Marketing Methods By Tom Colohue. Part Eight: Pros And Cons Of The Dirty Image

IIf you’re here to look into new and different methods by which you can market your band or artist. You’ve come to the right place. I’m Tom Colohue, and this is Marketing Methods; your guide to traversing the basics of the marketing world while avoiding the pitfalls, the traps and the unreasonable arseholes in it.

Pros And Cons Of The Dirty Image

There are a lot of people guilty of it, ranging from film stars to factory workers, but it’s a proven fact that showing off a bit of the bad boy style can work to marvellous effect.

Photo credit: Ryan Russell

It works with the ladies, it works with the fans and, as long as it’s not directed at them, it even works to bolster your marketability with your direct rivals, but there is a downside. There’s a line that you need to be aware of, and that line is what this piece covers.

Respect is one of the most important things that you can display if you’re trying to get a booking. Biting the heads off of bats in a packed stadium might be ridiculously cool, but biting the head off of a guinea pig owned by the twelve year old daughter of a booking agent is never going to get you very far, is it? You can’t afford to treat venue owners and talent scouts in the same way that you treat your fans because that’s just going to lead you onto a sinking ship.

Marketability is what gets an act signed. This goes in two ways. One way is for the fans, and for them, you need to stand out from the crowd. A clean metal act is just strange, while a classical opera singer who admits to cocaine-fuelled nights in with fourteen prostitutes and a family of pigs is more likely to just be cannon fodder on Buzzcocks than a success of any sort. You need to suit the needs of your fans, but you also need to suit the needs of the press, publicity and venue options.

The rule is fairly simple; treat officials like your mother, treat fans like your girlfriend.

Half of a relationship is spent with one side attempting to impress the other. With music, that’s almost exactly the point. Impress. Show off, do what you can and make yourself look as cool, as hot or as dangerous as you feel you need to be in order to impress the people you want.

However, that doesn’t work when it comes to people of official stature. They want to hear respect in your voice, and see dignity in your posture, like your mother does.

It’s a weird rule, but it works.

A good example of a successful bad boy image is Russell Crowe. People follow his life with avid interest in order to see who he’s going to punch next, but, behind the scenes, he’s still earning work.

A bad example is Charlie Sheen. Let’s not even go any deeper into that.

Tom Colohue is a writer from Blackpool, England. Though he specialises in Fiction, he also writes music theory articles, and new media articles based primarily on the internet. On occasion, these also intermingle. He is well recognised by numerous critics and analysts for his integrative descriptive work and his cynical textual mannerisms. For more information, Tom Colohue keeps a Facebook Fan Page, which contains updates from new articles and his personal blog, Mental Streaming. This page can be found via this link.

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