Late to the Bob Dylan game, I recently bought his three-CD set of unreleased material, The Bootleg Series 1961-1991. The included booklet of photos, song descriptions and credits features a scanned brochure of Columbia Records’ marketing suggestions from 1965, the year Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone” and went electric on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. It’s bracing to remember every popular musician is coveted first by the biz for his “artist product,” but really this list is just funny.
IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . .
We have all tried “different” avenues of exposure in promoting our artists and artist product. You have probably done some of these “different” types of promotion on Bob Dylan, but have you tried. . .
- Getting your accounts to position Bob Dylan product in other areas of their stores besides in the folk music section, such as with The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, etc. This will afford the customer a better chance to do some impulse buying.
- Contacting musical instrument outlets and persuading them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in conjunction with their guitar, harmonica and sheet music displays.
- Contacting radio personalities in your area that have “Americana”-type shows and pointing out to them the merits of featuring Bob Dylan in an American Heritage theme.
- Getting in touch with the casual wear buyers in department stores and men’s stores and convincing them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in their clothing displays. His dress may be considered “kooky” by conventional standards, but kooky or not he is a motivating force of the youth of today, and they like to emulate their leaders.
- Contacting the little theater groups and drama groups in your area to convince them that readings of the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs would be presenting modern poetry in its finest form.
- Getting in touch with the local newspaper culture editors and showing them the merits of doing a piece built around Bob Dylan, using a changing times theme.
- Putting your ads in your local newspapers on Bob Dylan is [sic] unusual areas of the paper such as on the sport page, the women’s section or even the financial section...after all, he does mean money...for us at least.
- Putting Bob Dylan displays with displays of men’s boots (he wears them all the time), sunglasses (he wears them all the time) or ANYWHERE that they will attract attention.
Be Different—He Is!