Marketing a New Artist

We had a class discussion about the marketing techniques used for new boyband One Direction. Here are some of the most important things we learnt and discussed.

Firstly we made a list of all the things SYCO (their management label) had to work with, the things that One Direction had, fresh after finishing third place in the 2010 X Factor final:

• Primetime exposure - X Factor's viewing figures are huge... 17 million people tuned in for the final
• Public goodwill - lots of people had watched them progress and voted for them
• The backstory - all five auditioned individually and didn't make it into the final 'boys' category but the producers decided to put them together and enter them as a group. This meant that many viewers would already have been a fan of some of them individually, especially Liam and Harry whose auditions were shown and publicised.
• Individual personalities and styles - everyone has a favourite!
• Mix of ethnicities and regions - mostly Northern English/Midlands except Niall who is Irish. Zayn is Asian (possibly only half?) and the rest are white.

One Direction on X Factor

 Things we have to bear in mind when marketing our new artist:

• The product SYCO are trying to sell is the music itself. -> the core product.
• Everything else is marketing eg. concert tickets, merch, etc.
• One Direction are a great example of a band who have been marketed using 360-degree marketing, hitting target audiences from all angles with a complete marketing campaign 
• SYCO have successfully utilised Web 2.0 for One Direction's marketing campaign to effectively target their young fanbase and allow them to immerse themselves in the interactivity of their website and social network links.
• Their official website (http://www.onedirectionmusic.com/) is the hub of the entire marketing campaign, so the website we create for our new artist as part of the coursework will be extremely important.

The marketing campaign must have worked as their debut tour sold out in minutes, despite only having released one single, so we should definitely follow SYCO's example of a great debut artist's marketing campaign.