Firstly, as I travel around in the back of Mr.Man's Ute, I have been studying a lot of little towns around the country to see what they do and where our town might pick up a tip or two. There's the Big Gumboot at Tully, the Elvis Festival at Parkes, Cow Patty Bingo or a Poop Pool.
I even attended the Big Ute Muster up near Deniliquin with my wool dyed Gun-metal Grey and pretending to be a Blue Heeler. There are Fringe Festivals for those with pony tails and Pyramid Festivals for those who believe only in the esoteric like Madoona. There are Art Festivals that feature such world famous artists as Usha Seejarim and Bongi Bengu. There is Nude Olympics at Maslin Beach, Tuna Tossing at Port Lincoln, Gumboot Tossing, Midget Tossing and Wife Swapping somewhere. If these under-developed villages can do it so can we.
To get myself up to speed after being transported to Golden Plains I even attended a local Marketing Seminar last year at Scarsdale Pub sponsored by our beloved Council. That in itself was a remarkable experience. You may have met the type, marketing people like me I mean. Extreme extroverts constantly smiling and never sitting still for more than a few seconds, talking ten to the dozen and, if they are that way inclined will call you 'Darling'. They have a way of bouncing around the room so that your eyes rattle like pinballs, more than likely dressing in the latest teen fashions which don't suit them, shimmy a lot, try to make you sing stupid songs and convince you that the Telephone Cleaners are the ears of your Sales Team.
We are ideas people. We can contemplate our navel for days, daydreaming comes easy to us, we use our imagination not or brains. Don't ask us to put anything into action. We Market Products we don't do action, we don't do work, to be exact we don't 'DO' anything.
Beside sometimes citing the bleeding obvious, marketing is about selling your product to an unsuspecting public, we can also impart some knowledge that it takes prospective customers five looks at an add before it sinks in permanently, thus the need to advertise at least five times in the Herald or that Direct Mail is by far the most effective means of advertising (the Herald goes to individual letterboxes), and offering free coffee to entice people into your shop is cost effective. How little does a cup of coffee cost if you’ve got the time to chat with potential buyers?
See … I'm marketing again without thought. I don't do 'serious thinking'.
Offering Free Coffee does not always work if you are a Barister (Coffee Maker not those who wear curly wigs) Grocer or Take-away shop.
Maybe some non-sensical tourist attracting activities might inject some of that country spirit into many of our more mundane and sedentary pursuits like watching the grass grow or even eating it like I do.
And now I get serious. A month or so back, and the reason why there has been a break in the publication of my column I unintentionally upset several humans in Linton with some of my more 'madcap' material. Whilst I do not retract anything that I said I will say that as a sheepish animal who abhors confrontation I certainly did not set out to upset but rather to entertain and if some people who are devoid of a sense of humour have taken offence then I apologise.
My feelings about newspapers are that they must represent all of the people and print both sides of a story where possible. There is a grim future in store for the print media in the next decade as the major papers increase their price or reduce their circulation to the point of only being available on the Internet. The outlook for National and Metropolitan Newspapers is eventual extinction.
I would expect that Regional and Local Newspapers and Newsletters will need to also undergo fundemental changes. As local news and views will no longer be seen in the major papers, smaller newspapers (and I include The Miner and The Courier in this) will be the only available outlets for local information. Internet Service Providers that feature the latest news whenever we activate our Internet connection will not bother to cover what Golden Plains Equestrians are doing nor the operating times of the Histrorical Society.
Active readership, which means opening up and perusing all the pages, depends very much on newspapers being up to date, active in local happenings, voicing opposing views, generating discussion and sometimes being deliberately confrontational. I have read many community newspapers in my travels. Some of them are extremely active and informative whilst others look not unlike TV guides or excuses for reprinting standardised Press Release (sometimes the same thing appearing in half a dozen papers) and certainly do not interest people enough to even read past the front page.
In the end if community papers are to survive they must attract Advertisers. Potential sponsors, supporters and commercial businesses are not interested in advertising in papers that people do not read.
Folgenderer Monat, Butch
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