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January 2003: Paul Smith - Minority Report
Even though I’m a middle-aged white Anglo-Saxon with the usual number of working limbs, I’m a member of a minority in the UK. I’m male, making up less than 50% of the population. As a part of a very significant minority with money to spend, I don’t feel disenfranchised, but there are smaller groups out there, equally cashed-up and ready to blow their dough, who don’t get much of a look-in.
I think the ECTS is back at Olympia this year, but wherever it ends up, no doubt it’ll still be resplendent with stands chock-full of big boys toys and semi-naked members of a majority hanging about the place, looking pretty. Pretty cheesed off by day three. In contrast, I was at Olympia in November for a different show, where the toys were for big girls and the shapely distractions were of a very different league- Semi-naked had lost its Semi. For those of you not familiar with Erotica, it’s billed as The World’s Biggest Erotic Festival and has stands filled with fetish-wear rather than software and BDSM furniture instead of the other sort of Play Station.
In this alternative-lifestyle environment where retro-urban-gorilla street fashion fans met cyber-gothic pierced Ubër-freaks, I’m not sure who was the most surprised to bump into someone I knew; The chap from Pinnacle, me, or the young lady I was accompanying around the show on the end of a lead.
It’s interesting that a market-leading firm such as Pinnacle should be at a ‘niche’ event like Erotica. As realists, they’ve accepted camcorders get used for more than births, Christmas parties and marriages. They also get used to record the hard work people have to put in before you can have a birth or a birthday to celebrate. Seemingly quiet suburban couples also want to edit footage of their orgies down to a manageable two hours.
If a business like Pinnacle, which has a major presence in every High Street in the country has embraced a minority, that of the BDSM/fetish/erotic-movie making world, then shouldn’t your firm have equally open eyes? There’s a market out there for erotic software, we know, but what about a discrete web design service for people who work within the sex industry? Just don’t ask how they’re paying… And it’s not only leather clad Dominatrixs’ (Domanatrixi?) who make use of IT products. The Pink Pound is a term that’s come into use in the last couple of years to acknowledge the Gay community as a demographic group, and they can’t all have iMacs.
Microsoft advertise in Bizarre, a magazine called ‘…an affront to civilisation’ by a government MP. Join them in standing out from the crowd and saying, “We don’t care if you’re a transgendered bisexual extravert with a penchant for skin-tight latex and horse crops, when you’re looking for a personal (services) computer, we want your business!” Although, for your marketing, you may want to work on the wording a little.
Paul Smith is proud to say he has nothing against deviants (he’s even been ‘into’ independent computer retail) and welcomes job offers of legal work to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk.
491 words on the dark world I’ve immersed myself in, now that I have the time Dale. It’s good to have a hobby, isn't it?
Regards,
Paul