What’s Going On?
“Music is the shorthand of emotion” Leo TolstoyFrom birth, first love, life’s highs and lows, through to death - music is the soundtrack to our lives. Music has a powerful effect on us emotionally. We are in fact highly sensitive to all sounds. Brands are beginning to value the power that both sound and music have in helping them connect with consumers in this visually cluttered world of ‘brand experiences’.
So much marketing energy has been focused on the visual brand. Yet the brave companies are asking themselves a simple question:
What does your brand sound like?
Have you considered this? Well, we do all the time from our clients.
citizensound delivers a range of services that allow brands to develop a presence through and within the music space:
- quantitative and qualitative research
- consumer and music trends analysis
- music search and licensing
- sales promotions
- music marketing and brand strategy
- trade marketing
- live events and experiential marketing
- branded content
- online and mobile music applications and services
- artist and music sponsorships and partnerships
- return-on-investment measurement and analysis
citizensound hears a lot of other questions and comments from marketers and their partners. Here are some of the common ones. Does this sound familiar?
“We are thinking of investing in music to help improve the consumer’s experience of our brand, but are not sure where to start”
Sometimes you just want a chat. Sometimes you want someone to open your minds up to interesting trends and opportunities. We often run short sessions on music and sound that give you food for thought and shake things up a little. This first step we call the soundsession
“Does our brand have credibility in music, and will it resonate with our consumers?”
We understand the highly personal relationship between music lover/consumer and music/brand. This is why we spend a lot of our time interviewing not just music lovers around the world, but also artists, managers and others in the music space. Our qualitative and quantitative research can help you assess your brand’s potential relationship through music. This we call the soundscape
“We do stuff in music, but we need to have a strategic framework”
By far one of the most common statements we hear from global brands, particularly those with lots of locally driven marketing activities. When we deliver strategic solutions for our clients, we do so with the aim of delivering one that all brand stakeholders, be they in the country office or the regional/global HQ, feel is their own. This step we call soundstrategy
“We have a need for some ideas for marketing activities for 2008, based on our existing strategy – any thoughts?”
Some of our clients just want us to come up with great ideas that fuse music to their brand strategy. Our ideas are not governed by a specific service we offer. We are not tied to outdoor events/celebrity endorsements/retail music deals. We do not package up pre-made solutions and try to retro fit them into your business requirements. We simply come up with ideas that are formed from the brand, music and consumer insights and .based on the premise that each and every idea. If one loses out, then everyone will ultimately lose out. We search for what we call the soundidea
“Can you help make sure our music properties are a success?”
We don’t just implement and manage the ideas we create. Some brands already have music activities up and running, but just want some extra hands on deck or want us to manage the activities for them. With our collective of citizens around the world, we have the people to help ensure things go to plan. This we call soundmanagement
“We spent a lot of money on the music activity, but are not clear on whether it really worked or not for us”
In a world of procurement and ROI pressures, we are only too aware that marketers need to be ever more convinced that their investments have worked. So that is why we work with our clients to build in key performance measures into all soundideas, and why we help them in the measurement after the activity with our proprietary tool soundinvestment
So why citizensound?
We have a rare mix of brand and music expertise: From business, research and commercial management, to first hand brand experience at a pan-European and global level. A traditional advertising and media agency background, matched with over ten years of hands-on experience in the digital space - brand, media owner and agency side. And all importantly we have over twenty years of hands-on experience working with artists and within the music industry. We fuse these skills into a single offering that ensures you get what you need – soundideas from a soundstrategy built from brand, consumer and music insights.
We know a few music bodies across the globe…and that helps! From artists to their managers, A&R men to label heads, music publishers to concert promoters, digital gurus to creative mavericks. We’ve collectively spent decades getting to know and understand the great and the good within the music space. And we are all huge music lovers too…
