It’s OK! I’m not going to give the top ten tips for attracting more eyeballs to your website … this is just an example of good marketing, in my opinion. What worked. Well, sort of.

It started at the East Village Takeaways (in Howick, not NYC, as my recent visitors from the East Village, New York and I chortled together). I was waiting for Special #4 when I glanced at a poster of a beautiful woman with a mane of golden hair. Wow. Stunning — a real retro look with a timeless face.

Call me ignorant if you want, but I hadn’t heard of Katherine Jenkins before. And call me shallow, but that face was alluring… What sort performer is she? I wondered. What’s this ‘Believe Tour’? When is it?

There wasn’t a lot of detail on the poster so I made a quick mental note in writing (as Olly Newland says) and a few days later popped her name into Gary Google. Images of this stunningly beautiful woman poured out of the interwebs, including this one from GQ magazine, reproduced at the Daily Mail (er, good golly):

Wow. And she sings beautifully. Um, apparently.
(image: GQ via DailyMail.co.uk) Click to enlarge.

But I still didn’t know what she actually did … what kind of performer she is … Wikipedia (at the top of the search results, don’t get me started) told me …

Katherine Jenkins (born 29 June 1980) is a Welsh mezzo-soprano, a classical- popular crossover singer. Her albums feature a mixture of arias, popular songs, …

Ah, OK, makes sense.

So off to YouTube, let’s see her in action. Cool.

A quick scan and I saw she had a version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ one of my all time favourite songs. (I took a video clip of him singing live in Montreal in 2008 when some good friends and I went to hear him in concert there. It’s posted on my Facebook wall — I’ll see if I can link to it from The Paepae’s FB page later…)

Anyway, long story short, I didn’t much care for K Jenkins’ version, but no harm done and no disrespect. YouTube led me off to k.d. lang’s version for the Olympics which was more to my taste (or live version here.)

But back to the (very minor) point: the marketing for the Katherine Jenkins ‘brand’ WORKED.
Ignorant ol’ me now knows who she is (and how beautiful she is — yes, I’m superficial, I admit it) and her skills and talent as a singer. It got my attention… which in this hurly-burly, hustle-bustle world is valuable. That’s a good use of her marketing assets.

And music often being an acquired taste, who knows how long it will be before I stop and linger at a Katherine Jenkins treatment of a song on iTunes and think, Hmm, not bad… click.

– P

Details of her NZ tour are: Wellington 1 Nov, Auckland 2 Nov.
Her website is www.KJ.TV (Seems only fair.)