(Why Should I Let You) Entertain Me
There’s an interesting article in The Guardian today which looks at the recent spate of bad news that has hit the music retail sector, including the very sad collapse of Fopp (where I used to work) and HMV’s disappointing financial results.
There was one quote that really stuck with me from Stephen Godfrey, store director at the soon to be opened Rough Trade superstore:
“The popularity of music is stronger than ever,” he says. “It’s retail that’s failed.”
So what does any of this have to do with digital, other than the fact that this crisis (if it is a crisis) is usually blamed (with arguable logic) on the advent of downloading? Well, it’s because that quote about how music retailers have failed made me think of something that our Executive Creative Director Anson often says, when trying to explain how the internet (and specifically Web 2.0 & social media) have changed the marketing landscape.
He says that all marketers should now bear in mind that as far as most consumers are concerned, it’s a case of:
Entertain me, or **** off!
It’s quite a blunt statement (and not one that we often use in pitches), but I think it rather eloquently summarises the difficulties most brands face nowadays.
With the amount of content & products that are now available, if you can’t give people something that they absolutely have to have (because it’s entertaining, or informative, or engaging, etc..) then why should they pay any attention?
Essentially Anson’s quote & the one about retail, both echo the excellent statement by Clay Shirky:
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
And that, in a nut-shell, is something that the record stores tried to ignore for far too long.
