The skies are waiting to drop a fortune on those who catch on to astrology as a marketing tool...

By John  Townley

In a world where everybody has something to say about astrology but nobody is really making a lot of money on it, it’s time to ask why not? J.P. Morgan is supposed to have said, "Millionaires don't use astrology, billionaires do", so why aren’t astrologers, astrology sites and software producers, or those who use them, rich? Few people indeed are mining megabucks out of astrology, despite its ever-widening popularity as reflected in world opinion research. What’s going on?

It may be everyone is looking in the wrong place. It's buried treasure hiding in plain sight. The popular assumption is that astrology is a form of entertainment whose only use is in massaging people’s egos – and that profits will come only from astrological products that do just that, such as Sun-sign books and columns, personal reports, and other narcissistic self-improvement and relationship products. That’s a limited market, and simply repackaging it over and over again, from print, to Net reports, to cell phones just doesn’t sell enough. There is still a big market yet to open up when you can get a quick reading about someone on your cell phone over drinks at a singles bar, a service that is already in the works but not yet fully implemented. India has it (and is making a fortune), but the Western equivalent isn’t yet online.

That will be big, but that’s not where the real money is, as profitable as it might become. It’s a limited well, and it will dry up just like the market for Sun-sign books did, once people have had their fill of the novelty.

 The current approach to astrology generates little more than funny money for most...

So where is all that billionaire’s gold? It’s in marketing, pure and simple. You don't mine the astrology market per se, though there is some money there, you use astrology to mine all markets. Astrology is a language that describes people and their needs and wants, their styles and lifestyles -- an overlaid and interlocking set of indicators similar to age, education, region, culture, and ethnicity. It’s not an exact science, but it proves itself over and over again in even simple, allegedly “for fun” Sun-sign statistics from insurance companies like Allstate, and sufficient to have caused a government ruling in a human rights dispute in Austria concerning unfair use of astrology inHYPERLINK "http://www.upi.com/news/issueoftheday/2009/02/05/Austria-OKs-astrology-hiring-prejudice-Will-it-catch-on/UPI-28971233861656/" hiring. Well, like pre-existing conditions in health care, prejudicial exclusion is not a good thing – but prejudicial/targeted marketing is the essence of selling anything. It’s simply a form of profiling, and it works.

Like profiling in general, it doesn’t work every time with every individual – not all Aries people prefer hot, fast cars. But a significantly higher-than-expected number really do, regardless of other factors. So, go sell to them – not by asking them astrological questions, just get their birth data (which is everywhere) and hit them up. If you boost sales by only a single percent, across the consumer market that accounts for billions in extra sales. And, what’s more, your audience gets to feel like you “get” them and their needs, you’re helping them successfully decide what they want and they’re the happier and more loyal for the effort. Astrology need never be mentioned – in many cases it probably shouldn’t be, because many people actually don’t like it – except when is serves as an intriguing background to fuel further interest.

There are endless spinoffs of this and a variety of ways to use it to explore and tap public tastes and consumer personalities and preferences. European restrictions to the contrary, it will be a useful tool in human resources, especially in finding unusual matching talents for projects and products and helping keep troublemakers out of positions they shouldn’t have. The same goes for insurance, which is already using it, but just not tipping you off to it.

  
Money from above is waiting for you, but you may need to keep the astrology connection under your hat...

Most important, you don’t need to “believe in astrology” to make it work. In fact it’s important that you don’t.  You can’t just dive in with some particular astrologer’s vision of which star types would like to buy what products. That’s asking for disaster. Instead, it’s easy to simply compare a customer birth database with the products they have bought, and the numbers will tell you the story, though a marketing-savvy advising astrologer will be essential to explore your results, someone who knows the language of astrology and where to look for meaningful results and correlations. You could set up a special market research poll to do it at minimal cost, but you don’t even need to. With already in-hand data, this could be done cheaply and easily, and turned into profits virtually overnight, just by adjusting your subsequent targeting. It doesn’t require big-time investments, it requires marketers with enough imagination to give something new a try and follow the dollar from there. Even the research software necessary to begin it is already on the shelf, just not yet used for this purpose.

 It’s not even a risky, “disruptive technology” revolution, only marginally out-of-the-box thinking that leads straight to the cashbox. And, like most other massively good ideas, this one will be obvious only in hindsight, because it’s so simple. Of course, once everybody is doing it, it’s profit advantage will decrease (though it will also become deadly not to use it), but hey, that’s capitalism.

So is your company going to do it? Are you going to be smart enough to invest early, or are you going to have to be satisfied with the gleanings of the market leaders, laboriously picking up the crumbs of yet another idea who’s time came and passed you by, because you took a pass on it? If there is such a thing as controlling your own fortune and destiny, using astrology to do it isn’t such a bad place to start...

 The fun Zodiac bills we've reproduced here can be had at ThisTexan...tell them we sent you!   

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