When You Know It's Not Going to Work: Marketing for Fun

What a wild and improbable sentiment: marketing for fun!

All right, now that I've effectively alienated people who love marketing and pursue it as a passion, I can finally talk to the marketing layperson like me (I see you onlooking marketing lovers, just waiting to condemn me for my poor execution of your passion. Go ahead, comment below, tell the world how cruel and evil I am. I dare you!).

As I've addressed in the past, I hate marketing. It's not my main skillset; it's just a necessary element of turning my actual skillset into a career. So, might as well have some fun with it, right? Probably wrong. Probably, I should be focussing on things that work, reading books on successful marketing, even hiring someone who knows what the hell they're doing. But screw that.

Fun!

And that's why I've been doing what I like to call "long-term marketing" (i.e. marketing that doesn't work right now but will one day...I'm sure...).

This started a few years ago when I was playing around on Printify and made myself some shirts. I started distributing these to friends and family (specifically, Spruce Road shirts). I played around with a few other merchandise ideas as well, including cups, mugs, and pens. The pens, I use as a makeshift business card. The rest of my ideas haven't really panned out so well.

Sometimes, my friends will all wear the shirts together. In fact, I even made a sale directly from one of those occasions when a very drunk man passed by a group of us, asked after our shirts, and immediately bought a book that he probably never read.

On the whole, though, this merchandise hasn't made me many sales (hence why I call it long-term marketing). The hope, naturally, is that one day, when I've built up a sizeable following, shirts like this will be commonplace and people who see them will immediately jump online to purchase a book. For now, however, they serve as little more than a friendly gift that may or may not ever be worn in front of people who haven't heard of me yet. ("It's a great sleeping shirt," at least two of my friends have said, and I ask if the monster under the bed might be open to buying a book...)

These limitations won't stop me, though. After all, some of the merchandise is quite useful. The pens work well (thank you, VistaPrint) and they're easy to leave around. Who doesn't need a pen? In fact, I left a few pens at a pub quiz once and several weeks later a friend found one there, still in distribution for dozens to see.

The greatest trouble I've found with this kind of marketing is the price. Ideally, I will get to a point where this merchandise is available for purchase. For now, it only sees the light of day if I order it myself. And as anyone who's ever tried to make something through a printing service can attest to: it's expensive. I've spent thousands and earned very little. It's a long game. I'll keep trying. But the prohibitive price definitely slows the marketing potential.

Certainly, I would not recommend this style of marketing to anyone just getting started. But that doesn't mean I'll stop. That said, it might be time to try something new, perhaps actually getting books into people's hands. Hopefully, soon I'll have an update for you on how that goes.

As for my current failing passion, I'll open it up to you, gentle reader: should I make my merchandise available for purchase? Or is the setup fee just another unnecessary cost in the short-term? Let me know below.