Relax, don't do it: Switch off now

In ostensible demarketing, people grow to like something more when it is taken away from them. In third-party demarketing it is an outside body intervening that can cause a brand's value to soar. Parental Advisory Labels, for example, can boost sales of a CD by giving it a cutting edge that it might have lacked.

The attempted imposition of bans by regulators, backed up by the calls of moral guardians, are the stuff of legend in the music industry also.  One of the early arbiters of public taste was the BBC and its infamous Dance Music Policy Committee, whose archives date back to the 1930s.  Leigh's excellent 2007 study of these shows how the corporation objected to innuendo and direct reference to sex, drugs, brand names, blasphemy and other taboos.  

Frankie Goes to Hollywood: image from LastFM.com

What happens when a piece of music gets banned? ‘Relax’, the debut single from Frankie Goes to Hollywood was banned shortly after its release in 1984 by the BBC, the single going on to reach number one and stay there for 5 weeks (Gareth Grundy writing in The Guardian, 2011).  It was a similar story for other classic pieces, not just ones censored by the BBC: the Evil Dead, Serge Gainsbourg, the Sex Pistols, Louis Armstrong, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Billie Holiday and Pink Floyd all succeeded despite – or perhaps, because of - officious regulators or censors (Neil Spencer writing in The Observer, 2005).   

What better way to be noticed in a crowded marketplace, what more effective way of establishing the cutting edge credentials of a piece of culture than to have it withdrawn? see Stephen Brown's excellent piece in Harvard Business Review, 2001).  Ostensible demarketing exploits the principles of psychological reactance. In music it works by provoking Taste Guardians to talk the outrage, and then exploiting any subsequent ban.


References
Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October

Grundy, Gareth (2011), “Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax 'banned' by the BBC”, The Guardian, 11 June
Spencer, Neil (2005), “The 10 most x-rated records”, The Guardian, 22 May

Warning: Parental Advisory - buy this!

Parental Advisory Labels are used in the music industry to warn customers that the music they might be considering may contain profanities, blasphemies, sexual references or other unspecified transgressions. They started to be introduced in the US in about 1985 as a form of demarketing, designed to discourage the young and vulnerable from purchasing the product.

John Denver was sceptical about the value of
Parental Advisories

There is some anecdotal evidence, though, that the PAL system actually encourages sales, and that many would-be buyers actively seek out CDs with the warning in place. This kind of behaviour is understood by psychologists who call it psychological reactance. It is also understood by parents, particularly those with teenaged children, who have learned that the easiest way to encourage their youngster to do something is to forbid it.

At about the time the PAL system was introduced a US Senate conducted a hearing into the issue of lyrics in popular music. The normally mild-mannered folk musician John Denver was called: some of his well known pieces like Rocky Moutain High had incorrectly been tagged as being drug-related. Denver surprised senators when he explained that the labelling system would probably be counter-productive:

“That which is denied becomes that which is most desired, and that which is hidden becomes that which is most interesting. Consequently, a great deal of time and energy is spent trying to get at what is being kept from you.” (US Senate 1985: 65-66)

In other words record labels could artificially and quickly boost the street credibility of their bands by ensuring that their recordings were given the Parental Advisory sticker.

Reference

US Senate (1985), Record labelling: Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Ninety-Ninth Congress, First session on contents of music and the lyrics of records, Washington: US Government Printing Office