Commentary

Too Much Music Can Dilute Your Brand Image

At the recent Dubai Lynx Ad Festival, I gave a seminar on the state of the art in using music and sound to strengthen brands. Called "What Does Your Brand Sound Like?," it covered the latest techniques for the use of audio, music and sound that elevate it from a disposable production element to a strategic branding tool and a legitimate discipline within marketing communications.

When we go to a festival like this, or Cannes, it's always revealing to get exposed to so much advertising in one place, and to study it from an audio perspective. And Dubai, as expected, showed the continuation of a trend that seems totally at odds with contemporary professional brand management: more and more music and sound being used at increasing volumes to scream for attention in an attempt to stand out from the competition, which is doing the exact same thing.

Countless brands are trying to associate themselves with music, and using so many sounds and styles that the music itself is starting to become a disposable, devalued and generic commodity rather than the legitimate brand asset it can be. Television advertising sometimes can seem like a radio station sampler, and this is usually to the detriment of a brand's unique identity.

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My friend Michael Spencer at Sound Strategies in London calls this torrent of audio "Sonic Gloop," and says it creates "a generalized mush of low-level information content" that we are increasingly starting to tune out.

Think about it. Eight million bands are selling their music on MySpace, and music supervisors everywhere are buying it in quantity. If you have web access and cable TV, you can listen to over 2,000 channels of streaming music or web casts from iTunes, Yahoo, Comcast or XM/Sirius.

Practically every piece of music ever made is for sale somewhere on the internet, either for listening or licensing. Even the most iconic musicians and songs are being employed, almost indiscriminately, to grab attention for a second and shill for the most mundane of household products. And this doesn't begin to account for the sonic gloop pouring from hotel lobbies, retail stores, airports, bars, and so on.

We have seen cases where clients have used so much music in a short amount of time, they are incapable of recognizing the tracks they've picked or had written for their own brands, and they have no idea what kind or how much music their competition is using. There was even a case last year where two competitors licensed tracks from the same rock band, both believing they were using music to help their brand image.

No wonder the listening, and buying, public finds it impossible to associate most brands with their music. It's total chaos.

What troubles me about this is that too many brand managers are not even trying to orchestrate a more cohesive audio identity. They are diluting their brand message and missing an opportunity to turn audio into a brand-unifying asset.

One way to start evolving your thinking is to try to answer this question: do you have any idea how many different bits of sound and music your brand is using? Put another way, do you have any idea how chaotic your brands sounds to your customers?

Most brand managers are shocked to find that their brand is emitting between 25 and 50 tracks of music and sound across all its consumer touchpoints. Some brands actually use well over 100 when you consider how many advertising agencies, promotion companies, web site companies, retail locations, customer service centers, and product development people have a hand in commissioning music and sound.

Rarely is this array of audio coordinated in any manner. Usually music and sound are chosen according to the personal preference of the person making the decision, who is often completely unqualified to make these choices and often makes these decisions in a vacuum. And so any hope of creating an effective brand experience is usually completely undone when the listening public:

  • visits your retail store and is bombarded with generic FM radio music identical to what your competitor uses, and worse, played at mind-numbing volume.
  • dials your customer service center and gets a rude voice, a generic recording, or on-hold music that is the same as a dozen other companies.
  • hears your radio campaign with music and sound that are completely at odds with the music running in your TV campaign.
  • visits your web site and hears a completely new range of audio that is unrelated to both TV and radio.

Research shows that today's consumers engage your brand through many channels simultaneously, and they have expectations that these interactions will be seamlessly inter-connected: your retail stores, your web site, your call centers, kiosks, catalogs, and advertising must all be part of the same brand experience, and one way to achieve this is with a cohesive and coordinated approach to music and sound.

We propose that a few things need to happen to solve this predicament of too much music and too much sonic gloop in the branding equation:

  1. Ad agencies need to step up their efforts as brand stewards and push for greater influence about a brand's music and sound across all brand touchpoints, even the ones they do not work on at present, and
  2. Client companies need to create a new role, Brand Music Manager, to coordinate the selection of all audio across the entire communications mix.
  3. Branding professionals needs to spend more time thinking about how a more strategic use of audio can create valuable assets and a better brand experience.

It will be interesting, as always, to see if the trends we observed in Dubai are more, or less, evident when the global ad community converges in June in Cannes, where we will be giving a workshop on the state of the art in audio identity.

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