The McDonald’s ‘I’m Loving It’ chant is up there with the Intel Inside sonic logo as probably one of the most recognised pieces of sonic marketing. But how do you keep your sonic logo sounding fresh? How do you stop consumers from going “not that again”?

Well how about you get your consumers to reinvent it! McDonalds ran a competition in the US to soundtrack their new ad, and the winner was Jason Harper, a singer from Palm Beach, who apparently received nearly half of the 12,279 votes cast at myspace.com/BigMacChant, where folks voted online in celebration of the Big Mac’s 40th birthday. Here’s the original advert…

…and here’s Jason Harper’s winning entry

You go half way around the world to one of the most exclusive hotels in Dubai to find your corporate colours in the carpet…

Well, we had fun in Dubai. The city is a fantastic example of the Adidas phrase “Impossible is Nothing”.

I have not been to Dubai for some years now and the transformation is incredible. Really enjoyed the visit.

I was kindly invited to speak to over 300 people at the OMD Creative Masterclass, organised by media agency OMD and my friends at CSquared. It was a really enjoyable conference.

The themes for the day were Mobile, Music and Movies, and there a few posts on the citizenbay blog over here.

My task was to address the new models of music and consider where brands fit into these new models.

The starting point was to challenge the audience on how much they contemplate the Sound of their Brands…

Very engaging audience. Back there soon…

Thanks to all at OMD ME and CSquared for the invite…

Alan Yentob’s excellent documentary on the work of Oliver Sacks, reminded me to share one of the insights that I picked up at a WARC conference I attended a few weeks ago on Sponsorship Marketing. The event chaired by a good friend of citizensound, Mark Palmer, brought together some excellent speakers including Sally Cowdry, Marketing Director of O2 and Max Bonpain, Head of Brand Management at Samsung UK.

One of the speakers at the event was Peter Walshe from Millward Brown who talked about the PARTNERZ programme that they had been developing with fellow WPP agencies, including Mindshare, Mediacom and Mediaedge:CIA. The work aimed to match brands with the myriad of sponsorship opportunities available to them.

One of the key bits of their research examined a range of key ‘cultural’ activities and the level of fit with consumers. They asked consumers all over the world ‘what activity do you LOVE?” Peter asked the audience what we thought would come out top. Most people banked on sport, but a small number of us shouted out music, and guess what we were right…

Music 36%
Film 28%
TV and Entertainment 17%
Sport 15%
Gaming 13%
Good Causes 11%
Arts 9%

Source: Millwood Brown/WPP

So if your were under any illusion that Film, TV, Sport, the Arts or even Gaming were more important to human beings than Music, forget it, you don’t have to imagine any longer!

The current ad campaign for VW Golf used the sound of the car to develop the sync track for the brands latest ad campaign. However, car manufaturers, unlike many other brands, have always understood the sonic importance of their products.

Car companies, especially at the high end of the market, have always traded on the ‘noise’ that their cars make, or in some cases the lack of it, as a major selling point.

The sound of a closing car door is not objectively related to the intrinsic qualities of a car, it’s an important subjective parameter for many consumers when they are looking to buy. That solid ‘thunk’ when the door closes, emphasises the quality that manufacturers such as BMW and Mercedes are fanatical about.

Equally, you only have to put your foot on the accelerator of a supercar like the Bugatti Veyron to know that the roar that comes from the engine is a lot more satisfying to the average pertolhead, than the noise made by your average 4-door family saloon. While some luxury car makers even go in the opposite direction, making the driving experience of their cars as silent and as stress free as possible. The latest Rolls Royce Phantom may have a V12 48 valve 6.7 litre engine under the bonnet, but the noise inside the car, even at speed, would be unlikely to wake the snoozing billionaire in the back seat of his limo.

Car companies spend a lot of time and effort in trying to effectively dampen the sound of ‘environmental’ noise. The car’s engine makes noise, the wind rushing over the car makes noise, tyres generate noise, and other vehicles make noise. So to create a comfortable environment, car companies have to use lots of techniques to reduce and dampen the ’sonic clutter’ that can enter into your car.

But while we want to keep that ’sonic clutter’ outside, many of us want a great sounding noise coming from our in-car hifi systems. And cars, as you won’t be surprised to learn are not great when it comes to delivering great acoustics. The interior of a car is made up of a mix of reflecting surfaces and absorptive surfaces, that can helpfully impact on the sound entering the car, but also unfortunately on sound within the car itself. So it should come as no surprise that the car designers and in-car hifi manufacturers continue to look for ways to improve our in-car listening experience.

citizensound says:

With so many car companies allowing consumers an extended test drive these days, you’d expect car manufacturers to be doing everything possible to make their cars live up to their potential buyers expectations from not just a driving point of view, but also by delivering a great sonic expereince!

So have Starbucks given up on music or are they just refocusing their attention?

When it was announced this week that they were to pull out of their record label Hear Music and hand over this business to their partners the Concord Music Group, an obvious reaction was ‘So what went wrong?’

This news was further compounded when it was announced that the entertainment division was to be put under control of the Chief Technology Officer Chris Bruzzo…geeks in charge of creative development? Surely this means that the whole Hear Music exercise has been a failure?

Well, it hasn’t been a failure in my view. For many of the classic artists, it has worked. First Ray Charles sells over 5million units. Paul McCartney sold more than he could have imagined. Meanwhile, Hear Music tempted Joni Mitchell to record again - which in my book is worth the whole exercise in itself. It also started to offer an alternative distribution and marketing solution for many other artists like the immensely talented and underrated Sia.

Has it been a success for Starbucks customers? Well, from a sonic retail perspective, Starbucks can teach many other retailers how to think about the effect of sound on a consumer’s experience in-store (See posts passim).

Starbucks have a head start on other brands in terms of understanding the power of music in the consumer’s connection with their business. Yet, the news clearly suggests that all is not well at Starbucks. So what can we make of the changes?

Shifting away from CD to digital is good business sense, though making the assumption that the CD is completely dead for the Starbucks consumer is a huge one. There are over 6000 options of coffee in Starbucks, so having a choice of formats for the music - “CD or download madam?” - is not a bad idea.

The bigger challenge for the new head of the entertainment division is how to ensure that the experience in-store is not undermined by this move. The danger is that a shift to digital entertainment will leave the coffee-house experience somewhat muted.

One hopes that Starbucks does not retreat, turn it’s music commitment into yet another music download site and forget that sonic branding is felt most of all by their customers in-store. They may be right to consider promoting books in-store (in fact this makes immense sense), yet the power of music could be better harnessed by brands, Starbucks included.

A thought for Starbucks:
Ever thought about getting local artists to play in-store, so supporting local art, giving something fresh to the customers and positioning yourself as the ‘local coffee house’ at the same time? It means acting small, not acting big.

After digging out my Desperate Bicycles records I decided to hunt out my copy of the first single by Scritti Politti. If that name seem familiar it may be from the hits they had in the mid 80s with singles such as Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) or The Word Girl, or you may even know the blissfull The “Sweetest Girl”, which got to the giddy heights of number 64 in the UK charts back in 1981 (the song was also the opening track on the NME’s C81 cassette which citizen Bay has been digging big time of late). However, before the band became an intellectual pop band much beloved by certain factions of the UK music press, they made a series of independently make scratchy DIY punk records. Scritti founder and current Dalston resident Green Gartside saw the Sex Pistols on the opening night of the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour at Leeds University, and decided to form a band.

The band came to London in 1977, moving into a legendary squat in Regent’s Park Road in Camden Town. Scritti Politti were galvanised into actiom the Desperate Bicycles and released their first DIY single, titled ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ on their own St. Pancras label in 1978. The inside of the sleeve included information on the cost to make the single - recording (£98), mastering (£40), pressing (2,500 7 inch singles for £369.36) , Rubber Stamp and labels (£8), plus information on their distributor Rough Trade Records, then still a record shop in Notting Hill. And just in case you didn’t get the idea he first time around, they printed the costs of producing the John Peel sessions EP on that cover as well.

Green notoriously hates the bands early records, which he claimed “sounds like some anti-produced labour of negativity”, but he finally relented and let his label Rough Trade reissue “Skank Bloc Bologna” on the compilation Early, which brings together the bands first four singles and EPs. The album is available for download at emusic, or you can buy the album from the Rough Trade shop here, for the bargain price of only £6.99!

In the citizensound sonicRetail survey, we found a few stores decided on a policy of a music-free zone in–store.

Shops such as Church’s shoes had the sound of people talking and shoes being squeezed on to feet, nothing more. And this worked for the environment and the clientele. A sense of calm away from the storm of the street.

The Apple Store on Regent Street London is also music free, which given the connection between Apple and music, this seems shocking. However, Apple might rationalise this decision by seeing each person as controllers of their own music destiny (via their iPod of course). So a store that tries to dictate and decide what the customer should hear is not a store that respects that customer. However, my issue with the Apple Store is that in this music-free zone, music is generally heard…not through the store PA system, but through far-off speakers linked to Apple products. People test out iPod speakers or listen to songs on laptops. So the sound throughout the store is of far off tinny music.

Meanwhile the O2 in-store had the music so low that you could hardly hear it. Given the immense commitment to music by O2, this again seems like a contradiction. I would expect the in-store sonic experience to be stunning in any O2 store. Sadly, this is far from the truth.   Which leads to another issue…

citizensound says:

If you think music has a role in store then for goodness sake have it loud enough to do its' work and invest in a decent soundsystem. 

Mango stores are the sonic version of vanilla ice cream. After a while you are yearning for mint choc chip, raspberry, peach or mango even…anything but  vanilla…I have to ask the question – what is the point of having music in store if the music is so bland? It got me thinking…

If Mango was a band, who would it be? And then it dawned on me…Mango is the fashion version of Westlife.

Westlife have sold loads of albums, have a huge following, but are not known for innovation and creativity. They get on their stools, then get off them and sing covers, get back on their stools, then sell lots of CDs. A brilliant and successful model that works. So, Mango as Westlife is not a bad thing, IF Mango wanted that image. But this is NOT Mango. When I lived in Barcelona in the 90s, Mango was not a covers band. It was not white suits and the boy your mother would like. Mango had credibility. It had edge. Yet it also had accessibility. Right now in their stores, it just feels much like a lot of other stores…

Una nota para MANGO:Por favor Senores y Senoras de Mango, es possible a cambiar vuestra estrategia de musica en las tiendas – estoy seguro que hay musica que puede connectar mejor con los consumadores. No estais Westlife, eres mas cool que ellos.

In our first post on the sound of the brand at retail, citizensound mentioned the lack of investment that seems to go into sound within the retail space.

This comes in part from a marketing focus on the visual when it comes to financial commitment. The sense of sight dominates marketing decisions – the logo; the packaging design; the Retail window display; the Point of Sale materials; the storyboard for the next ad – all highly visual. This makes sense given the power of the visual to connect with our subconscious. However, the human being is a sensory beast, not purely a visual one. The sense of smell, of taste and of touch have immense power on human behaviour, yet are still highly under-utilised in marketing – likewise with the sense of sound. Many retailers know that music has a role to play in the in-store environment, but it seems to have been relegated to a line on a spreadsheet that gets ticked or a figure that is cut every year.

In many of the stores citizensound visited, the little thought put into the sonic experience suggests that the sourcing of music has been given to companies who provide the cheapest service of homogenised nonsense, rather than carefully chosen music that resonates with the brand and the consumers. For some companies, I can imagine that music sourcing has been left purely in the hands of those looking to reduce costs rather than build brand. However, it is also probable that music is just not seen as a priority, so marketing budgets are channelled to the Visual, while the other Senses get neglected.

Gap has used music imagery in their communication successfully before and have created innovative music links such as Madonna/Missy Elliott. So to find poor sound quality and bland music in their stores was hugely disappointing sonically.

On the other hand, HSBC have invested in their own radio station. As you wait for an appointment with a business account person, you can kick back and listen to HSBC’s in-house radio station. Playing a balance of music that works for the company, HSBC have DJs playing a safe playlist with dedications to local store staff, and promotions of new products for customers. All the staff said they enjoyed it, whilst customers were shaking their ankles. This made more sense than Gap.

Who would have thought HSBC could teach Gap about music and customers?

citizensound says:

If you are listening GAP, please please sort out your stores – you and your customers deserve better…