Tune the music to your branding

Marta Miranda – Branded Content Specialist & Producer – Have you ever thought, as a customer, that Music can make you identify with a brand?

We're used to walking into a physical shop, for instance, and hearing a particular musical style deliberately chosen as background music. In fact, whether it's the kind of music playing in a shop, or the music picked for an advert or for a brand's event, music is closely tied to Marketing and can reinforce a brand's DNA.

And from 2020 onwards, the shift of music branding strategy towards digital became clear.

So how do we predict the future of technology and the next big step? The answer may be easier than it seems: by going back to basics a little. More specifically, by going back to using the voice.

Marta Miranda – Branded Content Specialist & Producer – Have you ever thought, as a customer, that Music can make you identify with a brand?

We're used to walking into a physical shop, for instance, and hearing a particular musical style deliberately chosen as background music. In fact, whether it's the kind of music playing in a shop, or the music picked for an advert or for a brand's event, music is closely tied to Marketing and can reinforce a brand's DNA.

And from 2020 onwards, the shift of music branding strategy towards digital became clear.

So how do we predict the future of technology and the next big step? The answer may be easier than it seems: by going back to basics a little. More specifically, by going back to using the voice. Music's relationship with sensory Marketing

First of all, it's worth remembering that a number of different elements build a brand's image — its branding — in the eyes of the public: the name, the visual identity, the way the physical space is decorated, the quality of customer service and sensory Marketing.

So when we think of brands like Apple or Google and associate them with innovation and market leadership, we're expressing how we identify a brand, and that will shape our relationship with it. Those associations have effectively been built by branding, through Marketing strategies and campaigns that reinforce the brand's values.

There are also various sensory Marketing techniques in use that are already familiar to us, such as a shop's signature scent, among all the sensations we're offered and remember when we think of a brand.

A shop's background music is therefore another sensory Marketing technique, drawing on hearing and using sound to convey the brand's identity. The aim is to deliver a better shopping experience, with a more pleasant environment that encourages buying, which tends to attract customers and keep them loyal. Music is rarely, then, a random element.

Take the example of brands whose shops are positioned for a younger audience and which opt for louder, more contemporary music with a more relaxed service style, whereas luxury brands positioned for a more mature target generally go for calmer music at a lower volume and with more formal service.

Ultimately, the point is to increase sales, and a music branding strategy has been shown to create a connection with the customer — who doesn't surround themselves with music in their life and let themselves be swayed by its emotional charge?

It's also argued that it keeps customers in the shop for longer, encourages impulse purchases and strengthens brand leadership through consumers' auditory memory. With the right musical curation, the brand stays in consumers' memory, because it triggers emotions. Music branding builds emotional connections with brands, creating positive memories and associations and helping them stand out from the competition.

In the book “Sounds like branding”, Jakob Lusensky tells us that “music branding is communication through emotions. Music engages people in conversation and creates memorable experiences. It helps companies build a unique position in the minds of their audience, turning their customers into brand fans”.

Music branding is a Branded Content strategy

Creating content for a brand through music means being able to translate the brand's concepts, attributes and essence into musical form, with the aim of building closer relationships with consumers. The goal is to add value to customers' lives and, in doing so, add value to the brand.

Music branding is most widely known for covering the creation of:

• background music playlists for in-store radio at a retail outlet;
• playlists for Events;
• artist performances at events;
• music festivals;
• production of TV adverts and radio spots;
• sound branding production (creating “jingles” for advertising campaigns, with a musical signature that becomes recognisable).

But these days you also need to consider:

• brand playlists on Spotify and streaming platforms;
• adverts on Spotify;
• musical content for social media;
• digital and advertising partnerships with artists/influencers (e.g. lives, sponsored posts, etc.).

How do you put the different music branding strategies into practice?

A few tips

Do you have a fashion brand? A restaurant? A hotel? A shopping centre? A clinic? Plenty of businesses make use of a music branding strategy. What they all have in common is the need to stand out from the competition, and to do that they need to tailor their campaigns to their own essence and target audience.

Although music branding isn't an exact science, here are a few tips for getting a musical curation service right:

Choosing the playlists

• Choose the playlist's musical styles (rock? jazz? bossa nova?) according to the brand's identity and its audience profile (not according to your own or your staff's personal taste);
• Schedule the playlist around the times of day and the flow of people through the shop — at the end of the day, for example, customers tend to be more tired after work, so very upbeat music can be irritating; faster music also makes people move around more quickly, which helps at peak times;
• Make your background music playlists (with the appropriate licences — playlists created on Spotify aren't allowed for commercial use in retail premises) consistent across all the brand's outlets, including digital channels;

To pull these strategies off well, it's crucial not only to keep up to date and constantly research new musical styles, but also to be able to answer branding-related questions. If your brand were a person, which singer would it be? What playlist would it have? What kind of music festival would it want to sponsor? What kind of audience visits your shop and what are their preferences? Are the musical artists you've chosen already representing competing brands?

From this analysis, a communications agency working in music branding starts to get a clearer sense of how to define a sonic identity guide for a brand, setting out the different musical styles and the artists that embody the brand's musical persona.

A presence on Spotify

According to data from Revista Exame (April 2021), Spotify has more than 300 million active users worldwide and there are at least 300 brand profiles on Spotify across different sectors.

Brands that want to create content on the Spotify streaming platform should use Spotify for brands, where they can set up their profile with their playlists for distribution across digital channels.

These playlists can and should work as content in their own right, with strategies designed specifically for them (for example, playlist names should be themed, reflect product attributes or campaign names, mark key dates or simply capture moods).

Spotify playlists should also be promoted as a type of content across other digital channels, such as social media (through stories, feed posts, highlight menus) or by email, encouraging customers to subscribe to and listen to a playlist.

To reach users on Spotify's free tier (those who aren't premium subscribers), brands can:

• sponsor lists created by Spotify itself;
• offer a sponsored 30-minute ad-free music session to anyone who watches a promotional video;
• create audio ad spots (just like on the radio).

To reach premium users, who listen to playlists without ad breaks, the American fast food chain KFC ran a creative campaign specifically within Spotify Premium to launch a new sandwich — the Anything but Ordinary Kentucky Burger.

KFC teamed up with three musical artists (local to Dubai), whose profile and cover photos were changed to feature the burger alongside them; commercial information was added to their bios; playlists were created for those artists with advertising messages such as “discover the new Kentucky Burger before it's too late”; and the gig locations pointed to the nearest KFC outlets on Google Maps.

This campaign, which is thought to have reached around 100,000 people on Spotify, showed how to link a product to musical artists, humanising the brand and building an emotional relationship with consumers. Source: Reason Why, Youtube

Another example is Adidas, which announced the launch of the Ultraboost 20 trainers by positioning them as an innovative product designed for the future of sport. That positioning led to the insight of linking them to the theme of space, which in turn led to a partnership with Spotify and the International Space Station (a United States National Laboratory) and the creation of a playlist of space-themed music. To access the playlist, customers had to point their phone at the stars until they located the Space Station.

Partnerships with musical artists

It was during lockdown that we began to see the trend for sponsored lives with musical artists who, teamed up with brands, entertained social media users. That trend ended up strengthening branded content campaigns linked to Influence Marketing, which not only helped the artists through a critical period but also gave brands access to those artists' fans.

And since then, brand–artist partnerships have become increasingly common. The advertising market keeps finding innovative ways to tap into the music ecosystem, and one of the most recent marketing trends is “clip-commerce”. It's nothing new for brands to invest in product placement in soaps, series, films and even music videos, so investing in audiovisual productions with singers was hardly an unlikely step.

Brands need to innovate to stand out in the market, especially when they're dealing with audiences who aren't the type to watch adverts on television.

In Brazil, a few examples stand out, such as the exclusive tracks created by the singers Anitta for the brand Magalu and Vanessa da Mata for Westwing. The partnership between Vanessa da Mata and Westwing produced Brazil's first clipe-commerce, in which every product shown was available to buy from the brand: Source: Youtube Vanessa da Mata Source: Youtube Magalu

In Portugal we also have two recent examples of this trend. The Scroll campaign by the Fox channels, which took the form of a real (physical) two-kilometre feed featuring examples of Fox programmes, used as a metaphor to poke fun at the average distance we scroll through our phone feeds every day, joined forces with the artist Ivandro to create an exclusive track on the theme. The music video was even filmed on the physical scroll built for the Fox campaign. Source: Youtube Fox Portugal

Samsung Portugal went further still and, also teaming up with a musical artist, David Bruno, produced not just one track but an album of five songs designed to serve as tutorials, highlighting the features of the Galaxy phone range: Source: Youtube Samsung Portugal

More recently it was Staples' turn to release a music video with the Portuguese musicians Diogo Piçarra and Nenny, creating the track “Todos fazem a diferença” to promote its Back to School campaign: Source: Youtube Staples Portugal To sum up, tune music to your brand offline and online

Since 2020, many brands have moved their activities into the digital world as they watched their shops close. If the shopping experience was already something to be refined in physical spaces through sensory Marketing techniques — among them choosing a background music playlist to stimulate consumers' senses — that shopping experience could hardly be valued any less in the online world. Music has a positive impact on the relationship with a brand, both consciously and unconsciously, whether in terms of how consumers remember that brand, how long they stay in the shop, or how they connect with it across digital channels.

At the end of the day, music branding lets you communicate a brand's identity in a more human, more emotional way.