Hello Jazz Friends,

Welcome back once again to another jazz music marketing post. Before we delve into the subject of marketing research, I feel that it’s important to really define what the term marketing really means.

Some common mistakes being made in defining this term is to equate it with advertising or selling. Advertising is merely a segment of marketing although an important component. Marketing is also in no way related to being a great salesperson. We’ll elaborate on the topic of sales in later posts.

In it’s most simple definition, marketing is satisfying or fulfilling a customer need. It’s important for jazz musicians to view fans as mutual partners. A broader definition of marketing is to establish, maintain and enhance relationships with fans or customers, for profit, so that the wants, needs, and desires of all parties involved are met.

The process in which the mutual relationship between jazz performer and audience is achieved successfully is through market orientation. Once you begin to understand where your existing and future fan base congregates, the better you can maximize and leverage your music marketing efforts.

Here are some ways to truly segment a jazz music audience:

Demographics – age, gender, income, ethnicity, marital status, education, occupation, household size, length of residence, social status

Geographic – city, state, zip code, county, region, location

Psychographic – attitudes, lifestyle, hobbies, personality traits, leadership traits, magazines read, TV programs

Behavioral   – brand loyalty, usage level, benefits sought

Geo-Demographic – analysis of individuals by location. Combines geographic information with both demographics and even lifestyle information.  

With that in mind here are some free tools that can be utilized for jazz market research.

Trade Publications:

For this type of research, simply go and visit the magazine rack of any bookstore and locate any jazz music or music industry magazines possible. These magazines can also be found at the public library. Also inquire about non mainstream publications with a reference librarian.

Homes.com: 

Although this is obviously not a music related site, it is very powerful because you can obtain some very detailed information pertaining to market segmentation by typing in a particular zip code using the neighborhood and schools tab.

The neat thing about this tool is that every piece of niche information by zip code is charted graphically. Be sure to bookmark this site. It’s going to helpful in the future for creating direct mail campaigns and scouting additional performance opportunities.

American Fact Finder:

The majority of market segment information can be obtained from government websites. A powerful resource is the US Census Bureau. Again, everything from population, demographics, social, and income status is right here.

This is definitely another website that should be bookmarked without question.

All this talk of market research, segmentation, niche targeting may seem a little boring and trivial, but as jazz musicians today, we cannot afford to observe our audiences solely from the bandstand. Doing these initial pieces of homework will not only provide you with more comprehensive knowledge of your target audience, it will serve as way to build more loyal, dedicated fans and keep those bank accounts full.

Blessings and continue to research.

Keep Swinging!

Andre Hayward

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Niche Marketing, Offline Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.