Know Your Audience

Samuel Goldwyn (of MGM fame) is frequently credited with coining the expression “Give the people what they want to see, and they’ll turn out for it,” on the occasion of Louis B. Mayer’s funeral. It’s almost certainly not true – the remark was recorded as having been said by comedian George Jessel in a newspaper article published at least 15 years earlier; what Goldwyn was actually quoted as saying on the occasion was that so many people had turned out for Mayer’s “because they wanted to be sure that Mayer was really dead.” As a piece of American mythology, however, the statement has always remained a favorite, and has led to generations of comedians, actors, writers and storytellers maintaining that in order to succeed, you really need to know your audience. By extension, we probably shouldn’t be all that surprised by the fact that a Radio Shack in Montana is having remarkable success with a give-away promotion involving guns…

If you’ve ever wondered whether satellite television providers like Dish Network subsidize local retailers and providers’ promotions, it would appear that you’re correct. In the story I picked up from the Billings Gazette website , it turns out that the Radio Shack in Hamilton (off of Interstate 93) is offering new Dish Network subscribers a free gun if they purchase or lease certain equipment and sign up for specific service plans. Anyone who can’t qualify to purchase a firearm (or does not want a gun) is given a Pizza Hut gift card of comparable value instead, which seems to be taking care of the anti-gun people for the moment – which, it must be acknowledged, isn’t as big a problem in Montana as it would be in some other states. Rather more interesting for us, however, is that while the Dish Network people were initially put off by the idea, the folks in the Hamilton area have responded with great enthusiasm, outselling the store owner’s wildest projections…

It’s a rather humorous way of coming around to the question of corporate management on a truly wide scale. The gun promotion in our linked story worked well enough in Montana, where a large segment of the population already have guns, and regard them simply as tools – which they are; a gun is an extreme efficient way of converting chemical potential energy into kinetic energy, which can be useful for a number of agricultural and wildlife-management applications. It’s not hard to imagine the same promotion working well in Fort Worth, Texas, where Radio Shack’s corporate headquarters is located, since Texans also have a long and romantic heritage of gun ownership (or at least embrace the mythology about gun ownership). But we can be fairly certain that this promotion would not work in any of the U.S. states with dense populations and strict gun control laws, and since Radio Shack is also active in South America, Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa, there’s no point in discussing a wide replication of this promotion, no matter how well it does in Montana…

Can Radio Shack come up with a similar promotion for other parts of the world? Offering gift cards alone probably won’t do it; this promotion succeeds the way it does because the idea is unusual enough (and jarring enough) to cut through the clutter of thousands of other advertising offers (and possibly dozens of loss-leaders) that a potential customer sees every day. At the same time, a free gun is obviously something that customers in Montana actually want, or the promotion would merely be notorious, not successful. To create an equivalent campaign in places where firearms are not as desirable, the company would have to come up with something that the local customers want, that no other merchant is likely to be giving away, and that will cut through the “noise” in the consumer atmosphere the way this offer does. It’s doubtful that the Marketing department in Fort Worth can do that for thousands of different communities around the world, each with its own ideas about what is desirable – and what is slightly disturbing. But their local or district managers probably could – if corporate management is willing to invest the money and take the chance of local blow-back when somebody tries the wrong promotion…

I’m not saying this sort of promotional program couldn’t succeed on a wide scale, assuming you had the right marketing experts, the right managers, and the budget to make it work. I’m just saying that to pull it off, you’d have to know your audience…