Don't Turn a Deaf Ear to Music Branding
New Technology Allows Marketers to Target Consumers Aurally on a Variety of Platforms
| |
| Gerald Schwartz | |
Senior marketing executives are listening hard, and not solely to the clink-clink of coins. The National Guard, for example, recently took a shot and recruited Kid Rock to reach 17- to 24-year-olds with an upbeat message. Yes, the U.S. military commissioned a tattooed rock star to boost its image and enlistment, with an aptly named song, "Warrior," and a synchronized video that played on movie screens across the country.
"Music branding is not new," said Martin Mueller, executive director of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. "In the 1950s, the spread of television sparked America's humming of 'Rinso White, Rinso Blue' as much as the opening score to 'Bonanza' and 'I Love Lucy.' First, it was the jingling of bells on a Good Humor truck; then it was the electronic tune of the Mr. Softee truck ruining my nap on a warm Saturday afternoon."
Role of technology
What is new for marketing executives is technology. Technology did more than kill cassette tapes; it created a spectacular encore. Dot-coms such as CDNow and Kazaa competed with illegally cheap or free music and debuted the ability to reproduce high-quality digital music on many different platforms.
More than radios, tape recorders and record players, suddenly computers, iPods, birthday cards and toys sing and play instruments -- and ever more cheaply. The size of reproduction has shrunk from a big wood-and-metal box to a thin plastic case, and the quality has only improved.
CMOs and their consultants found they could brand their businesses and products in ways never conceived and created a chorus of campaigns using memorable melodies played on multiple media or platforms. A new field was born -- music branding, not jingle writing -- and now everyone's jumping on the digital bandwagon.
It's inescapable. Consumers can close their eyes but not their ears. Long ago, Muzak had the right idea -- strategic melodies, in offices and elevators subliminally influencing happiness and productivity.
New technology enables a smart leader to brand a business with a symphony of synergies. The multiplatform National Guard campaign ran on TV and movie screens, in theater lobbies, on popcorn bags, and online.
Getting in their heads
CMOs cannot afford to turn a deaf ear. Music can give rise to excitement, smiles, tears -- and product purchases. Imagine the theme of Sesame Street playing on your cellphone via Bluetooth technology while you're passing a toy store in a mall, or Jiffy Lube's theme on your car's GPS system while driving to work, triggered by an electronic roadside billboard. Music enables a marketer to fine-tune an audience by demographics and geography based on genre – hip-hop, rock, blues, country, oldies -- in a way sports or cultural events can't.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
|
Gerald Schwartz is president of G.S. Schwartz & Co., New York, and co-founder of Digital Power and Light, New York. |
|
Even the commercially resistant have found additional sources of income in product marketing and advertising in concert with their agents and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, perhaps most famously the Rolling Stones with "Start Me Up" for Microsoft and more recently Bob Dylan for Victoria's Secret.
Who owns it
OK, music is a marketing tool. But who orchestrates the creative, the strategy and implementation -- the CMO, the ad agencies, the promotion joints or the PR firms? The talent or their agents and managers?
"Seems fair game to me," says Robert Urband, a Los Angeles-based entertainment manager and lawyer. "Any business consultant can own this if he can hum a few bars and grasp the technologies, the media and applications. The key is orchestrating the application across the different platforms, live and digital. Of course, you have to choose a relevant song and negotiate a sound deal, especially when it involves long-term use in many unexpected ways."
Perhaps music branding, with all its opportunities for selling products, services, ideas and images, is as big a playing field as sports marketing. And given the dollars at stake, the field's future looks just as great, for artists, agents, promoters, marketers and their products to score big.
RSS Feed
RSS (What is RSS?)
But successful music marketing (aka: sonic branding) requires more than just an MBA and the ability to "hum a few bars," as Robert Urband asserts.
Indeed, this attitude leads to the kinds of tactics that many people consider strategic (e.g., use "cool" song to appeal to the kiddies) but are really only one-off campaigns, forgettable noise without any real relevance to the brand or enduring value to consumers.
Unlike the importance of understanding the mechanical aspects of music-based marketing (technology, platforms, etc.), Urband mentions the relevance of the music itself only passingly, as if this were an easy thing to determine.
This is like saying anyone who can put a sentence together and use Word can write a bestseller.
Brands spend millions to understand how to project who they are and what they stand for through proprietary logos, color palettes, graphic devices, and photography styles. They also take great care to understand how these expressions of identity will be perceived by their audiences.
The same care should be taken to understand what a brand sounds like. And this requires expertise, not merely an appreciation of music or the ability to hum.
Martin Mueller is right: music marketing is not new. What is new, in addition to the technology, is the branding rigor and musical expertise that sonic branding specialists are introducing to the practice.
Sonic branding agencies combine strategic brand-building expertise and marketing chops with licensing know-how and the musical fluency of schooled composers.
Their purpose is to define, develop, and strategically deploy their clients' unique "voices" in a holistic way--to design the total sonic experience, rather than leave it up to chance and the uncoordinated whims of whoever happens to be picking music on the brand's behalf.
This is how random music use and disjointed tactics are transformed into an authentic, thoughtfully orchestrated sonic branding program with purpose and long-term value.
Taking full advantage of all the great new sonic opportunities that technology affords us is a no-brainer. But if we don't pay particular attention to relevance--to the brand and to our audiences--we're only making the world a noisier place.
Sincerely,
Brian Rupp
In my experience, using too much music from famous artists to promote a brand is a poor substitute for an original marketing idea.
My friend Mr. Urband is correct in one regard though: the field is wide open right now, but I would advise those interested in this subject to work with people who know as much about the discipline of branding, and original brand/music strategy, as they do about music. Music experts are everywhere; brand experts are rare. Audio branding experts, even more rare.