PR 101

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.

So, after unplanned week off from blogging – more about that later – I sat at my keyboard trying to come up with a topic for this week’s blog. I realized I have a lot of items that wouldn’t make up an entire blog, but are still things I want to put out there. So, here are some of them.

Apple Inc.’s Marketing

Whether you are a Mac or a PC, you have to admire the way Apple markets itself.  The phrase I used to start the previous sentence is an example. Apple has become an iconic product. It’s marketing is transcending its market and becoming part of the general conversation. Which frankly is genius.

Of course Apple runs television advertisement for its products. However, those commercials are just one leg of the centipede that is Apple’s marketing plan. I cannot think of another company whose products go viral faster than Apple. They are word-of-mouth geniuses. You gotta admire that.

BP and The Oil Spill

That would make a great name for a punk band. In the real world, it has been an unmitigated disaster for British Petroleum on so many levels.

If you remember, last I blogged about the need for a crisis communication plan. That plan cannot sit on the shelf and gather dust. Just like every other part of crisis planning, a crisis communication plan has to be practiced. In that way, when the real thing happens, the communications team will know what to do.

I have to say that if BP did have a plan, it ain’t working. They have so ham handed about the way they dealt with the media. Their people actually got testy about what the company was doing. Bad idea. That just leads to more bad press.

The only way to act when there millions of oil that will potentially damage eco-systems from Louisiana to Florida and beyond is contrite.

Ford’s Advertising Campaign
Ford Motor Co. clearly gets it when it comes to telling the public about their products. Their current ads are the firs I have been in a long time that actually talk about their product’s attributes. That is a good way to get consumers interested.

If you watch television commercials for automobiles, you will notice that the ads rarely talk about what’s in the car. Most of the time, the commercials are trying to sell image. The one exception to that are truck commercials. The people who buy trucks want to know about horsepower and payload. They don’t care about image. They care about owning a tool that will get the job done.

Ford seems to have transferred that idea to car advertisements. The commercials for such things as the Ford Fusion or the Escape SUV talk about cargo space, gas mileage and horsepower. Those are thing I want to know about when I look at cars.

The Internet

I never realized how much I relied on the ability to use the Internet until part of it was taken away from me.

As I am sure you all noticed last week PR 101 was attacked by a virus. It was part of a larger attack on WordPress Blogs hosted by Go Daddy. I eventually had to take the blog down to protect all of you from getting infected. It took awhile, but the viruses were eventually flushed from the system. I have to give kudos to the Go Daddy customer support for helping me.

I also have to give a huge thank you to Joao Moraes of Sao Paulo, Brasil. Joao is the man who designed this blog and maintains it for me. It was he who helped me work my way through all of the issues a virus attack presents. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have a blog.

I also have to thank of all of you readers for sticking with me. I appreciate it. Thank you.

If you have been reading my blog, you know I am no fan of Microsoft’s marketing. The Redmond, Wash.-based company’s efforts come way too close to the line between truth and fabrication for my taste. Remember the commercials where a “real person,” who turned out to be an actress didn’t really go into an Apple Store, as she claimed.

Oops, they’ve done it again

Well, the company has done it again in the two commercials I have seen for Windows 7. In one, a very tall man named “Jack” claims he had the idea for Windows 7 while in the shower. They show him having his idea in the shower.

However, watch the commercial closely. The guy in the shower is not the same person who says he came up with Windows 7. If “Jack” is a real person, why the body double? Was he too shy to take off his shirt?

The same thing happens in a second commercial. “Steve” tells of having his revelation (complete with Angelic music). But, to me the problem is the “Steve” trimming the bushes when the light bulb is not the same man who is telling the story. Watch the commercial to see for yourself. The gardening one is taller and frankly more buff.

So what’s the big deal?

Why do I care, you ask? Don’t all commercials bend the truth?

Not all of them. In fact, most companies try to be honest. You find out quickly enough if they are or aren’t easily enough. In these days of social media, it is not hard to check claims. Companies who cheat are outed pretty quickly, I have found.

Frankly, given Microsoft’s record with the Apple commercials, I would think they would want to be very careful with their marketing. If they can’t even tell the truth about the people in their commercials, what else isn’t the company not telling us? This is why I am a member of the Apple cult.

I do have to say I like one Microsoft product – Excel. In fact, I love Excel. It is so easy to use and very functional. I also used to use Word because it is so ubiquitous. However, I am now using Google Docs more and more as it is easier to share information.

For almost everything else, I primarily use Apple products. I am writing on MacBook. As I said, I a member of the cult.

So, what do you think?