OK, so I’ve been exaggerating. Not all of your readers are nuts… but they sure have a knack of tangling themselves up in knots when it comes to research.
One of the more baffling conundrums I’ve encountered lately occurred during a session we arranged in the Ignite board room with a group of Uncut readers recruited via uncut.co.uk. All the guys were subscribers who knew the title inside out, back to front… and back again… so, following the guidelines I’d picked up from attending tons of recent sessions run by external companies over the years, I eased us in by testing a few broad brand assumptions such as, y’know, “Uncut is full of the music we like” and “Uncut knows its onions”.
Over two sessions I asked the 10 people in the room to score each assumption out of 10, on the premise that the higher the number, the more they agreed with the proposition. And, as usual, one of the things Uncut scored very highly on was “Uncut is a good source for discovering new music” - overall score: 78/100.
We then got down to brass tacks, flicking through the latest issue page by page and asking the participants to score each franchise/feature/ what have you, again out of 10. Which was all well and good until we came to the “Welcome to Uncut” page where the magazine introduces the reader to two new or relatively new acts.
The page only scored 70/100 which was shocking considering that an average score of 75/100 was tending to show that all was well with the reader. What was going on? Well, three of the 10 argued vehemently that they were never going to read a page covering acts they didn’t recognise and had never heard of. Now, call me old-fashioned but did this not register a kinda disconnect with their earlier statement about Uncut turning them on to new music?
Digging deeper, I discovered that part of their antipathy towards the page was simply the strongly-held belief that all great music ended with The Clash and that nothing, no matter how much we “hyped” it, would ever be as good as Strummer and co. Well, if their minds are that made up there’s not much, I suspect, anyone can do about it.
Another suspicion, however, seemed to offer the hope of solution. The fact that Welcome… was a regular franchise dedicated to new artists suggested to these readers that there was a space to be filled every month, irrespective of whether a fresh genius was actually on the rise. So the very fact that it was regular undid its value. The flatplan, they were saying, was driving the critical acumen.
Their solution was, of course, to only feature a new band if they were truly great and - in the extremely unlikely event that was ever to occur - they should appear in the main feature well, duking it out with the Dylans and Lennons and other legends of yore for space. Would they read it if we did it that way? Would they believe it?
“No, course not!”
Great. I’d also noticed that several participants were suspcious of the “What’s On The Uncut Stereo” column where the mag’s writers get to talk about new music well up front of general release. “It’s just journalists showing off,” was a prevalent comment. “They just pick obscure stuff we’ve never heard of to make themselves feel superior.”
Could there be a clue here to the new music conundrum? What, I asked, if we expanded the little nib we include on the Welcome To Uncut page where an artist they are familiar with says why they think the new band featured are ace? What if the page became My Favourite New Band by Paul Weller, for instance? Would that pique their interest?
“Nah! That’s Smash Hits innit? And it’s lazy too. You guys are there to tell us what new music’s great - that’s what you get paid for!”
Doh! and again I say, Doh!
So I’m begging you, I’m on my knees. If anyone has an answer to this most perplexing of riddles, please let me know. There’s a drink in it for you. Or two.