The Passion Pop Curve

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This comes from the blog of marketing guru Seth Godin - the full post is here and here's the curve:



"The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither.

A delta blues guy who plays for tiny audiences in Memphis is in the sweet spot of the passionate. John Mayer is in the sweet spot of pop. Both are great guitarists, neither is too edgy or too trite. Both made a choice. But there are a thousand guitarists who are neither. They're afraid to embrace one curve or the other and end up with neither."

Presented (for now) without comment. Over to you!

Comments

Re: does this salvage it?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

He is broadly saying this but he's extending it from the two markets being defined by wealth to their being defined by taste, sensibility, appreciation (what he's calling "passion"). He's basically suggesting that crossover between minority and majority tastes is, if not doomed, at least very fraught.

(Obviously taste *is* defined very much by wealth but Godin's argument is flawed even before we open that can of luxury worms.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the history of pop of course being the history of minority tastes becoming the mainstream (and vice versa) (cf anythony's b&w minstrel show post)

i actually do find this kind of model useful in a how-not-to-think-abt-it kind of a way

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What's interesting I think is that if you DO think about it in this way, can it become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

I also wonder if this isn't a better map of how consumers THINK they act than how they actually act.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think this is the cultural capital argument -- byebyepride to thread) -- where taste is considered to map onto accrued status within the relevant in-group

but even here the attempt to generalise about in-groups is a problem -- a map of pop is a map of historical specifics

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

1 majority of a niche audience will leave you if you go for popularity
- this has the ring of truth in 'before they sold out' winges

2 majority of a wide-umbrella audience will leave you if you go for boutique
- ???

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well there are a fair number of pop examples of #2 - Dazzle Ships for instance! - but of course the leaving in #2 is less permanent than in #1, usually.

The weirdest part of the curves as Godin presents them is the far right - who does he think goes here??

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

GPWM :-) i was thinking of 'selling out' and 'alienation' as the motors, yet i couldn't for the life of me think of examples of alienation. brain fried from cold and the sunshine.