How music marketing builds brands that connect with customers

According to Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, “brands are running out of [marketing] juice”. Luckily for you, Roberts has a remedy for this, which he calls “Lovemarks”. Lovemarks is a term that refers to the process a brand follows to create an emotional connection with their target audience, through mystery, sensuality and intimacy. And how do leading marketers aplpy this to their brand building strategy? Through the #PowerOfMusic, of course.

Below is a list of what music marketing offers customers.

Emotional Connections

The idea behind Lovemarks is to build on mystery, sensuality and intimacy within the brand building strategy to gain Loyalty Beyond Reason, another Roberts-coined-term. When building emotional connections with customers, sensual experiences need to be highlighted for building a brand and personal relationships.

One great example for this was the South Australian advertisement for the Barossa Valley.

The most important decisions your customers make are at the mercy of their emotions, rather than rationality. Because of this, your brand needs to draw from emotions, and the best way to replicate genuine emotions (cost-effectively) is by building a brand with music.

Engagement

According to a study by SIFO Research International, there are three degrees of advertising avoidance:

1. Ad Avoiders: Traditional and little inclined to change.
2. Traditional & Control: Active news seekers and try things early.
3. Laid back & Available: More materialistic and actively try things.

Each level of avoider requires the same key elements to building a brand’s loyal customer; engagement and value. Marketing with music is a strategic means of encouraging engagement as it is “able to evoke the instinct of subconscious and happiness avoiding any logical methods by affecting emotions” (Brand Amp 2009). The effect of which encourages customers to purchase the experience of happiness through the brand itself.

Experiences

Experiences are the new source of credibility for customers, as aesthetic, social or symbolic expressions are able to generate deep emotions, values and visions.

By building a brand identity and offering your customers’ memories and sensations rather than products and services increases the perceived value of your brand.  According to Marc Gobé’s Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People (2001), each brand should encompass all five senses in order to build loyal, long-term customers. Sight and hearing are the two leading senses employed when a brand is being processed. These two senses are then required to instill taste, touch and smell in the customer in an effort to set up the full experience.

Exclusivity

Although your customer recognises that your company mass-produces a product or service, they expect exclusivity from your brand. Marketing with music isn’t just about radio and TV advertisements using a popular hit song to gain momentum, building a brand encompasses providing your customer with a unique experience that is genuine and exclusive to your brand.

Companies like Munchery, which transforms an everyday meal into an experience - thanks to music, are providing exclusivity with a custom-made playlist tailored to the meal their customer is about to enjoy. In doing so, this specialised meal suddenly takes on the five senses, building the experience, that are missed by other companies in the industry. This throws engagement into overdrive as your customer feel empowered and engaged on a 3 dimensional level.

More and more companies, roughly 97% according to a study by Heartbeats International’s Sounds Like Branding report, state that music has strengthened their brand, with 7 out of 10 marketers believing that music will be more important to brand in the future. That report was from 2009, so you are now officially in the future and need to harness the #PowerOfMusic to see more connections with your customer.

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Read more about how music helped build brands for an insight into how companies like Marriott Hotels and HP have succeeded at marketing with music. Get the download link below.