That's a tremendously good point, Robin. People won't get interested in Jowetts if they aren't aware of them (I'm forever asked by friends what my car is and having to explain...). One way of making people aware / more familiar with them is through the press.Robin Fairservice wrote:Why don't more people know about Jowetts? How often do you see a mention of them in the magazines that deal with Classic Cars? MG's Jaguar's, Aston's etc on and on ad nauseum. I stopped subscribing to "Thorough Bred & Classic Cars" because of the constant repitition of a few makes. I doubt that the publishers of Hemmings over here have ever heard of the make. Will the Jowett Centennial Rally feature any where?
Has the Executive ever sat down with magazine publishers to find out how to get more articles in their magazines? Did Keith ever get a mention of his Javelin taxiing peole like Moss and Brabham at the Goodwood Reviva?. Any chance of an article about the Moss family Javelin? Noel thinks that advertising concerning Jowetts is needed to get articles published; but by who? Should the club retain a PR flack?
How will the youger people ever hear and learn about Jowett's if they don't ever read about them?
I don't know whether the Centenary rally has featured in the motoring press over here; I didn't see the article that Jack did, but I remember him telling me about it and it was obviously a really good feature. The magazines such as Practical Classics seem to cover multiple club events on a monthly basis, I'm sure they would make a column inch or two available for our national rally.
I have got a couple of articles in the (very) local press on the back of the Classic Car of the Year competition - I simply wrote a press release and sent it off to the papers concerned, together with a selection of high-res images. The resulting articles are very close to the text that I originally sent them - in both cases I had a conversation with the journalist who 'wrote' the story and they got a few extra details so they could tweak, etc, but essentially I did all of the work for them:
http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/8 ... mpetition/
and
http://www.hemeltoday.co.uk/news/busine ... _1_1001921
What I didn't get was links to the JCC or the website in there - but then I did do it as publicity for the competition and to get votes
- but the point is, it was remarkably simple to get the story published. I accept that this was on a very local level, with a local interest angle but I fully intend following it up if we get through to the next round, and will be making sure we get the Club and the website mentioned in those articles. I do hope that these stories may have prompted a couple of curious people to pop "Jowett" into Google though.Another forum I've recently been visiting is that of Practical Classics magazine. It seems that most of the guys who write for the magazine also frequent the forum; they're keeping an eye out for - and openly inviting - interesting cars / stories for the magazine and I suspect other publications do similar. They have a readers' restoration bit every month - the website is asking people to submit their stories (if I wasn't already in their competition I would have done!). As far as I know they're not after any reciprocal advertising, it's just an easy way of them getting stories, but also making sure that their readership has buy-in to the magazine (my interpretation, not what they say!).
Jack's right - this shouldn't be left to any individual member to do, but maybe there is scope for a strategy and coordination role; someone who has oversight of what publications there are, what their market/target audience is, narrowed down to a managable number that the Club would be interested in featuring in (say a dozen or two) what sort of features they run, and a record of when a Jowett owner (note, an owner in their own right as a private individual rather than the Club) last approached, or was featured in, each of these publications. The Club could then coordinate approaches with articles - written by the owners so that the work is spread amongst the Club. Why not recycle some of the Jowetteer articles?? Plenty of those would no doubt be of great interest to a wider audience!
Harking back to our conversations on this forum not so long ago regarding events that we seem to have been absent from in our Centenary year, perhaps a similar strategy / coordination role could be usefully established for events - not just national events such as the Silverstone and Goodwood happenings, but the major/larger scale local events.
Yes we are a small club with limited resources, but we are also a very friendly, enthusiastic club with wonderful cars which we are rightly proud of. Let's ourselves emulate the "little engine with the big pull".
Amy.