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The Creative Business is a series of 12 modules of information about developing creative enterprises, written especially for people running businesses in the creative industries.
The information is particularly relevant to creative businesses and cultural enterprises in the fields of Advertising, Literature and Publishing, Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Music, Design, Cultural Heritage, and Crafts.
Published on the Creative Choices website, this series of 12 articles covers a range of business issues facing creative entrepreneurs:
1. It's Creative but is it a Business? Business Feasibility - deciding whether or not to make a business from your creativity.
2. You're Creative - but so are they! Dealing with competition - understanding your competitive advantage in relation to rivals in the marketplace.
3. Not All Customers are Good Customers. Choosing Customers - finding the right customers to fit with your creativity, ambitions and values.
4. Precision Marketing. Advertising and Publicity - communicating your key messages to customers.
5. Structuring Your Enterprise. Setting up a Business - choosing the best structure: self-employed, not-for-profit company, or commercial enterprise?
6. Make Money While You Sleep! Protecting your Ideas - using intellectual property rights to protect your creativity and make money while you sleep.
7. Creative Collaborations and other essential C-words. Working in partnership with other individuals and businesses in the creative or other sectors.
8. Raising and Managing Money. Financial Management - getting the right financial result by managing your income and expenditure.
9. Customers as Partners. Keeping Customers - listening to customers and building closer relationships with your best customers.
10. Reassuringly Expensive. Pricing - deciding how much to charge by looking at pricing and value from the customers' point of view.
11. Focusing your Enterprise - selecting priorities for development as new opportunities arise.
12. Growing your Business - key issues ahead as your business grows.
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Read and comment on these articles by David Parrish at The Creative Business blog on the Creative Choices website.
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Raising finance from loans or investments can be a major challenge for all types of businesses, and it’s especially difficult when credit is scarce and investors are feeling the pinch. So any alternative ways of raising funds are worth exploring.
Enterprises in the creative, cultural and digital sector have creativity at the centre of their products and services, yet don’t always apply that same creativity to the business side of things, such as marketing, leadership or finance. But some do. True ‘creative entrepreneurs’ are not just creative people doing business – they are creative with business too. Some of these creative entrepreneurs - especially in music and film - are exploring innovative ways of raising serious amounts of money by asking lots of people for modest investments. This ‘Crowd-Financing’ approach can be labelled ‘Fan-Financing’ when fans are the focus for investments. Here are some examples:
Australian musician Clint Crighton has devised a way of raising funds from his fans to record his next album. For 100 Australian dollars (about £50) you can join an exclusive club of fans which gives you special privileges: a lifetime free entrance pass to all his live gigs, a signed pre-release version of his next album, and a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to be there at the recording of his next album. A membership of 1,000 true fans will raise the 100,000 Australian dollars he needs.
In the USA, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule invites fans to invest in her enterprise at different levels to receive a range of different benefits. From just 10 US dollars for a digital download, the investment levels rise in steps to 1,000 USD for a specially-written song for your voicemail greeting. For 5,000 USD she will perform a concert in your home and if you want to invest 10,000 USD you can sing along with her on her next album.
In the UK, Slice the Pie is a sophisticated music investment site which allows you to invest in the future success of a wide range of musicians. (I’ve invested £100 in Sarah Grace.) This model also uses a voting system to find and filter talent and then voters are invited to invest. Like the X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, this model cleverly involves the ‘crowds’ in voting - and at the same time builds a base of followers who eventually become customers or investors.
Three British teenagers raised £105,000 by selling credits in their film - for just £1 you can have your name listed in the closing credits. Award-winning Merseyside writer and film director Fiona Maher sold bit-parts in her film on eBay to raise money for her first full-length feature film. A new film called The Age of Stupid is using crowd-financing to raise investment from the public by selling shares priced £10,000 which entitle investors to a share of the profits.
Music and film are leading the way with fan-financing in the creative industries, but surely other enterprises - in the creative sectors and elsewhere - could adapt these models to their own situations and raise much-needed cash by adopting this crowd-financing approach.
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This article was first published by 08businessconnect.com
Copyright David Parrish 2009. Some Rights Reserved.
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Thanks to Alun Parry for telling me about Andrew Dubber's excellent free eBook
New Music Strategies: The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online.
It's a must for anyone in the music business.
And for everyone else too.
For other creative entrepreneurs it has lots of useful information about Web 2.0 business strategies, the Long Tail, and lots of good advice about internet marketing in general.
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"Art is not what you see, it’s what you make others see"
- Edgar Degas, French artist (1834-1917)
I agree with this statement, which switches things around nicely, so that instead of thinking only about our own point of view as the creator, we also look at things from the point of view of the audience/client/customer.
In the context of combining art and business, Degas helps us to think about Marketing and Quality in useful ways. I suggest that:
- Marketing is about looking at things from the point of view of the customer (or "audience" or "client" if you prefer).
- Quality is not what you put into it, but what the customer gets out of it.
I'm sure Edgar Degas would agree.
Furthermore, what you 'make others see' might be a variety of different things. According to Charles Leadbeater in his essay 'The Art of With', the writer Umberto Eco "long ago declared that works of art were open to multiple interpretations; the reader was as active in creating meanings as the writer."
In business terms, we need to be open to these various 'meanings' or 'customer interpretations' because otherwise there can be a big difference between what you think you are selling and what the customer is actually buying. What you consciously or unconsciously 'make others see' could be a lifestyle, a feelgood factor (or even a 'feelbad factor'), or maybe a 'talking point' or a 'story' when they buy your creative product or service.
What both Degas and Eco are saying is that we need to be aware that other people (the audience/reader/consumer/customer) might see things differently than we do.
Understanding how clients see things and perceive customer benefits helps creative entrepreneurs to become even more successful in terms of marketing, pricing and choosing the right customers.
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Share your own thoughts and experiences about all this on the Creative Enterprise Network.
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Steve Messam is a talented artist - and a shrewd creative entrepreneur.
Steve was approached by Cumbria Tourism in the UK to create an art installation to help publicise the launch of their campaign for cultural tourism. The budget offered was a modest £4,000 GBP so Steve put together a business case for a bigger budget. He knew that the client wanted publicity and so argued that a bigger investment in a more impressive work of art would pay dividends in terms of 'Advertising Equivalent Value' (AEV) - in other words, the cost of the publicity in column inches if it were paid for as advertising.
Steve pitched his idea and business case to the PR Agency Colman Getty, who specialise in arts related work and had been commissioned by Cumbria Tourism to publicise the art installation and campaign for cultural tourism. Using data from previous projects, Steve calculated that the Advertising Equivalent Value should be at least £150,000 GBP and possibly as high as £250,000 GBP, provided the budget for his art installation was increased six-fold. Colman Getty understood the commercial value of the PR that could be generated and helped Steve to convince the client to invest accordingly.
The result was a spectacular installation called 'Drop', a huge inflatable sculpture modelled on a drop of water. The sculpture was installed at various scenic locations in the English Lake District. Part of the publicity campaign was to encourage tourists to take and publish photos of the huge silver sculpture and this viral marketing helped to promote the campaign further.
See photo below. More images of Drop can be seen in this pool of photos on Flickr.
With the help of Steve Messam's art, the campaign was highly successful and exceeded its targets in terms of publicity. In one weekend alone, over 10,500 people went to see it. News and images even reached the world's biggest circulation newspaper, China Daily.
Steve's reputation - and his creative enterprise - goes from strength to strength. He will be exhibiting his latest art installation at the Venice Biennale in June 2009, raising finance in a similar way using the business case of Advertising Equivalent Value, rather than an application for an arts grant.
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Discuss this and other ways of raising finance on the Creative Enterprise Network.
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T-Shirts and Suits has set up an online Creative Enterprise Network to help creative people world-wide to promote their enterprises and to network with each other across national and cultural boundaries.
It's free to join - and easy to upload photos, videos and information.
The network includes blogs, events and discussions.
There are specialist groups within the network, including:
- Creative Collaborations
- Digital Creatives
- International Connections
- LatinoAmerican Creatives
- Freelancers
- Creative Students
- Graphic Design
- Business Partnerships
- Advertising and PR
- Creative Entrepreneur's Guide to Shanghai
- UNESCO Project
You are invited to join the network and to invite friends, colleagues and contacts to join too.
The network welcomes anyone involved directly or indirectly in the creative industries, cultural industries, creative businesses, cultural organisations, cultural enterprises and creative industries support organisations. Creative industry organisations world-wide are invited to join.
www.creative-enterprise-network.com
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I was asked to give "three top tips" to creative entrepreneurs in an interview about how to successfully blend creativity and business.
Ellie Stevenson interviewed me, along with Nick Williams of 'Inspired Entrepreneur'.
Read the full interview on the ArtsHub website.
Here's an extract:
Can you give us three top tips for running your own successful creative business, David?
1. Firstly, define what you mean by success – it could be a mixture of financial success, creative challenges, recognition, job satisfaction, quality of life, etc, and that formula will be different for everyone. Define what you mean by success, don’t let others define it for you, and know where you want to go.
2. Be clear about your market and don’t try to sell to everyone. Choose your customers. Choose customers that fit your objectives and your ethos and that deliver the financial results you want. Don’t have a scattergun approach, looking for any old customer. Choose the customers that work best for your business strategy.
3. Understand intellectual property (IP), because IP is at the core of the creative industries. It’s important to make sure you don’t get ripped off by other people, so it’s about defending and protecting intellectual property; but just as importantly, it’s also about how to commercialise that IP so you can make money from it, through sales and licensing, for example. Given that IP is so central, I think most creative businesses could do with knowing a bit more, and learning how to use it.
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Note: This is an extract from an article by Ellie Stevenson, first published on ArtsHub UK.
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Share your own Top Tips with other creative people in business on the Creative Enterprise Network
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A useful and readable 'Creative, Cultural and Digital Industries Guide' has been published by Business Link West Midlands
It is available in hardcopy from Business Link West Midlands and downloadable as a free eBook in PDF format below.
This creative business guide was written by David Parrish, author of the book 'T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity'.
The 48 page publication covers a range of issues relevant to enterprises in the creative, cultural and digital sectors.
Sections include:
- Strategic Planning
- Understanding your Customers
- Profiting from your Ideas
- Organisational Structures
- People and Skills
- Promoting your Products / Services
- Financial Management
- Legal and other issues
- Links to useful organisations and resources for creative enterprises
There are also four case studies featuring creative enterprises from the West Midlands region: 383 Project, Stan's Cafe, Gas Street Works, and Capsule.
Download PDF:
Creative, Cultural and Digital Industries Guide (PDF) [3.2 MB]
Businesses in the West Midlands region of England can obtain a hard copy of the Guide.
Contact Business Link West Midlands on 0845 113 1234.
The creative industries guide was designed by iDM Design, Wolverhampton This creative business guide was written by David Parish of TShirts and Suits.
David Parish retains copyright in this material and other writing about the business of creativity, as published in the book 'T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity', the publication 'Designing Your Creative Business' and a series of other articles, blogs and 'Ideas in Action' features.
Similar creative business guides can be written for other organisations in the creative, cultural and digital sectors.
Contact David Parrish to discuss options and possibilities for your own version of this creative industries guide.
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Thanks to Danielly Netto from Newcastle University Business School, who's researching business models in the creative industries, for including this viral video in her presentation.
This is a video from artist BLU showing the awesome MUTO 'animated graffiti' work in Buenos Aires.
Published on the internet using a Creative Commons licence, it's already had about 3,000,000 views on YouTube so far and received nearly10,000 comments.
The business model used has been categorised as 'Findability/Creative Investment'. In other words, the creator gives something away for free in order to reap financial benefits by other means. It's one of the 3 (or 14) Kinds of Free.
It's a brilliant example of viral marketing !!
See also Viral Marketing Video from Berlitz.
See also Buzz Marketing
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Artist Ken Walters sells his work in the virtual world Second Life, as well as in real life to galleries, individuals and companies.
I met Ken when he attended one of my training workshops for creative people in business and I was fascinated by his personal story as well as his artwork. A feature in The Guardian tells how a stroke made him into an artist, giving him another kind of 'second life' after previously working as an engineer, without any kind of artistic training. He now runs a successful creative business from his home in the North of England.
He has combined his new talents as an artist with a marketing strategy which includes a variety of online and virtual media including Second Life. Ken also publicises his work through social networking sites and has published images in the "T-Shirts and Suits (Creativity and Business)" international group for creative people in business within Facebook.
His income is derived from direct sales and through the licensing of his intellectual property. Global corporation EA Games were impressed with his work and commissioned him to design 100 digital dinosaurs for a new educational game called Spore. Ken retains ownership of the copyright in the designs and gets a cut of merchandise sales as part of the licensing agreement. In this way he is developing additional income streams as a Creative Entrepreneur. Ken Walters can be contacted by email (mail@kwdag.biz) and his website address is http://www.kwdag.biz/.
His character name in Second Life is Blunt Fhang.
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