Marketing mix

You can use the marketing mix to define the ingredients you intend to use to sell your project. The marketing mix consists of 4 P’s: Product, Place (location), Promotion and Price. These four 4 P’s have to match with the target group(s) you want to reach. Personnel are sometimes seen as the fifth P. As a musician or ensemble you yourself are this P, and at the same time you are the P of product. Define your own marketing mix under these 4 or 5 headings.

Product
Describe the musical product, its quality and its special attributes. Think about characteristics and attributes that you can focus on in publicity. You can also ‘play’ with the shape of your musical product. Can you and will
you adapt the shape of your product in such a way that you appeal to certain target groups? Think for example about certain kinds of education or interdisciplinary and multi media approaches for a concert; additions such as lectures, introductions, audience participation etc. Making changes to a shape certainly does not have to mean making concessions to the quality of your product, but on the contrary could be a means of bringing your musical product closer to an audience. You have an interesting product, so why not market it in an interesting way!

Place (location)
Indicate where the project will take place or where the musical product can be obtained (distribution). Are the chosen locations popular? Maybe you want to choose locations where you can expect a great crowd anyway? Where do the ticket sales take place? Don’t forget the internet as a virtual market place. The place (location) can also be part of the product. This is the case if all concerts of a festival for example take place at very special venues, in mansions, churches, at unexpected locations or outside.

Promotion
How do you intend to promote your project? There are many means of communication that you can select by thinking of the target groups that are relevant to your product. You could use folders, brochures, flyers, advertisements in newspapers or specialist publications, posters and the internet. Also don’t forget free
publicity through newspapers, radio and TV as a result of the press releases you will send out. Also e-mail and sending text messages through mobile phones is an inexpensive way of letting a certain group of ‘customers’ know about your activity.
There are many ways of promoting products through the internet. From entering your project on portals focussed on your genre, news sites and the use of MySpace and YouTube. Sometimes you can make promotional material yourself, and sometimes it will be necessary to hire a professional. It goes without saying that you have to adapt the promotional means you will use to your available budget. You can always do something more, more beautiful or better, but you need to have the means for this. For more ideas, also read the section about publicity and media, print work and the one about the internet.

Price
What will you charge for your musical product(s)? Are there different prices for different target groups? Will you give students a discount on their entry ticket? Price is a way of differentiating by using various forms of discounts. You could use a passe-partout for a festival and discount coupons, if you can get a local newspaper to print them. You could also offer coupons on your own website, your MySpace page or in your digital newsletter, for example to trigger people to buy more CD’s at once (second at half price or get the second ticket for free).

Personnel
With this last aspect we mean the way personnel contribute to the image of the music product. In the first place this is you yourself, as a musician. But in a wider sense, this also applies to your entourage that has a certain image for the audience, but also for other target groups in the professional music practice. Do you have a manager, someone who is in charge of the equipment, someone who does the ticket sales? Perhaps you can get volunteers to contribute to your musical product. Your professional image, next to your own attitude, is also determined by (the use of) these people.