Conant · Fountain

Marketing Musings on Art Sell Fine Art For A Change Entertaining · Amusing · Interesting. And Free. Year 2 · No. 1 · Jan 15 1999 ISSN1437-1375 Happy New Year and Assessing

Conant · Red Door

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Preface This journals serves as a forum for discussions on marketing art. It is intended to help with the development of the Art Quarter affiliate program. My motto will be, as always:  Als ich kan (from a painting of Jan van Eyck, found as a citation in a modern mathematical book, which means: as good as I can).  Your appreciation gives me the encouragement to continue. It is for you and all the great masters that I do this, and I hope you enjoy the results. Please don't hesitate to send me feedback in order to help me with that goal! This kind of journal is new to the net, so please tell me if the size is OK (eg images are great, but big!).  Because English is not my home language, I do not always express myself clearly. I hope that you are able to interpret my meaning. Also, I invite you to participate. Send me your articles and comments to be published in this journal.  Yours truly,

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Dear Partners:

Happy New Year to you! The last issue was sent seven weeks ago, end of November, in addition to the regular cycle of 4 weeks I had a 3 week holiday break. Much has happened since. The new year is a good time to have a look back and another to the future.

Unfortunately, there are no good news with respect to marketing. It didn't pay to give away a painting with ArtQuest®. I didn't even get a single email from this engagement.

Things developed even more strangely: the winner was very much excited and promised to report how they felt towards the original and where are in the house this painting would find a place. Since then, I never heard anything from them again. Ten days ago, I sent them a reminder, even offer them to give them a different work if they don't like it. Still no response. I'm puzzled.

You probably got my notice that I finally launched a giveaway myself. Shortly after, I renamed the service to "Free Gift" because ArtQuest® named theirs giveaway. One of my affiliates, Eduardo Peirano, had a great idea. As I gather email addresses for the drawing and people understand that they must send me an email to participate, he replicated the Free Gift page.

Eduardo publishes a newsletter about educational courses on the web. He advertises the journals and produces a constant stream of prospects and subscribers. Alan Gardyne produces contacts interested in 2-tier marketing, and that's it. Nobody of the other 80+ affiliates delivers a single address so far.

I don't know if it's too early, but if this were a business like any other, the conclusion would have to be that the affiliate system does not deliver. Fine Art isn't books or flowers or even gifts, so we have a little problem here. One thing seems to be clear: the merchandise of my business, made it be expensive or comparably cheap, cannot be sold to the crowd hanging around on the Internet. It has to be targeted, and I haven't an idea what to do next.

A couple of days ago, I had a long phone call with the CEO of ARTES, a company selling fine art via catalog here in Germany (I talked about them in issue 1.6). I wondered why they didn't have a web site. He informed me that all the big companies in Germany who transferred their catalog to the web made huge losses. He didn't see their clients on the net yet. (That's the reason I addressed the world rather than the German market.)

My endeavor was to promote high-quality art. I wonder where I can find the people who look for high-quality art. Maybe you got some good ideas?

Truly yours,

PS:
If you have enjoyed this issue, please support my efforts and recommend it to a friend. For your convenience, I prepared both a mailto: link at the top and a Recommend-It button at the bottom.

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