Music and Branding #5

This is a translation of the column I'm writing for Danish industry publication Markedsføring (Marketing). Music and Branding deals with the trinity of brands, bands, and fans. It looks at how brands use (or don't use) music as part of their brand building efforts and how bands collaborate with brands. 
This column (# 5) was published in issue #13 out Nov 9th, 2010 and focuses on how brands are using music and to what extent they are dedicating the resources to make it a success. Please find links to the first three columns at the bottom.

In the previous column in Markedsføring #12 (column #4 here), we looked at the link between the interest of brands for using music as part of their brand marketing and the resources that they dedicate to it. And found that in fact there isn't much of a link.
Many brands want to use music and think it's important for brand-building but don't invest risk, time, money, hands, skills, or thinking to do it properly, ie in a purposeful, value creating way. In this column we will investigate the reasons for this. What are the barriers?

Rights management
Rights management, in this case intellectual property rights (IPR), is an area of increasing importance and ditto complexity when working commercially with music. Not only is IPR fundamentally complicated, new digital platforms and tools, the fragmentation of sales and distribution channels, and the difference in national legislation increase this complexity.
There really is a lot to be aware of and be buttoned-down about, and we can't blame brands for saying 'No thanks, we'll pass'. After all, commercial use of music is not their core business.
When I was European digital director at Levi's - where music is in an integral part of the brand marketing and a central element in consumer engagement - I had good use of our in-house lawyers who are IPR specialists. But even their insight and my experience from the record business wasn't enough - quite simply because music IPR is so intricate and because new opportunities emerge constantly which the legislation hasn't quite caught up with yet.
Many brands try to manage the IPR stuff themselves or ask the ad agency to do it. But a layman is a layman, and the consequence often is that the brand fails to secure all necessary exploitation rights, and fails to clarify liability. Both can be very costly.
At Levi's we would work with external experts to assess rights costs, formulate and negotiate the deals and manage payment to the various rights societies etc. I strongly recommend doing it this way.

Measuring effect
Another barrier for brands to using music strategically is measuring effect or ROI. How do we know if the investment comes back, how do we measure it? And this is just the right question to ask. But it starts with establishing the right objectives. Without objectives, there's nothing to measure against.
The reality often is - as previously described - that the brands haven't clarified for themselves why they want to use music. What is the purpose and what do we want to achieve? See column #3 for more about music strategy.
So before you start whining about the difficulties of measuring ROI, get your success criteria in place, find out what you want to measure and why.
As we saw in the previous column (#4), precious few brands have customer loyalty and even fewer have sales as objectives. There is a lack of commercial focus which really is the place to start. When you have your objectives and success criteria in place, you establish the KPIs and then you start tracking them, just you do with the other marketing activities.

Objectivity
Rights management and measuring effect is stuff you can do something about pretty easily. It's much more difficult with the third barrier.
The third barrier is this nonchalant or random approach to the use of music. An approach deriving from bias and personal opinions within the marketing departments and/or the agencies. In other words: Objectivity is still a scarce resource.
It's as if music is not viewed as a credible, serious and valid strategic brand-building tool: Professionalism is allowed to put its feet up and relax, while decisions on music is taken on the basis of personal points of view and not according to what's appropriate for the brand and the target audience.
But as with any other marketing activity it's necessary to be concscious of the effect that our messages/activities - in this case, the music - will have on the brand as well as understand the target audience's preferences and possible reactions.
We might think to ourselves that we're one kick-ass fabulous music guru, but it's not our knowledge of music that makes us a good music marketing strategist - although some interest in music and music culture obviously helps. What makes someone good at using music strategically for brand-building purposes is the ability to place music in the bigger brand picture in a way that consistently benefits the brand and supports its strategic goals.

In the next column we will focus on the important objectivity and take a closer look at relevance and brand fit, ie the part of a music strategy that deals with values match.

Previous columns:
Music and Branding #1
Music and Branding #2
Music and Branding #3
Music and Branding #4