PR 101

I had dinner Sunday in Chicago with a good friend. During the course of eating great cheeseburgers at Jake Melnicks Corner Tap, we got talking about a a May 13 New York Times story that reported that mobile phones are now used more for texting than talking.

“The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association,” The Time . “And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.”

“‘Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel told the Time. ‘But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.’”

I said I found it interesting that people were returning to the written word for communication. My friend said that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He pointed out a couple of things: texts are never very long; and most people are not very good at communicating when they are limited in how many words they use.

I was reminded of one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: “If I would have had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” The point the great writer was making is that it is much for difficult to communicate clearly when fewer words are used. It takes time and practice to learn to do it well. For instance, I usually rewrite my blogs at least twice. If I cannot cut out at least one-third of the words from the first draft, I assume I am doing something wrong.

I doubt anyone rewrites their texts before sending them. I suspect there is a lot of miscommunication because people never read over the text before sending. Plus, many people just don’t know what words mean or how to use them.

I thought that when my friend made that point. I agree, I said, but I am good writer. He agreed my texts and emails are usually well written – short and to the point.

Be that as it may, he added, how many good readers are out there? That brought me up short. So, I did a little research and found:

• U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy, according to the Educational Testing Service.
• Nearly half of America’s adults are poor readers, or “functionally illiterate.” They can’t carry out simply tasks like balancing a check books, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993.
• More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level – far below the level needed to earn a living wage, according to National Institute for Literacy, Fast Facts on Literacy, 2001.
• 21 million Americans can’t read at all, 45 million are marginally illiterate and one-fifth of high school graduates can’t read their diplomas, according to U.S. Department of Justice.

Apparently there are many people who are not good readers. The Times story noted that almost 90 percent of Americans have mobile phones. So, many of those functionally illiterate people are texting.

Doesn’t sound a like a recipe for good communication to me. I am not even going to cover abbreviations like ROTFLMAO, TTYL, or all the others that seem like a foreign language.

My suggestion – trying actually talking. You might be surprised how much easier it is to communication.

A.C. Neilsen has discovered that marketers are not going after we Boomers. Apparently, those marketing types assume we’re just quietly strolling around on our walkers from the shuffleboard court to a pinochle game. They apparently think the only products in which we are interested are Fixodent and erectile dysfunction medicine.

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.

I read an article Sunday about how the depressed the music industry is this summer. It said that in order to make up for income lost because of decreasing CD sales, many top bands had upped concert ticket prices to above $200 for the best seats. Given the current state of the economy, no one with an ounce of sanity is spending that kind of money to see a concert. So concert ticket sales are down and a number of acts have canceled summer tours.

This is, to me, is the beginning of the end game for the music business as it is presently constituted. As anyone with marketing experience can tell you, this is an industry that is doing itself in. The music industry didn’t do the same thing American car manufacturers didn’t do – respond to a changing market place.

“Billboard magazine recently predicted that summer 2010 could be the toughest touring market artists and promoters have had to face since the mid-’90s, citing a spate of nixed shows and canceled tours,” The Washington Post reported July 2.

Performers including the Eagles, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Simon & Garfunkel have either canceled dates or “postponed” entire tours because of weak ticket sales.

Why is this happening? Well, let’s get into the way back machine and look what happened when CDs were first introduced. That’s when the problems began.

In 1982, Sony and Phillips Electronics introduced the first CD recording – “The Visitors” by Abba. One would have thought that choice of a first release would have strangled the fledgling format in its cradle. Incidentally, the first CDs had a capacity of 74 minutes. That’s the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I guess that makes up for the Abba release.

This is where the recording industry made its major mistake. Vinyl albums contained between eight and 10 songs. Whether out of hubris, stupidity, greed or something else, the recording industry put the same eight to 10 songs on those first CDs. Those CDs sold for $21.50, according to a 2007 report prepared by Recording Industry Association of America.

That worked until CD burners were first sold to the public in the middle 1990s. People discovered a blank CD actually held between 15 and 20 songs. That was a “hey, what a minute” moment. True, CD prices had dropped to just under $13, according to the RIAA. It was too late. A lot of people felt they were getting ripped off and got angry.

Free file sharing sites such as Napster rose up in response to that anger. The feeling seemed to be if the record companies were going to rip us off, we are going to fight back. Without rehashing the history, this eventually led to the creation of ITunes, where a complete album can be purchased for $9 or $10. The recording industry essentially ceded control of its product to Apple and other such sites.

Plus, feeding that anger, I feel, was rock stars went from being one of us to one of them. The Rolling Stones bought estates in the south of France. Eric Clapton flies around in a private jet. Why should a college kid making $60 or $70 a week delivering pizza or a laid-off worker feel any sympathy for some over-privileged musician?

Apparently not wanting to give up the valet and butler, those fat and happy musicians raised concert ticket prices to make up for the lost CD income. That is so damned odd to me. Did they think somebody not willing to pay more than $10 for a CD is willing to pay over $200 a ticket? I mean, Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. Did he skip the lecture on “elasticity of demand?”

What that term means according to the Business Dictionary is “responsiveness of the demand  for a good or service to the increase or decrease in its price. Normally, sales increase with drop in prices and decrease with rise in prices.” Or the less you charge, the more likely people are to buy your product. Well duh!

As I said at the start, I think what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the music business in its current form. Unlike the American auto industry, they are not pulling up before they crash. I don’t think they know how. Rather than find a solution, they would rather waste their time going after teenagers downloading music. Sad really.