One of the first tasks that journalism students tackle in class is to write their own obituary. That sounds a little macabre, but there’s a method to the madness – writing about yourself is considerably more difficult than writing about someone else. (In fact, the trick to writing your own obit is to pretend you’re writing it about someone else.)

Marketing yourself is a lot like that. For some reason (false modesty, a societal proscription against bragging, whatever), it’s a lot harder to market yourself than it is to market someone else. 

Recently, I’ve had the challenge to market myself, in order to build bookings for live, musical performance. It’s interesting, because while I am typically fearless when recommending marketing ideas to clients, when you’re doing it yourself, it’s a lot harder. But why? I have a theory (what a surprise!)…

When I pitch to clients, there’s an automatic checks-and-balances thing going on, that causes me to slow down a bit, and consider my recommendations. If I don’t have a rationale with data to back up my plans, the client would be likely to shoot them down, and lose confidence in me at the same time. When you market yourself, you have no check-and-balance system in place, to force you to consider things like “is this over the top.” 

What makes this interesting from a marketing perspective, though, is that I’m essentially “eating my own dog food.” It’s one thing to know the right thing for a client to do. It’s quite another when you have to pay for it yourself. This puts a whole new perspective on things. For instance, I created some posters for myself, to promote a recent gig. I had a concept, got my wife to help shoot the pictures, then created the poster. So far so good. Since I only needed a few, it was off to FedEx Kinko’s to print ‘em up. The cost was reasonable, but I had to weigh that cost against what I earned for playing. (No sense spending money on promotion, if it’s going to cut deeply into profits, especially without a guaranteed return on the marketing investment.) Once I saw where the restaurant hung the posters, I realized they had a previously unrecognized design flaw. I’d put the picture of me with my guitar on a black background. Very dramatic. Unfortunately, because the restaturant chose to hang the posters on the tinted glass of their front doors, it was difficult to see the artwork until you were only a couple of feet away from the glass. A higher-contrast design would be a much better bet, say – a white background. Not as dramatic, visually, but it would “read” much better through the tinted glass. 

So, you live and learn. It cost little for me to learn this lesson. Next time, I’ll keep the physical limitations of where the poster will be placed (I had no control over where they put them), when I’m designing the next batch. Like a lot of marketing, this is a case of a closed-loop feedback cycle: 

• Analyze the problem
• Propose a solution
• Execute the solution
• Analyze the result
• Adjust the solution to improve the results
• Test again, with modifications

Periodically, I’ll blog some more about how the self-promotion thing is working. Think of it as my own little marketing lab, with the results published here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under advertising, design, marketing, media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.