Music image problem

There was an article about annual latvian music award nominations in one internet portal. The event, which is held by Association of Music Producers, is getting controversial this year, since quite a few well known acts have not been nominated (due to the fact that to participate you have to submit your work). But that's not the issue.

I don't usually read comments in portals, but this time i did, since the topic interests me. I was surprised by amount of "commentators" who had very strict opinion about latvian music as whole. Basically, they wrote, everything is crap, latvians can't play or write, latvian musicians should better go and dig graves, latvian language is not good enough to be used for song lyrics.

Maybe they are a very loud minority, but anyway that is a marketing problem. People have bad opinion, for whatever reason, which means that they won't come to gigs, they won't purchase any records or won't generally look for new latvian music. This opinion must be turned upside town, since it doesn't allow for development. We do have some great bands, great songs, great performers, just that latvians have this tendency of judging their own more harshly, perhaps because the musician lives just around the corner, therefore he can't be good, since the "the latvian" himself can't play or sing or write (and this musician around the corner can't be better than him, can he?).

Bad news is that advetising campaign probably won't help, the change has to start with the musicians themselves. We have to be better promoters, better marketers, better musicians, be generally more active. Maybe then we can "pull" the audience up a level?

Megahertz wars. Err... what wars?

It occured to me today, that some six, seven years ago big part of computer marketing was the speed of processor, expressed in MHz. It used to be a really big thing how fast your processor is. Now, this is gone.

I started to wonder why and here are some thoughts:

1. Processor speeds ventured into gigahertz territory, and maybe for some unknown reason, gigahertz doesn't sound so cool as it's mega brethren.

2. "Apple" finally succeeded in convincing general public, that processor speeds aren't that important. That was time when Macs were still running PowerPC processors, which were slower than their "Intel" counterparts. Irony is, that for some time now "Apple" is using "Intel" processors as well.

3. Or, most likely, computers have very much infiltrated the life of mainstream public. Fancy terms like "megahertz" doesn't mean anything to them and are difficult to remember. There are more important things like design, brand or color.

I suspect this should happen with any advanced technology. First it's marketed through technological advancement, but any tech advance "commodizes" over time and in the end it's always down to what color the stuff is.

Guilty as charged

Seth Godin has a post in his blog, which strikes a chord. The key phrase is:

When in doubt, challenge the strategy, not the tactics.

Guilty as charged, Seth. Too many times when recieving a brief, for instance, and feeling that something is wrong, i've started to nitpick the details, but failing to see the bigger picture. I'll try to remember this.

Cheap luxus

Spotted today, when coming to work. The white sign says: "Sale - gold for 12 Ls a gram". The yellow line in latvian: "Gold can't be cheaper". 

The guy or gal who decided to put such signs out isn't really good with psychology, is she? I mean, why do you buy gold? Because it's expensive! Saying "Discount jewellery" is the same as trying to sell Roll's Royces, using 10% off as an argument.

Win!

Just got back from Georgia. It seems that the hot trend in Tbilisi is to advertise not the product or brand itself, but lottery, which the brand or product has set up. Something that was popular here, in Latvia, several years ago.