AmbientShade posted at 3:33PM Wed, 08 February 2017 - #4296879

Even selling through a large broker like daz or rosity still requires self promotion and marketing if you expect to be successful. There's only so much advertising you're going to get from a broker, because at the end of the day you're just one name on their roster of hundreds. You have to build a brand for yourself and work on building a fan base outside of the site your content is being sold through and all of that takes time and persistence.

There are content artists who run their own site as well as sell through brokerages but usually they aren't working by themselves.

Then there's sites like hivewire who launched a new figure and a new store at the same time and are still running a few years later, so it is possible. It just depends how much time and effort you're willing/able to put into it.

You're right self promotion is important either way and does form part of building successful brand recognition with customers. Though at the end of the day, it is nowhere near as important as the quality of content created and the meeting of customer requirements within the product delivered. This is what truly builds a strong brand for content creators. Many of the big name vendors do very little self promotion if you have a look, but have established themselves as a large brand regardless. Other vendors have changed their brand names numerous times and continued to see success regardless of their brand revamps.

It seems you may be underestimating the power of brand affiliations relation to consumer confidence which is much higher with an established parent brand. A customer will make more frequent purchases over time from a brand they trust, regardless of the individual brands that exist under that parent entity. For example a Coca Cola branded Hibiscus flavoured drink would see more chance of market success and higher purchase numbers simply from the brand affiliation at work from its parent Coca Cola. Selling "Bob's Hibiscus Juice" means establishing not only the product itself but also Bob in consumers minds. If Bob did decide to go it alone and knock back a license deal from Coca Cola, most people would see that as being rather crazy and a missed opportunity considering the brand equity and marketing resources available from them.

There is also a big difference between marketing and promoting an entire website as a vehicle to sell your own products, and promoting products sold on an existing established marketplaces which have their own marketing components at work.These parent marketing components form a foundation to stem your own marketing from. Each major marketplace has established brand recognition in the sector and brings commodities to customers such as consumer trust (or distrust in some cases) for new products, quality guarantees, returns/refunds, secure payment facilities, website security... etc. The marketing and financial equity required to build trust for these areas into a consumers mindset for an individual store front is huge and seems to be reinventing the wheel when you could easily get a taxi. One element that could severely effect any new figures success in today's market is the seed of doubt in a consumers mind about the level of support the figure would see across the community as a whole and from the independent source over time. This can trigger a wait and see mentality in customers, that could see the figure miss it's moment.

HW is the opposite of an independent solo storefront. It's very much borrowing from already established marketplace moulds with a significant financial investment into the brand itself.