Be sure to check out this year’s European advertising festival Eurobest in Amsterdam 25-27 November. Many interesting speakers, seminars and people. Heartbeats International will host an exclusive workshop on the 25th, outlining the principles of music branding and the future to come. See you there?
More details about the workshop:
In this year’s best global brands ranking by Interbrand, brand experience is profiled as one of the key factors for success. The concept of an experience economy was coined ten years ago by authors Pine and Gilmore when they published the book ‘The Experience Economy’. The authors argued that we are now facing a new important step in the processing of economic value, where companies sell memorable experiences rather than just products and services.
In today’s digital age people look for authentic experiences that they can engage with emotionally. To be successful a brand you need to offer a multi-sensory experience that touches all five senses. In order to command a higher price, build strong loyalty and ultimately create value for the customer, companies need to understand that there is more to a brand than what meets the eye. It’s not what we see, but what we hear, feel, smell and taste that is becoming more important.
According to the Sounds Like Branding survey, hearing is ranked as the second most important sense when building a strong brand today. An experience cannot exist without music. Just think of a movie, event or nightclub without music. To be successful today companies need to define how their brand sounds and what music means to their customers. Based on this understanding they can create experiences that go way beyond muzak in-store and background music in TV-commercials. They can create meaningful and memorable experiences (such as these) that are needed in order to stay on top of the competition today.
People are sick of advertising. A recent conducted survey by the SIFO Institute showed that 75% of people actively avoid advertising, whether it’s on TV, Internet or radio. New technology has set the customer in charge of the remote control.
In order to reach out to customers today you have to deserve their attention. To deserve their attention you need to engage them. If you engage them they will pass on your message, creating word-of-mouth which has always been marketing’s strongest tool (ranked as having seven times
as much impact as traditional advertising).
People love music. A survey from Millward Brown showed that music is the media that people would least like to live without (before Internet and TV). Another survey conducted by EMR (Entertainment Media Research) showed also that music is the main reason why people spend so much time on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. Music engages people in dialogue and conversation, whether it’s online or in ‘real life’.
The reason why a market leader such as Coca-Cola puts music at the heart of its marketing mix is that they understand that music engages people, that marketing today is conversation, and that when music is free it is one of the most important social media to start-up and nourish conversations around the brand and its products. In this way they can create not only consumers but friends, and in the long run, true fans of the brand.
A purchase decision takes around 2.5 seconds and is anything but rational. Many of the most important decisions we make in our life are based on feelings. A feeling is subjective and often irrational and impulsive. We experience this when we fall in love as well as when we shop.
We consume, love and relate to products both with our hearts and our minds. But in today’s market where supply has long surpassed demand and products are more and more similar, the emotional aspect is the differentiating factor. Emotions, unlike products, cannot be copied or produced cheaply in China.
Music is distilled emotion. People listen to music to set themselves in certain types of moods. It is a companion through life and is ranked as the media they would least like to live without (that is before Internet and mobile phones). Music is the most powerful way of building a more emotional bond with the brand. It circumvents the rational mind and speaks directly to our feelings. Brands that understand the implications of music will be the market leaders of tomorrow.
Many of us who studied marketing are familiar with McCarthys marketing mix. How his four Ps and the right ingredients of product, price, placement and promotion help to position a brand on the market. Fifty years later and still many marketing departments follow a model that was meant for a world before branding, new technology and hyper competition changed everything. Don’t get me wrong, the four Ps still work great for products but in today’s world where a company selling experiences, association and lifestyles more and more, this model is long since outdated.
Branding today is about positioning a company in the mind of the target group. Companies today focus on building a more emotional and exclusive brand that offers an experience that engages their audience. This is what I named the four Es in brand communication. Just as in McCarthy’s model, each brand needs its own unique recipe. How these ingredients are to be mixed depends on what type of brand it is and in which segment it’s active. For a brand with retail stores the experience is probably more important than for an Internet brand where perhaps engagement is in focus.
In the following four posts I will present how the four Es model works in music branding. How the right music mix helps a brand to be more emotional, engaging, experience based and exclusive. I will start next week with the first post on emotions.
Sounds Like Branding the book is released in Scandinavia in February 2010. Written by Heartbeats International founder Jakob Lusensky, it’s the first in the field of music branding. It tells an exciting story about how brands became record labels and consumers turned into fans. It also presents the models and tools at hand to work with music branding in practice.
The publisher is Norstedts, Sweden’s oldest publishing house, founded in 1823. Together with Swedish online book store Bokus we now let you choose the cover for the book (only the Swedish version…).
Discussions are being made with various international publishers and an english version is planned for later on in 2010.
Being a great fan of both food and music I found this piece from the University of Gastronimic sciences quite interesting. I am pretty sensitive to when the two do not correlate. I don’t know how many times I have had to tell the waiter to change the selection of music. In my world, the level of understanding of music as a way to enhance the eating experience is greatly underestimated. Of course there are exceptions: I can’t wait to get back to Tokyo to once again to experience dining at the China Blue on the 28th floor of the Conrad Hotel. A beatiful experience for all senses where the Philip Glass inspired music selection greatly enhances the magic of the experience.
Read the full article here.