Brandable Me

Well, it has been some time between posts. It was summer, I had an art show and I was obsessed with finishing some paintings, have a look at http://pk2kart.blogspot.com to see my recent single-minded focus. 

My big learning over the summer was about consumer marketing. It is field where I have had very little experience as most of my career has been in government or government-funded environments. These have been largely business to business corporate communications models.

But this summer, I held an art show of my work over the last year - my severance and EI show I informally called it, but the public name was Reflections on Windows. Here's what I learned.

First, marketing is all about a differentiated brand promise. Well, I certainly learned that as a individual, being able to talk about my passion for visual art was an immediate differentiator. All of a sudden, I had a subject to talk about people in my network. In fact, they almost always bring it up in our conversations and meetings, asking what I am working on, when is my next show and how I find ideas or work with my materials. I have actually been quite surprised at the interest it has created. It's a little bit of buzz marketing almost every day.

Second, as I organized a show, I had to tell people about it. And here is where more consumer marketing discoveries happened. Like others, I have hundreds of email, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. Well, I had to invite them and if they could not come, provide a web locations for them to look at the paintings in the show. As a result, one of the things I finally got around to was a blog about my paintings (see reference in first line). I have been delaying this for quite some time, but it was a necessity. And I needed some print products as well. So I had to design it, get it printed and distribute and then remind people, answer their emails and basically organize a campaign all about me!

As marketing needs to be measured, here's my assessment. On the failure side, my reception was a bust. I put it on Sunday, July 4. Big mistake, weekday evenings are the best, so next time it will be Thursday and I'm sure I will get out some folks. On the positive side, I may sell as many as three of the eight paintings, which would be great and about as good as I can expect at this point of my development. And now I have postcards that can serve as business cards, a blog and lots more people who know I paint and ask me what I'm working on. One of my discoveries is that for artists, having a show is really the litmus test of whether you are really one or not. Following both my shows (last year and this year), I had sales inquiries from people who did not even attend! It's just that in the public mind, if you have a show, you are somehow a real artist. I would have never found that out without doing it myself.

Overall, the show was a lot of work in many non-communications areas, but also in my own profession, teaching me the dynamics of branding and marketing in a way that could not be more personal. Thanks for reading!