[Resource of the Day] – Why Cartoony Doesn’t Cut It For Kids

It might surprise you to know that from the ages of 8-12, most kids prefer photographs to comics, live-action television to cartoons, and non-fiction books to fiction books.

It surprised me when I first learned about it during my research for Army Ant Publishing. And I found out about it in the worst possible way, too — I had already come up with the idea of starting a comic book company for kids, and I wanted to make my first story a cartoonish adventure series featuring my dog, Ramses, a spunky little pup who would be smarter than his owners, but always thwarted by his love for peanut butter.

But unlike a lot of people who want to start companies, I wasn’t content to develop a product and then test it with children. So, I started researching what children were into, and when I visited my mother’s second grade class for a monthly young author’s writing workshop I was teaching, I would ask kids what they were into.

I got the responses I expected, of course — the kids loved Spider-Man, and Pokemon, and Spongebob, and all of the things that marketers work so hard to get in front of them. A lot of them were obsessed with video games, and many of the girls were into Hannah Montana and shopping at Club Libby Lu. But what surprised me was that many of the children were also interested in animals and nature. They enjoyed nonfiction books, and when I looked at the books they enjoyed reading, I noticed that they enjoyed the books with realistic artwork over those with cartoonish artwork.

This was very interesting to me, especially once I started seeing articles such as this piece from Newsweek, which talks about a publisher that gave the “Little House on the Prairie” books a makeover to suit the tastes of modern children. The publisher decided to replace the classic Garth Williams illustrations on the cover with more photorealistic covers that conveyed a sense of adventure. Other publishers of literary children’s books followed suit. The article even quotes two children who approve of the change:

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[Business Planning] Seven Ways to Find Demographic Information

If you’re in the process of starting a new business, or if you already have one and you’re trying to expand it, chances are good that you’ve come up against one of the toughest questions in the process:

“What are my customers like?”

Big companies always seem to have exactly the right answer when they’re asked this. “We’re very big with the 18-24 male segment, though we can skew as high as 34,” a marketing rep might say. “We’ve seen a lot of growth in the East Coast market, and we’re noticing a particularly large amount of interest with men who have at least 1-2 years of college under their belt. An emerging secondary market comes from young professionals who like to read, but who don’t have the time to get into full-blown novels.”

Huh? How did they find all this information, and how do they know it’s accurate? Are they polling all their customers somehow, or do they have some secret source of demographic information that the rest of us don’t know about?

I used to wonder about that too, but then I took a class on marketing research. Now, since I was old enough to start filling our product registration cards and to say “no” to people trying to get me to take a poll in the mall, I’ve been aware of the field of marketing research. And, like most folks, I’ve even been resentful of it, at times, because it seems like a practice that only big companies with too much money can afford to engage in.

I won’t say my class turned me around on this viewpoint entirely; marketing research is extremely expensive, and it really is something that most small companies can’t afford to do on a regular basis. But the class piqued my interest enough that I’ve joined the Master in Marketing Research (MMR) program at SIU-Edwardsville starting this fall, and I know enough about the field now that I can dispel some of the myths… and tell you how even a small company can use basic marketing research tools to describe his or her customers.

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[Resource of the Day] — The Changing Consumer

Today’s article: The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer
by Peter Francese
Source: Advertising Age.com

The other day, I posted up an article about rethinking WHY consumers buy. Today, I want to offer an article that talks about who these consumers are.

One of my frustrations in dealing with many small publishers is that they create products without deciding whom they’re trying to develop them for. Often when I’ve talked to people trying to pitch comics and I ask them, “who’s your target audience for this?”, they have a vague idea at best about who they expect to pick up their book every month.

As I’ve said many times on this site, one of the most important aspects of developing a product is developing your marketing. And in order to do that, you’ll need to develop an STP plan (segmenting, targeting and positioning). And in order to do THAT, you’ll need to understand the base of consumers available.

But before you get started, you need to realize something rather important: that demographic of 16-24 that most US comic book creators want to attract? They’re actually a pretty small market right now compared to the rest of the US population. The two biggest consumer markets right now are ages 35-44 and 45-54; they account for 49% of consumer spending in the US. And over the next ten years, these groups are going to shrink as these consumers enter the 55+ demographic… and shift from a consumer mentality to a service mentality.

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[Resource of the Day] – Rethinking Consumer Behavior

This summer, I’m finishing my undergraduate degree in Business Administration (with an emphasis on Marketing) and preparing myself for graduate school, where I’ll be working towards my Master in Marketing Research (MMR) degree. I actually only needed to take three classes this summer to get enough credits to move on, but I decided to add a fourth, “Consumer Behavior,” because I thought it would be an important class to take.Sadly, the class text doesn’t have a lot of “meat” to it, and though it includes some models for consumer decision-making, they’re extremely abstract and don’t seem to reflect reality very well. At first, I thought that the problem was that I didn’t understand the subject. But coincidentally, while I’ve been taking this class, I’ve been reading a book called Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein. While my consumer behavior text focuses on how consumers select goods and make purchases, this book focuses on the decision-making process in general, attempting to build a model for how decisions are made (primarily under pressure) and the steps that people take to evaluate alternatives.

What’s interesting is that the two books are entirely at odds with one another. And what’s even worse is that Sources of Power seems to be much closer to the truth. I guess I could have saved myself some time and money by reading it before I enrolled in my Consumer Behavior class. But actually, it’s valuable to know the “textbook” theories of consumer behavior… because I’ll know what to expect my competitors to do down the road.
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[Business Planning] – Great New Ways of Doing Old Business

I talk a lot about publishing on this blog, but my research isn’t restricted to the publishing world alone — as a business student, I’ve had the chance to study a lot of companies in a large number of industries. In fact, one thing we get to do in business school is what are called “case studies” — we’re given a historical crossroads in a company’s life, filled in on the information leading up to a decision that needs to be made, and asked what we’d recommend using the tools we’ve learned in class. For someone like myself, who enjoys strategic planning and evaluation, it’s tremendous fun. But what often frustrates me is that my classmates are so eager to figure out the answer that the instructor is looking for that they don’t approach the problem creatively.

Sadly, this happens a lot in the business world. Managers find themselves in the unenviable role of having to appease stock owners, and they focus on the mantra of, “maximize profits, minimize costs.” This has led to a lot of bad decision-making, and it’s also led to a lot of good companies taking a plunge once they reach a point of maturity where they can no longer sustain rapid growth.

What I find most interesting, however, are companies that are able to look at old industries and find new ways to compete in them. I’m going to give three examples today of companies that have done a great job of thriving in mature markets by redefinig the way they do business. I’m also going to discuss some of the ways that an enterprising young publisher might redefine the publishing industry.

But let’s start with an example from another industry first: Build-A-Bear Workshop.

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Why WALL-E is a Success, Both Artistically And Commercially

I’ve never understood America’s love affair with summer blockbusters — year after year, the summer releases are largely made up of the most overhyped, under-ripe films Hollywood can deliver. This is particularly sad when you consider that most of the movies released in the summer are either sequels to successful films, remakes of old films, or licensed from a popular novel, TV show, video game or comic book.

The category of animated children’s films is particularly dismal, and most are barely worth remembering, let alone paying $8.50 to get in the door. Sure, every now and then you get a Shrek or a Lilo and Stitch, which is well animated and smartly written. But most of the time, studios put out films like Madagascar or Chicken Little, which are little more than a string of sight gags tacked on to a bunch of one-liners read by celebrities. Sometimes, you even get films like last year’s Meet the Robinsons, which bore the distinction of being both poorly animated and wretchedly written, despite the fact that it came from Disney, who should really know better.

I’m a big fan of animation, whether it’s CG or cel, and I hate to see the category being filled with so much dreck. The film industry treats these films like 90 minute fables that wrap sugary, forgettable jokes around a moral center that leaves a bitter aftertaste. I mean, really, how many more films can be made with the theme, “be true to yourself,” or “be nice to other people”? Do the people producing these films really think children want these moral platitudes? Is it really worth bludgeoning the audience with a lesson at the end just to appease the few soccer moms who want to be able to say, “Now didn’t that movie have a nice message?”

Since so many of these films exist, it’s almost a futile question to ask. Clearly, since so many of these movies are made, that must be what the audience wants, right?

I might have come to this conclusion had it not been for one studio that never sinks to the level of its competition (or its parent company!). This is a studio that dominates the CG half of the category, though I have no doubts that they would be equally good at cel animation if they chose to try their hand at it. This is a studio that has produced so many hits so consistently that even its weaker films are on a whole different level from the rest of the stuff out there.

This studio is Pixar, and I’m pleased to say that they’ve achieved yet another triumph with their latest film, WALL-E.

And though the film is receiving near-universal praise, it’s also receiving a lot of criticism from people who are saying that the film’s environmental overtones are too pronounced and that it has an anti-consumerism agenda.

I disagree, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. But I’d also like to point out that if you look closer at Pixar films, you’ll discover that all of their films have something deeper to share than just a neat story…

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