable.

Two things I learned here:
1. None of us is as unique and varied as we think we are (and if we are, it’s probably a mistake).
2. If we fail to position our music and image- fail to categorize, yes, fail to pigeon-hole ourselves- then someone else will.

Tag cloud for your mind
Turns out that our minds can only hold so much information, and our notions about an artist (or anything else) fit into tidy little “pigeon holes”. This long-accepted truth in social science is called “categorization and particularization”. Two guys in 1980 even wrote a book about how apply this phenomenon to marketing (actually, they wrote several books, but they’re all the same idea, just restated).

Our minds tag things with labels: car, house, river, artist, band, good, bad, funky, bluesy, fast, slow, etc. Think of it as a Del.icio.us tag cloud for your mind. A thing, like a band or artist, may have a few different tags.

Can’t co-exist
But unlike Delicious tags, our minds don’t like tagging something with polar opposite tags. We can’t handle the cognitive dissonance. Kind of like matter and anti-matter; they can’t both exist in the same space at the same time.

We don’t think of an artist as being both “good” and “bad”, at least not in the present moment. Perhaps at one time they were good, but now they are bad, or vice-versa. At one time, they were rock, but now they’re country. They live in only one pigeon-hole in our mind, at any one time. This pigeon-hole represents their position, as Ries and Trout would call it. It’s how your mind knows where to look when retrieving memories or thoughts about that artist. Your pigeon-hole is your position!

Who cares?
You should, if you’re an artist. Basically, if someone asks you what kind of music you play, and you give them some sort of generic answer, like “Oh, our style can’t be pigeon-holed,”, then from a cognitive science point of view, you’ve told them nothing.

Your (potential) fans cannot categorize and particularize “totally original”, or “like nothing you’ve ever heard!” or “completely unique.” Their minds- literally- can’t deal with that. They’ll have to file your music somewhere in their heads, so when they hear it, it will be totally dependent on their own frame of reference, without any help from you. Plus, as Derek Sivers, founder of Cdbaby.com, points out, they may not even bother listening at all.

If you had given them a strong positioning statement, such as

• “Punk. We sound like a chainsaw cutting concrete.” Or


• “Retro-funk. We sound like a 1970s TV cop show theme.”

then you might (a) get more people to listen, and (b) suggest to them the appropriate cubby-hole in which to file away your music. At least you give yourself a chance to form the impression you want with your fans. If you give them nothing, you leave it totally up to chance.

Pick a hole
Ultimately, people who hear your music will make their own judgments about it, and find a cubby hole to put it in. But if you’ve already suggested a cubby hole, that is, a position, then they are more likely to put it into the cubby hole that you have suggested!

Easy filing
You are doing all the cognitive work of filing your music for people. The very fact that you’ve done this will be enough for people to go along with your positioning. We are all bombarded by information that forces us to work to file it away.

Imagine helping a friend clean up their office. There’s a huge stack of paper on the desk to file away. You’re not really sure where everything goes, or why. It will all go much faster if your friend just hands you the paper and says “File this under ‘Bank statements’. File this under ‘Medical expenses’.” Your friend has already categorized and particularized each of the papers for you. All you have to do is file it away as instructed.

This same technique is the essence of positioning. But there are some tricks:

• The position must not create cognitive dissonance in the mind of your fan.


• The position must be one you can support and defend.


• The position must reflect your true artistic essence.

We’ll discuss how to do these things in future articles.