On vacation last week I found myself in a discount book store where all titles were 40%-60% off. My son asked me about a specific book he was looking for and I explained to him that this wasn’t a typical kind of book store that had “best sellers.” It was only then that it dawned on me that the entire store was, for the most part, filled with brand failures. The books were either utter failures OR they were over produced by a long shot and the excess inventory needed to be moved at a discounted price.

I tried a little experiment and scanned an aisle or two … looking for books that passed a couple of subjective litmus tests; Was the cover really interesting or did it just blend in with all the other books around it? Did it follow “expected” book branding convention (more on this in a bit)? Did the title and sub-title engage me emotionally or hook me in some way?

Of course there were exceptions, but the vast majority of answers were “no”, “no” and “no”. Hmmmm.

I got home and took a gander at the Amazon.com Best Seller List and found a couple of things;

• There’s a strong correlation with cover design and the type of book (let’s call it “book branding”). For exmple, scan the list and look for all of the fiction novels. They all have a fairly abstract full cover image. The title covers 2/3 of the cover and the author’s name covers the rest (or vice versa). There’s almost no other text. Then, scan the list and look for all of the “famous people talking about their center of influence” books. There’s a prominent picture of them smiling, the titles are smaller and the subtitles are significantly longer. This applies especially for recipe, gardening and home improvement books. Again, there are exceptions to this, but it appears to be an implied convention.
• The most important point is that the overall presentations are MUCH more engaging … even those without imagery.

Does this type of analysis apply to you and your products and services? Should you be going out of your way to fully understand your entire market and identify if there are implied conventions? If there are conventions, will bucking them help you or hurt you? Do you reaallly need to jump through all of these analytical hoops? As they used to say on Laugh In, “you bet your sweet bippie!” I know, I just dated myselft … but you get the point.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 7:46 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.