José Latour

Sell­ers go to mar­ket­places to make money by offer­ing goods and ser­vices, and the same rules apply to mar­ket­places the world over. Make, har­vest or extract some­thing, price it accord­ingly and offer it for sale. It seems, though, as in the last one hun­dred years the ever-increasing role of pro­mo­tion has pro­foundly changed the buyer-seller relationship.

Pro­mo­tion involves more than just adver­tis­ing and pub­lic­ity, but those two com­po­nents, tak­ing advan­tage of the devel­op­ments in com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy, have trans­formed the marketplace.

In non-durables, adver­tis­ing and pub­lic­ity have made qual­ity and price, for­merly the two fac­tors upper­most in people’s minds, less impor­tant. For many, they are no longer deter­mi­nant. From ham­burg­ers to cloth­ing, from per­fumes to over-the-counter med­i­cines, those who buy an arti­cle based on pro­mo­tional cam­paigns are at least as many, or per­haps more, than those who con­sider price and qual­ity the cru­cial factors.

In durables (homes, boats, jew­elry, etc.) the role of pro­mo­tion is less influ­en­tial, or negligible.

The effects on human health of decades-long pro­mo­tional cam­paigns for cig­a­rettes, liquors and junk foods is sub­stan­ti­ated by sta­tis­tics on the mil­lions of peo­ple who have died or are gravely ill as a result of can­cer, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases, obe­sity and hepati­tis caused by the con­sump­tion of unhealthy, yet very well-promoted products.

In the past, imi­ta­tive con­sump­tion and word of mouth made or broke brands. Celebri­ties smoked, wore the cloth­ing in fash­ion, bought cer­tain cars, and the man and woman in the streets copied them. Nowa­days imi­ta­tive con­sump­tion seems to mush­room ad infinitum.

Word of mouth, how­ever, seems to have lost much of its power. Orga­nized efforts to revive it seem doomed to fail­ure because con­sumers know or will soon real­ize that their friends or neigh­bors are not giv­ing dis­in­ter­ested advice. To make it look that way, those recruited to pitch prod­ucts are rewarded with points they redeem for prizes, not cash.

Enter­tain­ment and culture.

If expe­ri­enc­ing plea­sure brings hap­pi­ness, recre­ation and relax­ation, then most cul­tural prod­ucts –paint­ings, lit­er­a­ture, con­certs, etc. — recre­ate, relax and may even make peo­ple happy. If enter­tain­ment amuse and recre­ate peo­ple, then cul­ture and enter­tain­ment share some com­mon ground.

The pre­cise moment in which cul­tural prod­ucts started being bought and sold is lost in the fog of his­tory. We know that by the Mid­dle Ages painters, gold­smiths and prob­a­bly some musi­cians as well, made ends meet by sell­ing their works or performances.

Exclud­ing such com­po­nents of the enter­tain­ment indus­try as amuse­ment parks, theme parks, dis­cothe­ques and video games, in First– and Second-World coun­tries the demand for cul­ture and enter­tain­ment has spawned a mar­ket that includes books, visual arts, radio, tele­vi­sion, movies, music, sports, bal­let, opera and the­ater. A seg­ment of this mar­ket is cul­tural. Deter­min­ing which is difficult.

Con­certs, bal­let, opera, the­ater, and most visual arts are con­sid­ered cul­tural expres­sions. For spec­ta­tors, sports are enter­tain­ment. But con­cern­ing books, tele­vi­sion, radio and music, which works may be regarded as cul­tural prod­ucts pro­vokes controversy.

It may be inter­est­ing to con­sider mer­can­til­ism in books and book publishing.

Ninety– and one-hundred-year-old copies of news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines from the U.S., France and Spain prove that books were reviewed fre­quently, but pub­lic­ity and adver­tis­ing were almost inex­is­tent. Until the 1910s, per­haps the 1920s, the num­ber of copies a book sold and the atten­dance at cul­tural events were mostly the result of reviews and word of mouth. Most pub­lish­ers saw them­selves as pur­vey­ors of cul­ture; they didn’t want to lose money, but mak­ing money was not their rai­son d’être. Book­selling was con­sid­ered a very dig­ni­fied way of mak­ing a living.

A hun­dred years later books are mer­chan­dise in the mar­ket­place. In fic­tion and non-fiction alike, pub­lic­ity and adver­tis­ing are deter­mi­nant.  In mass-market fic­tion, pro­mo­tion is indis­pens­able. The big chain stores have a sin­gle pur­pose: to make money. Inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers and book­sellers, among whom, it seems, many ide­al­ists con­tinue to exist, also depend on good– and best-sellers to survive.

The most recent world-wide pro­mo­tional cam­paign for a book took place in 2007. In Jan­u­ary read­ers learned that on July 21 the last Harry Pot­ter book would go on sale. Before the last install­ment, the series had sold 325 mil­lion copies in 64 lan­guages. Such phe­nom­e­nal result made many peo­ple imag­ine that even if the launch date was announced one week in advance, thou­sands upon thou­sands of avid read­ers would have queued up for days around book­stores to buy the book. Pro­mo­tion seemed unnec­es­sary. Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows would have eas­ily beaten all pre­vi­ous records and maybe exceed the 80-million mark. Was a seven-month pro­mo­tional blitz nec­es­sary? The answer is: Yes, the bot­tom lines of pub­lish­ers, whole­salers and retail­ers demanded it.

Word of mouth sells copies, no doubt about it, but a frac­tion of what pro­mo­tional cam­paigns sell. In some cases, after the pub­lisher real­ized that sales were boom­ing with lit­tle or no adver­tis­ing, they imme­di­ately started spend­ing as much as they could in a pro­mo­tional cam­paign to fur­ther boost sales.

Ms. Winfrey’s rec­om­men­da­tions prove the point. After receiv­ing her bless­ing, books that had been for­got­ten for decades or new ones that had sold mod­estly, top the charts. Luck­ily she spon­sors noble causes, like reading.

In the cur­rent book mar­ket, qual­ity and price rarely deter­mine sales vol­ume or the author’s advance. The advance, how­ever, deter­mines how much pub­lic­ity a book will get. The corol­lary of mid-sized and big advances is that the pub­lisher will spend as much as pos­si­ble in pub­lic­ity and adver­tis­ing to recoup the advance. The inevitable corol­lary of very small and small advances is that the book gets just a few reviews. And in the age of pub­lic­ity and adver­tis­ing, with­out tours, ads, radio, TV and posters, irre­spec­tive of qual­ity, sales are poor.

Those books recount­ing some­thing off­beat or crim­i­nal that hap­pened some time before pub­li­ca­tion and gained national and/or inter­na­tional noto­ri­ety, are a case in point. For exam­ple: less than two years ago a pub­lisher advanced half a mil­lion U.S. dol­lars to a cou­ple for pen­ning a book on why the bride ran away a few days before the wed­ding and falsely claimed that she had been kid­napped. For most peo­ple, such books are nei­ther lit­er­a­ture nor entertainment.

Fic­tion and non-fiction books of ques­tion­able lit­er­ary value sell hun­dreds of mil­lions of copies as a result of two fac­tors: (1) vast pub­lic­ity and adver­tis­ing and (2) a cul­tural defor­ma­tion brought about by pre­ced­ing pro­mo­tional cam­paigns of infe­rior books. On the con­trary, good or even great books that have not been pro­moted sell a few thou­sand copies. Nobel– and Booker-prize win­ners infre­quently top the charts.

The major pub­lish­ers’ main con­cern is their bot­tom lines, as they should. But bottom-line con­sid­er­a­tions make them risk-averse and lit­er­a­ture is risky. In fact, even with good pro­mo­tion all fic­tion is risky; exam­ples abound. Fic­tion lack­ing pro­mo­tion spells finan­cial dis­as­ter for the author; not nec­es­sar­ily for the publisher.

Extend­ing this analy­sis to the visual arts, plays, movies, TV series and music, includ­ing clas­si­cal and opera, could be quite inter­est­ing. Then we might per­haps reach a fair con­clu­sion con­cern­ing the influ­ence that pro­mo­tion has exerted on the enter­tain­ment and cul­tural mar­kets and assess if world cul­ture is or is not in dire straits.