Why Listening is Just as Important as Talking and why your target market may be able to avoid you - Marketing This Thing Part II

There are 2 types of marketing that those of us with maker businesses have to be thinking about - there is strategic marketing (this week's topic) and operational marketing.

Strategic marketing is about positioning our businesses to make money.

One of the ways to do this is to put the customer at the center of our core business thinking and decide what products and services to produce in the first place based on them.

This is no different than what any other type of business has to do to make money.

Now for makers this is not about selling just to be selling -

if we are not creating a business selling something that we are passionate about and is uniquely our own than we are not creating anything anyone will ever miss when it is gone and it soon will be ...

to make room for the passionate stuff that someone willing to put the time and energy and hours into discovering and working and reworking is dreaming up right now in their pajamas or their office suit or their McDonald's bright red shirt -

someone (to quote Will from Monday) who is not afraid to die on that treadmill.

A photographer who's soul yearns to roadtrip the country and photograph rusty cars in junkyards and battered old street signs should not be snapping birds on branches because maybe birds on branches are trending right now ...

(although I would totally hop on the hedgehog train if I were you - I had previously predicted the fox trend and am now predicting the hedgehog trend)

but a strategic, customer centered marketing focus would ask the photographer to think about just how infrequently most people change their wall art and maybe license her images for use on other products or maybe create a humorous 'junk in your trunk' greeting card line or package her photos in such a way that customers are more likely to buy them such as producing a Blurb coffee table book of her photos and selling that.

Now in one sense this does not really expand this photographer's "target" market (again I am picturing ducks in a shooting gallery) because her market is really the people who love her aesthetic (and the people shopping for those people) but it does give them more reasons to buy from her and more ways for her to operationally market her work.

Before I discovered Etsy I created and sold a line of scrapbook-type hanging boards that I called Graffiti Boardz.

I sold them in a few stores at the Jersey shore, but mostly I sold them at local craft shows, street fairs and music festivals.


I made them for about 3 years (it was a part-time thing) until I talked to the album frame manufacturer who fabricated the metal framing I used around the boards about resizing them just for me. I wanted them to make me a 12" frame (the size of standard scrapbook paper) instead of the 12 1/2" frame (the size of a standard record album).

Within a few weeks they had fabricated the special sized frames (yippee) for me and (not so yippee, maybe just a yip) for Michael's and A.C. Moore which they promptly stocked the frame department with and labeled scrapbook frame.

(yes, I am taking total credit for scrapbook frames in the craft stores ... as well as the Cheesecake Factory's crispy crab wontons ... I take total credit for those, too and possibly Obama's economic plan, but we'll see how that works out first)

Anyway back to the new (to me) Etsy marketplace because although these boards had sold very well at local craft shows where you need a broader appeal product with a high 'mom' factor (niche products will not make you the queen of the local craft show circuit) I knew instinctively they were not the right aesthetic for Etsy and that the big old internet, which was getting bigger by the nanosecond, demanded niche thinking.

(plus I thought hanging scrapbook frames were about to be everywhere - and I was tired of making them and my scrapbook store-owner friend, who sold me all her scrappy leftovers at below wholesale prices was ready to move on, too)

Of course, if my heart and my soul were still screaming Graffiti Boardz, I would still be making them (I am sure with a gazillion little adjustments by now) and truly if my heart and my soul were still needing to make them, then I would be making the selling part work ... even on Etsy.

So, what does all of this have to do with listening instead of talking and our so-called elusive "target market" - well, I knew that a successful creative business needed to be customer "focused" at its core -

putting the customer at the center of our business thinking in the beginning as hard and as much work as this can be -

is still alot easier than putting them at the center of our bullseye and "targeting" them later on by firing products at them and seeing what we can hit.

(due to the popularity of video gaming, customers are increasingly agile and able to avoid this type of 'targeting' anyway)

If we don't make what people want to buy

(note - I am not talking about things that everyone wants to buy - we'll leave that to Target)

then no matter how clever or creative our operational marketing is - it will probably fail.

Now, we have to do this without silencing our creative voice because if there is not a whole lot of what is uniquely us in our making then no amount of operational or strategic marketing is going to work for long anyway.

This is where alot of makers get stuck - they either decide to make what sells and it ends up looking an awful lot like what everyone else is making

and then spend alot of time looking for someone to buy it or get pissed or depressed if no one does

or they decide they want to make what they want to make no matter what

(which is, of course, totally ok if you are not wanting to sell it)

and then spend alot of time looking for someone to buy it or get pissed or depressed if no one does

but if other people are the center of a business, and I think they are, then it is just as important to listen to them in the beginning as it is to talk at them at the end.

Staying true to our own voice while seeing customers as active partners and not passive 'targets' is totally possible for all of us.

On Friday I will talk about some very specific ways we can do this in Part III of Marketing This Thing - Strategy is Not Just for Generals.

(I know you may lose some sleep waiting - please don't hate me for this)

*listen print by the amazing and uniquely herself elle moss

This is Not a Customer-Free Zone or why "other" people may be the whole point of our business - Marketing This Thing - Part I

Sometimes it is easy to confuse the things we need to do to make our art and the things we need to do to make a business with our art.

Making a business with our art sometimes requires a shift in our thinking from "what do I want to create?" to "how can I use my creativity to provide what people want to buy?" -

both questions are part of the making experience, but forgetting to transition that thing that you just have to make

(and I totally get that "have to" gut feeling of creation and do not want anyone to ever, ever lose it)

into something people want to buy can create a kind of customer-free zone where other people -

who I would argue are the entire point of our business (not the point of our making, of course, but the entire point of our business) in the first place - get lost.

(and we don't want them to wander off into a WalMart)

We can totally make things and never give any thought to selling them and I would agree that the most genius art is created in a customer-free zone, but not the most genius businesses.

If we are making our makings into a business we should already have a good sense of ourselves and what it is we love to do and need to do and what it is that we do really, really well.

If not, we need to take a step backwards and give ourselves some time to focus on this- this is a process after all, a marathon not a sprint, and although everything these days feels like it is going 1000 miles per hour - it really isn't - there are some things that will always take time and be worth putting the time into.

Our work must come from our heart and our soul and be truly unique and our own

(this stuff is hard or everyone would be doing it)

but to turn our makings into a business we need to focus outside of ourselves a bit or we may be left searching for some kind of marketing miracle to sell it for us.

I think if we have to spend alot of time figuring out how to convince people to buy our stuff something has probably gone wrong somewhere along the way.

This week I will be focused on marketing this creative venture of ours - and by marketing I do not mean some kind of uptown version of "selling" - it is much more personal and radical and important than that!!

Marketing is really about aligning our business and our brand and 'our world' with the stuff outside ourself, the living breathing two legged stuff - those other people in the world.

This is absolutely NOT a matter of trying to "please" all of the people all of the time, but targeting partnering with the people

(I hate the word "targeting" because it sounds like our customers are plastic ducks lined up in a shooting arcade and it is our goal to knock their heads off and we really, really want to win the 4 foot teddy bear for little Morgan or Megan or Melissa and it's every man for himself)

that we can connect with most powerfully and match their needs with our own creative skills - this big old internet has actually created a world hungry for the very real and personal skills that only us small maker companies can provide.

In fact the vastness of the internet demands that we not please everyone. It requires us to find our niche. And, if you don't have a whole boatload of people who would never, ever buy your stuff then you don't have one.

Staying true to ourselves while keeping an eye or an eyeball or at least an eyelash on what people want to buy is totally do-able!

Wednesday - Part II of Marketing This Thing - Why Listening is Just As Important As Talking (and why our 'target' market may be avoiding us)

* mini alphabet letters by lovemaestore

a little Monday morning inspiration from the fresh prince:



some stuff I am taking with me:

1. greatness is in all of us
2. when other guys are sleeping, I am working
when other guys are eating, I am working
3. I am not afraid to die on a treadmill
4. your life will become better by making other people's lives better
5. you don't say, I am going to make the perfect wall- you say I am going to lay this brick as perfectly as I can and pretty soon you have a wall

Here's to a day/week/lifetime of wall-making everyone!

trouble in paradise? or wait I live in New Jersey so maybe I should call this trouble in anti-paradise

So, I am doing a little whisper-typing while hubby helps me rearrange some tables in my studio

(I have to whisper type this because he does not like me blogging about him)

but 2 things have happened within the last 24 hours that I find very alarming, especially with Valentine's Day approaching and I feel I must report on them

OK- he's left the room- I need to type fast ....

#1. Hubby ate the last cookie

now he has always been the kind of hubby who hardly ever takes the last of the milk, never the last bite of a shared dessert and would never eat the last cookie in the box

at least not the last chocolate cookie

so what is up with the fact that he ate the last cookie last night right in front of me and then proceeded to fold up the box, without even missing a beat in the conversation

#2. Hubby left his radio station

(I was briefly in country music hell - am I the only one who thinks country music is all about beer now - I still miss the Dixie Chicks)

and his seat position in my car when he borrowed it and he only drove like 4 blocks roundtrip

now normally I am not such a pain in the ass that I would even give this another thought, but when I noticed it this morning after last night's 'cookie incident'

I am left wondering if something is wrong here and how long this kind of stuff has been going on and I may have been too busy to notice.

(he's back, more whisper typing)

I mean, I know that I have eaten many a last cookie, switched many a radio station dial within seconds of buckling my seatbelt and sometimes forget to look in the mirror before I leave the house

(that last one is not related but it can drive hubby crazy and is for some reason coming back to me now)

but he doesn't ....

I guess I will have to see if all of this is leading up to a gigantic Valentine's Day surprise -

(hopefully not in the form of another girl - one who does not smell like E6000, always checks her face for respirator 'dents' before leaving the house and who will always save the last cookie for him)

will keep everyone posted ....

Back away from the mealworms ..... there's no love like hedgehog love

I am predicting ...
(without any psychic assistance although I may have made one spin with my magic eight ball)

the hedgehog (please don't call her a porcupine) is about to replace the fox as the trending critter you will be seeing everywhere.

The fox will not be disappearing anytime soon as evidenced by the fact that although the fox replaced the owl -

(the owl didn't stand a chance against this crafty devil)

there are still as many owls on Etsy as knitted caps lying on livingroom carpets.

My prophecy is based on the fact that although the fox, well-known for his cunning, has many strategies for killing the hedgehog - the hedgehog has only one strategy for defending herself.

Whenever the fox attacks, the hedgehog rolls into a tight little ball of spikes.

It works every time.

So, you read it here first folks - just as that sly fox outmaneuvered the wise old owl, the hedgehog is about to prove a good defense can beat a good offense anyday.

* hedgehog cork necklace available in my Uncorked shop here
* hedgehog locket featuring the gorgeous illustrations of Biliana available in my Polarity shop here

Have a wonderful weekend everyone - next week will kick off my new Marketing Series on Monday so stop by and pull up a chair! GG6HXSDWQTD9