How Music Grows Brands: The Field Guide

By Joe Belliotti and Rebecca Jolly

Music is a motivator, a respite, a provocateur. When used strategically in business, it creates culture and connects brand with consumer.

As a branding tool, music can be a double-edged sword. Even the most complex instruments, though, are capable of transforming your business—if you know how to leverage them.

In How Music Grows Brands, branding experts and music industry executives Joe Belliotti and Rebecca Jolly provide an insider look at utilizing music as your most powerful branding asset. They introduce Brand dB, their proprietary methodology, reveal the secrets of the industry, and provide a roadmap for long-term success. The first resource of its kind, How Music Grows Brands is an empowering exploration of the power—and potential—music has to shape culture and drive business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781544537818

Book preview

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One. Why this Book

Chapter Two. Why Music?

Chapter Three. The Way Brands Tap into Music

Chapter Four. Brand dB

Six Steps to Developing a Brand-Music Experience

Chapter Five. Music Strategy Should Bring Brand Strategy to Life

Chapter Six. Working through the Complexities of the Music Industry

Chapter Seven. Music and Music Marketing Aren’t Shiny New Objects

Chapter Eight. A Case for a CMXO: Chief Music Experience Officer

Chapter Nine. Where to Go from Here: Rebuilding after COVID-19

Conclusion

Copyright © 2023 Joe Belliotti and Rebecca Jolly

All rights reserved.

How Music Grows Brands

The Field Guide

ISBN  978-1-5445-3782-5  Paperback

ISBN  978-1-5445-3781-8  Ebook

Introduction

Brands face an endless list of challenges when it comes to working with music and sound. Most people who have picked up this book know too well where many brands end up when they attempt to navigate the number-one cultural passion point:

Lack of strategy, often leading to lack of consistency and needless overspending

Challenges navigating a complex, fragmented industry

Difficulties reconciling how cultural impact and alignment influence business objectives (particularly in the short term)

Misalignment between brand, audience, and music direction/choices

Intangible results and subsequent challenges around internal communications and proof of concept

And on and on.

However, some brands, such as Coca-Cola, Red Bull, and Vans, have managed to overcome these challenges and find consistent, time-tested ways to harness the power of music and sound to grow their brands.

How can these challenges be solved for all brands? How can we help every brand use music and sound to create and build culture, drive measurable business results, and build meaningful relationships with audiences at scale?

It’s absolutely possible and, when done right, can entirely change the game for a brand. By building the internal expert capabilities, processes, and tools in music and sound, we can start to create a proposition that can realize massive positive impact for the business in question and the culture it chooses to align with. This is no different from any other marketing discipline where the right set of strategic capabilities within organizations can transform businesses.

Our hope with How Music Grows Brands is that we will help brand builders on their journeys to harnessing the power of music to grow their brand.

This book will take you through the following key areas in this pursuit:

1.  Why this book: Here we’ll identify the typical challenges faced in this business intersection and outline—drawing on our personal experience and expertise—how we can begin to tackle them, and why we should. We’ll look at what we can achieve when we crack the code and where that will take us.

2.  Why music: Why are we so sure that music is a key cultural passion point worth aligning with? How can it connect us so effectively to our hard-to-reach potential audiences? This exploration around the why will help brand builders construct their own narrative to ensure that they can achieve buy-in to the proposition from internal stakeholders.

3.  How brands can use music: This is a reference directory detailing all the hows and whys when it comes to brands working with music—the channels, the opportunities, and the results they can drive.

4.  Brand dB: Brand dB is our proprietary methodology. It involves six steps to developing a brand-music experience, from how to define the picture of success through how to identify the relevant brand-music intersection for you, including creative solutions and partnerships to value assessments, amplification, and measurements.

5.  The chicken or the egg: music strategy vs. brand strategy: A recurring challenge is which way this should be done. We explore how to build the brand’s strategy that will be brought to life strategically through music, working through the matrix of complexities to achieve value for all parties.

6.  Music industry 101: This is how to navigate one of the most complex and fragmented industries—a walkthrough of how it works and who does what. From artists, labels, and publishers to platforms, events, and media. We explore how each of these areas operates and how to optimize each for brand success.

7.  Music-marketing bedfellows: Applying music to a brand marketing strategy isn’t new—it’s been done for decades. We explore some of the greatest success stories and what we can draw from them that remains applicable today.

8.  The case for a CMXO: We believe that the music function should occupy a key role internally at brands, and we make a case for it in this chapter, packaged up and ready to be borrowed for internal sell-in.

9.  Where we go from here: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and seismic global shift that followed changed the course of all elements of the music (and brand) world. We shine a light on the new world of opportunities that subsequently opened up, along with thoughts on how to capitalize on them.

Enjoy the read; we hope it supports your business goal and entertains you along the way.

Chapter One. 

Why this Book

Our Personal Rationale

We experience music and sound in so many ways during our daily lives, both intentionally and unintentionally. In the modern world we live in, it’s incredibly rare to be in complete silence, without music or some other form of audio penetrating our consciousness. Whether we realize it at the time or not, music helps shape the mood we’re in, enhance certain moments, and create lasting memories that come back to us time and time again when triggered by the distant tinkling of a certain tune or jingle. It never ceases to amaze just how powerful this can be.

Think back to your childhood. We all have specific sonic memories that take us back to moments in time. We both (your authors; more on us later) have visceral reactions to pieces of music. Every time Joe hears Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, he’s transported to childhood and specifically to a birthday party in his family’s house, to the extent he can almost smell the Entenmann’s coffee cake. For Rebecca, Michael Jackson’s Bad takes her back to letting herself in the front door after school to find her mom dancing around the kitchen as she irons shirts, spaghetti bubbling away on the hot stove. Such real memories from previous decades, all five senses triggered by a few short bars of a song.

On average, we spend 37.5 hours per week with music. We listen to music, follow music online, and watch videos, TikToks, and livestreams. We Shazam songs and create and share playlists. We move. We dance. We connect. And with that in mind, it becomes a given that brands seeking to connect emotionally with their customers, to market to them, to find affinity and sell products to them, turn to music in some way. Those behind the curtain at a brand, the people responsible for pointing it in the right direction and finding a place for it in a crowded and noisy world, continually research and mine insights into who their customers, and potential customers, are—what they like, what they do, where they spend their time, what moves and motivates them, what brings them joy.

Regardless of the brand and the audience it is looking to reach, research pretty much always finds a link to music. Across all demographics, music is the number-one most valued passion point, the number-one signal of personal identity, and the number-one sharable cultural vertical across both online and offline experiences.

Yet, somehow brands only end up investing around $1.6 billion per year in the global music space. By comparison, brands spend over $20 billion in sports and are on track to spend $10 billion on influencer marketing. This is a massive disconnect but, more importantly, a massive opportunity.

There are countless opinions on, and rationalizations for, why brands don’t invest as heavily in music as you might expect they would. Some say that music is hard to navigate because the music ecosystem is fragmented, the rights are complex, or the music industry doesn’t package music in easy ways for brands to partner with. Some brands say, Music doesn’t work for us, or We don’t know how to measure the ROI.

Regardless of the reasons, it all comes down to one key point: most brands do not have the internal specialized capabilities to navigate and align the music experience effectively enough to drive their business objectives and grow cultural relevance. These conversations and challenges often become so commonplace that they can end with brands abandoning their music campaign before they can figure out if it’s driving results, or even avoiding music altogether, which serves as a huge missed opportunity to attract young, affluent, and engaged consumers to a brand. And in all cases we’ve ever come across, it boils down to lack of a specialist practitioner who could have greatly reduced any investment risk and exponentially elevated the output.

This book is designed to guide everyone interested in, and working across, the brand experience, from brand builders to marketers; from entry level to CMO; from those studying for a future career in the industry, to agencies, specialty marketers, and design firms. At the same time, we’ve aimed to create a resource for those inside the music ecosystem, specifically those looking to optimize revenue opportunities and business growth within the industry: record labels, content creators, artist reps, media companies and platforms, new tech, and music-experience entrepreneurs.

How Music Grows Brands