Radiohead King of Limbs - Marketing and Design

This post is about marketing and web page design - the takeaways are:

• If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you
• If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it
• Set expectations and then over deliver

Marketing (Part 1)

Radiohead are notorious for their lack of communication, they have the best signal to noise ratio of any band I know.  This means that when they do communicate, people comment on it.

The band announced the release of their new album with a simple blog post on their website on Monday.  I don't regularly visit Radiohead's website, but I found out about the record’s existence from a news aggregator on Tuesday.

Marketing (Part 2)

I read eleven music related aggregators and I receive three of them in email format, the rest are RSS feeds. I scan their headlines every morning and if something catches my eye I dig deeper.

Pretty much every one carried the story about Radiohead's new album and in every format I was able to click through to the band's website.  Once I had verified the information and pre-ordered the record, I then tweeted to my network about it.  Over the next two days I saw people in my own network going through the same experience and tweeting and blogging about the record to their network.

Design (Part 1)

When I arrived on the King of Limbs website I immediately knew that I was dealing with the band:

Band name (brand) is big and easily identified – the text is simple and straightforward and the graphic immediately funnels your attention to the purchase process.  Note how there is no menu navigation – there is only one way off this page and you choose it by identifying which market you are – brilliant!

Design (Part 2)

There are two products on offer – the higher margin one is presented first, but again – look how clean and simple the language is.  Look at the relative size between the title and the text and the information delivered.  There are only two visible buttons on this page – the pre order and order button – there is no doubt what the purpose of this page is.

Although menu navigation does make an appearance it is super simple – no drop down menus, no multiple options, simple and clean.  The rest of the purchase flow is just as easy – there are no “up sells”, no additional offers and no superfluous requests for information.

Marketing (Part 3)

When Radiohead announced the new album on the 14th, they said it would be available on Saturday 19th.

When I woke up this morning and looked at my network on Twitter I saw that people were already listening to the album.

http://twitter.com/thebluesage/status/38611832986025984

I immediately went to the site and saw that they had released a day early, I downloaded the album, started listening and immediately told my network the news.

By exceeding the expectations that they themselves had set, they delighted me and made me feel good about the whole experience.

Takeaways

If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you

If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it

Set expectations and then over deliver

Simple huh!

Last Man Standing…

..or Woman It has been an auspicious month for Kilted Chaos – Alex and I met for the first time – our articles of incorporation finally arrived, signed by Wyoming’s secretary of state – we’re delivering on 3 major corporate projects across three different countries and we have a kick ass creative genius that we’re nurturing. An overnight success that took 3 years!

Over the next month we will be re-branding Kilted Chaos, we won’t be losing the chaos sphere or our rather irreverent approach to business, but we will be making it easier for companies to understand what it is we do. We’ll be taking the lessons that we have learned while working with clients big and small over the years and applying them to ourselves. It’s the words – “lessons we have learned over the years” - that form the basis of this post. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small business or an independent band – it is the lessons you learn by actually doing it that eventually shape what you become.

Alex and I first met online 3 years ago, I can’t remember the community – could have been Craig’s list, could have been a Wordpress message board, but he delivered a solution to a problem I had and did it in a way that made me want to engage back. Over the years we have built a relationship based on the equitable delivery of work product – we have learned how to communicate using email and Skype, we know how to disagree with each other, how to motivate each other, we’ve educated each other in new areas and as a result, we have a company that solves problems for many different types of organizations.

Over the years we have watched people and companies come and go – we’ve seen “Gurus” rocket to stardom for a couple of months and then just as quickly disappear – we’ve watched the aggressive self-promoters last a little longer but ultimately suffer the same fate – and yet all the while – we’ve been getting better and better at what we do.

The thing is – at some point – you have to actually deliver – or as Seth Godin says – you have to ship. Your sites have to work – your product has to actually rock!

We love this paradigm – both in business and in music – sure, right now – there’s a million different things competing for attention – but eventually – the wannabees, the poseurs, the douches, the people who are in it for the fast buck – they’re going to die out because they can’t sustain. We’ll be left with the people who kept at it – who did it – who didn’t give up, who learned from their mistakes and got better, who actually know how to make shit work and to make shit rock.

Facebook Fatigue

Thought we’d take a few minutes to update on the marketing of @DrasticJo and reflect on a recent Facebook campaign. Jo has an album coming out in November and we’re tasked with finding the people who would like it and developing a relationship with them so that they will buy it.

Tommy Silverman recently made the case in Wired magazine that 80% of the music out there currently is crap – that the signal to noise ratio is so bad that it’s practically impossible for the good acts to break. Clearly one’s definition of good is purely subjective – but it does mean that the value of a personal recommendation becomes even greater.

As part of Jo’s campaign we built out a new Facebook page and wanted to let her friends know about it. We hijacked her personal account – put in a new profile image and sent a message out to all 500+ of her friends asking them to sign up for the mailing list and become a fan of the new page - You can see a copy of the message we sent here

The result: 25 new likes on the fan page and 1 new email address. Even better – one of her friends commented on her wall that they felt the message was Spam. Not exactly what we were going for.

The takeaway for us is that unless the message is personally tailored to each individual recipient – then it gets classified as band spam. Sure we could have spiced up the text – added more of a giveaway – thrown in a video etc, but I don’t think it would have made much difference. We were banking on Facebook friends having a deeper connection and being willing to help – but ultimately it felt like a MySpace campaign and is not something we’ll be repeating.

That’s not to say that we’ll be giving up though – we still believe that it is better to deepen the existing relationships than it is to develop more shallow connections. The value of a true fan throughout an artist’s lifetime cannot be underestimated, it’s apparent that we need to invest more in them at this stage than just a cut and paste form message.

We’ll let you know how well the next approach works out.