Thursday, May 13, 2010 Scissors and tape meet Facebook — Marketing lessons from the Sex Pistols
My husband, Chris, was having computer problems. He was trying to design a poster for our upcoming show at Club Garibaldi’s, and everything was wrong — wrong program, wrong logo, missing photo, everything. I went to my computer, cranked open Pages, and started looking through poster templates. But I was still missing a logo and a photo and frankly I’m not a graphic designer.
“Do you have any of your pre-printed posters left?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, but it doesn’t have your band’s info on it.” My band, Fake Goddess Friday, is hitting the stage for the first time, as an opening act for his band, Shattered, a Rolling Stones tribute act. “I suppose we could take the Sex Pistols approach and cut letters from the newspaper,” he said. For those of you born after 1977, Chris was referring to this.)
For the next half-hour we cut letters from last Sunday’s New York Times and stuck them on the poster with double-stick tape. Re-enter technology, stage left: Chris scanned the now-completed poster, created a PDF, sent it to Kinko’s and got the posters printed and delivered to the club. The PDF, of course, has already been distributed via e-mail and Facebook (soon to hit MySpace, LiveJournal, and now Converge). So what can we take from this experience?
Marketing lessons from the Sex Pistols
- Use ALL of the marketing tools you have. Sometimes that’s going to be a pair of scissors.
- Be brief, fast and loud. Too much information is like a long boring guitar solo.
- Convey a strong brand personality, even if some people don’t like it. But to see if we succeeded, you’ll have to come see the show.
- Tailor your message to the medium. The poster is missing a few details because it was designed for display at the club. Which leads us to …
- Get your target audience involved. Other distribution channels allow our friends to participate in our marketing by including more details, like the full name of the club and its address (Club Garibaldi’s, 2501 S. Superior St., Milwaukee, WI 53207), the style of music (power pop/punk), and their relationship to the band.
- See if you can get your band’s name to be bigger than your husband’s band’s name even though they are the headlining act.
Malcolm McLaren would be so proud.
advertising, creative, marketing in Marketing 
Reader Comments (3)
don't try and tell me that there ain't a template for "punk style cut out newsprint based poster" they've violated every other type of art, why not this.......
Why don't you print it in wing-dings then people have to scan it, highlight the text and convert it in order to be able to read it....hang on , that would be just another excuse to stay home , eat pizza and have a root on the couch........
Wisdom! Especially pearl #6. This looks AWESOME. You are both wizards.
Wow! She is a marketing goddess....