Don't you wish you could spin this one for your friends?
The Onion’s A.V. Club recently ran a snarky little article, Vinyl is just a fad, record executives say, to belittle music industry insiders who fail to appreciate vinyl’s surprising resurgence in sales. Now, I love records, and spend probably too much time and money adding more vinyl to the thousands of lps that already line my walls. But, c’mon everybody, of course vinyl is a fad. Recent sales notwithstanding, is it really possible to imagine vinyl as a sustained medium for distributing music? We all know that in a few years, this vinyl resurgence will be one of the things people in decades to come will associate with the whacky 2010’s, like yoga pants or frozen yogurt franchises.
So I’m NOT suggesting that content marketers should add vinyl albums to their content mix. (Although the Rick Springield 45 was a nice speaker gift at Content Marketing World 2012.) But I do recommend that content marketers reflect on what this vinyl resurgence means: There’s a growing, unmet hunger for the tangible, the touchable, the physical in lives that have become waaaaaaaay too digital.
What might this content look like? Well, at Content Marketing World 2014, one of the exhibitors packaged their content ideas into a neat little stitched booklet about the size of a passport; it’s attractive look and feel made it one of the few swag items I carried home with me. I love the way Jordan’s Furniture turns their showrooms into family destinations complete with movie theaters, waltzing waters, trapeze swings and more. One of my own clients, Viessmann USA, runs hands-on classrooms that give heating/plumbing contractors direct experience serving and maintaining some of the world’s most sophisticated boilers.
These content producers operate in very different industries with different markets and purposes in mind. Yet each has found a way to use physical experience as an important part of the way they communicate value. How can you make the 3D world another dimension of your marketing?