Creating an attractive brand for your music is one of the most important marketing elements to help gain customers. A bland brand means no sales, and the wrong brand can be a disaster.
With a great brand that fits your music image perfectly, your music image can soar.
But what is a good brand? Is it a nice website? Is it the level of quality in your music? Is it just a catchy name?
It’s all that and more. It’s everything from the logo on your website (you do have a website, right?) to the design of your CD to the values your music conveys. Brand is the perceived value and quality of you as an entertainer.
When you’ve branded well, you’ve created a remarkable and distinct image. It’s memorable. It’s easy to recognize. People know exactly what they get if they're into you – before they even decide they are.
Your brand should capture:
- The emotion people feel when they think of your music
- What they achieve from being a fan of your music
- The overall impression that your music projects
How to find the right brand for you
Capturing all of these impressions can seem daunting at first, but there are few tricks that make finding your brand a little easier. By answering some questions, you can gain direction towards a perfect fit:
- What feeling do you want people to have when they think of your music?
- Fill in the blank: A consumer thinking of your music should say, “Wow, these guys seem really….”
- What type of personality do you have? (E.g. Fun, quiet, casual, dedicated, curious, whimsical, scientific, etc)
- What values do you want your music to project?
The more you learn about what impressions you want to convey, what your business represents and who you are, the closer you come to building your brand.
A few examples...
Jessie produces and records her own electronic pop. She wants people to feel comfortable with her, not overwhelmed. She believes in helping other people and giving away lots of content so more fans can find out about her and enjoy her music. Jessie is a very friendly person, and she likes having fun. Her friends think she has lots of pizzaz too. Jessie wants to convey that high energy and fun-loving attitude to fans.
Jessie’s brand is: Energized, helpful, friendly, and fun.
Here’s another example:
Martha is an mature, experienced folk singer/songwriter. She likes intimate performances where she can connect people with the deep spiritual energy of her songs and playing. She’s a kind, warm, caring woman, and she’s always mothering people. She wants to provide meaningful an honest music, traditional, nostalgic and comforting and she loves for people to feel right at home at her gigs.
Martha’s brand is: Warm, comforting, welcoming and caring.
It’s all about emotion
Notice that much of building a brand has everything to do with emotion and very little to do with actual marketing. A good brand makes people feel something. It resonates with consumers on a deeper level beyond what they want to buy and the price they’re going to pay.
Think about some big-name business brands, like Apple, Toyota, or Campbell’s. When you think of one of the large brand-name corporations, what kind of feeling do you get? What do you think they stand for? What emotions do they convey? Every brand tries to represent a certain lifestyle or personality to resonate with targeted consumers.
And it works.
Once you’ve figured out your business identity and image, you can start creating marketing materials like a logo, a business card, and a website… All properly branded so you can achieve maximum success.
Kurb is an online promotion company specializing in digital music marketing and artist management.
Follow our blog at http://musicmarketingblog.info for cutting edge web promotion as we launch http://newmusicmarketing.com - the exclusive artist community putting artists in control of their online promotion and revenue management.
Within New Zealand we also provide low cost and hassle free CD DVD duplication and printing as well as poster design print and placement in Auckland.
http://www.myspace.com/kurbpromo
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