The EU-Eastern Partnership Culture and Creativity Programme has published a free marketing course online for cultural and creative entrepreneurs. Written and presented by David Parrish, the free marketing course has been designed especially for entrepreneurs in the cultural industries and creative industries, including cultural institutions, freelance practitioners, cultural enterprises, creative entrepreneurs and cultural businesses. By …
Tag: market research
Don’t do Market Research!
Marketing is all about looking at things from the customer’s point of view. That requires understanding customers and, indeed, listening to customers. Don’t do market research! Listening to customers is the term I tend to use, instead of the phrase ‘market research’. That’s because ‘market research’ tends to conjure up the idea in people’s minds …
Crowd-testing
You can use crowd-funding platforms to test the market for a new product, service or project, in parallel with raising finance to fund new creative initiatives. This was one of the many interesting points made by Slava Rubin, Chief Executive Officer of the crowd-funding platform, Indiegogo where we were both speakers at a creative industries …
Be your own kind of entrepreneur!
Business doesn’t have to be about being the biggest, fastest or strongest. Entrepreneurs don’t have to be short-sighted, aggressive and unfair. “Entrepreneurialism has nothing to do with hardwired personality traits.” This is what Robert Kelsey says in this article in the journal of the Royal Society of Arts. I agree totally. Unfortunately, the popular image …
The Art and Science of Advertising
The best advertising agencies know that the ‘creative’ elements of advertising are just the tip of the iceberg – or the ‘icing on the cake’. Less visible, but equally important, is the market research and clear understanding of customers’ want and needs. Advertising legend David Ogilvy emphasised the importance of researching how customers think in …
Good Enough…
Thanks to Phil Birchenall for sending me this article about the Flip Video camcorder. It’s about a simple and inexpensive camcorder that’s “good enough” rather than being “the best”. It has just the right range of features to be usable and useful, at a reasonable price. It’s opened up a new market of ‘ordinary’ users, …
What are you selling, really?
If you’re a creative business or cultural enterprise, you are selling goods or services to customers, whether it’s graphic design, fashion, architecture, music, crafts, theatre, film or books. But what are you selling, really? Or to put it another way, what is it that the customer is really buying from you? It’s often the case …
Viral Marketing
The term ‘viral marketing’ describes any strategy that passes a marketing message from one person to another – and goes on to spread ‘like a virus’. In other words, the message must spread automatically as one person contacts another (like a virus). To be able to do this, the marketing message must be built into …