Richard Burgess, Director of Marketing & Sales

For-profit organizations are mostly driven by their marketing departments. Projects are based purely on projected sales and the bottom line: profit. Market research assesses sales potential, and should a product fail to meet expectations, it is deleted from the label's catalog. Folkways could not be more different. We are committed to keeping releases available even when we have low sales, and we frequently take on projects that have a limited audience but are considered important from a curatorial, cultural perspective.

So how do we do this? Our approach to marketing is not just about spending money on ad campaigns, retail sales programs, PR outreach, and radio, although these are all tools that we use on a daily basis. We're not trying to sell someone something they don't want. Marketing in our domain is more about understanding the special value in each product, figuring out who our potential customers/audiences might be, and matching the two up. So, marketing for Folkways involves finding a cost-effective way to say the right things, at the right time, to the right people.

Branding the record label itself also is a tool for effectively communicating the special value of our products and our mission to our customers. We are extremely fortunate to have inherited two highly respected brands, Smithsonian and Folkways. Our job is to nurture respect for those brands by maintaining the very highest curatorial standards in our recordings. Marketing's job is to maximize public awareness and availability of our releases and then define in people's minds their special value. The recorded music marketplace is extremely crowded. Last year SoundScan registered over 28,000 releases in the United States. This makes it very important for us to differentiate our releases from everyone else's.

How do we cut through the "noise" to reach those people who haven't yet discovered Folkways? The answer lies in the product, the first of the four
famous commercial marketing P's — product, pricing, placement (distribution), and promotion. The seed of a successful marketing campaign is embedded at the core of the product itself. Each recording should be an engaging, informative, and memorable experience featuring wonderful music and incisive notes. Then we need to "shout loudly" to get over the "retail noise." This involves design and visual branding. Each time a customer has a good experience with one of our recordings, he or she mentally or emotionally associates that good experience with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Each new recording needs to be of the same high standard and then branded, so the next time that customer sees one of our recordings in a store, in an ad, or on the Web, they mentally r emotionally link it with the good experience they had with the prior recording. It goes without saying that the visual elements need to be consistent with and complementary to the music.

Since marketing and sales is the arena in which we come head-to-head with the free market system, our challenge is to play by enough of those rules to survive, but not so many of them that we become indistinguishable from other labels and lose sight of our organizational values. Marketing and sales should never be at odds with the nonprofit mission. At the same time, the balancing act occasioned by the nonprofit, curatorial-driven mission juxtaposed with the needs of the marketplace often produces a creative curatorial/
marketing dialogue that is both informing and enriching to all concerned.

More information on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

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