Designer Con: IP buys you cheap marketing

People who work comics conventions already know this. You are way more likely to sell something that someone already recognizes. It’s part of why the unspoken truth of conventions that stuff is sold there without the implied or express permission of the original copyright holders.

Oh yeah before I forget, here’s a dinosaur for #Dinovember.

dimetrodon cave

Got that out of the way.

Sure there are alterations, sure there are mashups. It’s satire, it’s parody blah blah blah. I know, ok. Go ahead and construct your legal defenses – I don’t care. There is no defense to the fact that the reason people do it is to make sure they can sell something without having to do the hard work of actually branding and marketing something beforehand. You’re selling something cold, you need to get past the customer’s defenses.

Go ahead and claim it’s because they loved something growing up – I don’t buy that entirely. It’s also because they know that if they love something it has a good chance of making sales because someone ELSE loved it, too. By the way, this is my way of giving you credit for NOT being a naive hippie and thinking it’s all peace, love and happiness.

But I truly loved that some people I spoke to at Designer Con WERE trying to make a break away from intellectual property sales and into their own content. That’s always what people will say by default, and lots of people hate their jobs and would rather do THIS.

I also have to say that people here have a WAAAAAY higher display game than any comics show I have ever been to. There are some people here who shouldn’t even try to sell stuff, they should professionally design OTHER people’s presence at shows. They are THAT good.

But there is something happening to the overall business of making – there is just so much STUFF being made by far more people than ever that I think some people will eventually make some prediction about the disruption of yet another industry. Yeah, even your lovey-dovey crochet crafted ugly dolls are part of aggressively disruptive tech grinding away at the prior hegemony of traditional manufacturing. That’s mostly an excuse to use the word hegemony – I try to do it at least once a year. Like a prostate checkup.

Think about what happens if there are enough breakout hits emerging from this designer crowd of DIY badasses. Think about the already built in aversion to that big word I mentioned before that started with the letter H. If enough of them don’t want that ToysRUs deal, that mainstream national and international endorsement, the fast food chain kids meal market position … what happens then?

But that makes ME naive. Of course they want that BIG deal, right?

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