How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary

tasks?

Taylor Barnes

What is a Brand Image?

Branding is a way of clearly associating images or messages with a certain product, and to differentiate that certain product from other products.

There should be an intelligent use of design, advertising and marketing to make the product become more attractive and relevant to its target audience.

The main aim of a brand name or image is to satisfy the consumers as it is their decision whether to buy that particular product or not.

Brand Image in the Music Industry

Branding in the music industry is basically to sell the artist to their target audience and also to try and entice a wider audience.

In the music industry branding is key to making the artist recognisable for the audience to relate to in more than on product, for example music videos and magazine adverts.

There are lots of different brands in the music industry; the more unique and interesting the brand, the more audience recognition the artist receives in a forever growing, changing and competitive business.

A quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos states "a brand is what people say about you when you leave the room"

An example of the Impact that branding has in the Music Industry today

I am looking into the branding of Kings of Leon’s debut album ‘Come Around Sundown’. Kings of Leon are a well known band across the world, and their new album promotes a different image of the band in contrast to their other albums.

Here is a link to the music video ‘Radioactive’ which promoted the release of their new album, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IAxoqoqJ44 . In my opinion this is quite a refreshing, ‘new’ brand image for the band. They appear fun and lively and the simplicity of the video shot in orange light creates a more relaxed look on the band.

I think the image that Kings of Leon are trying to create here is possibly more chilled, soft rock. The band also seems to appear quite fun and relaxed, due to the soft sunset colours of reds, oranges and yellows. Personally this makes me think of a beach on holiday and I can get a feel of the music being chilled out and down to earth. This is quite a big contrast compared to their previous albums where they had more of a hard rock image. Here is a link to the bands previous image in their music video ‘Sex On Fire’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94RNp7veIJE .

The brand image created for ‘Taylor and the Rubies’

The genre of our artist ‘Taylor and the Rubies’ is Indie Pop, and we created a brand image on what our interpretation is of that genre, whilst bringing some individuality to our artist.

The overall brand image of ‘Taylor and the Rubies’, is a fun, energetic, lively and an animated artist.

We achieved this by; use of bright and interesting colours in the outfits used in video and in ancillary task. We have also kept the same running theme of the artist’s bubbly personality throughout, even in the print tasks. And finally linking props from the video into the Digi pack and magazine advert.

How we constructed brand identity in music video and ancillary tasks

Logo This is the logo for ‘Taylor and the Rubies’. Although this emblem of a ruby is only used on the Digi Pack cover, I believe that it accurately fits the brand image and makes the artist recognisable to the audience.

The dynamics and graphics of the ruby make it look animated, and easy to relate to the artist as it is part of the band name. We was debating on whether to include

this symbol more into our ancillary tasks but felt that as it is on the front of the Digi Pack ,it has all ready made its mark as the logo for our artist.

Use of Colours and Outfits

To create consistency throughout the video and print tasks we used the same outfit from the weather woman scene for the Digi Pack and poster.

We decided to use more images of the bright red top as this makes the artist recognisable and also generates a coherent brand image of being fun an vibrant.

In the ancillary tasks, Digi Pack and Magazine Poster we enhanced the colour in the red top to make it stand out more, and also created a twist by adding a green skirt which we thought brought style and youth into the artist.

Font in Ancillary Tasks

From Magazine AdvertWe kept the font consistent throughout all ancillary tasks. To create this font we downloaded ‘Brushtip Travis’ from dafont.com.

We felt that this font fitted the brand of the artist completely. It looks young, fun and lively through the use of ‘brush’ affect. To give the font more individuality and to also fit the brief of the brand we added a golden/yellow glow behind the text, this links tot he theme of yellow tones that we have also created through editing the photos of the artist.

Personality of the artist

What was more vital to our brand image than anything was that the personality of our artist was very clear to the audience.

We managed to establish fun, cheeky, comedic and lively through use of exaggerated and animated gestures and facial expressions through the video and ancillary task.

In the video it was easier to show the artist personality through movement; for example playing with material on the whites frames. However we also created strong facial features, in these two still shots show the comedic side to the artist, which is common with the indie pop genre.

In the ancillary task we tried to create gestures that resembled the lyrics. Here it looks like the artist is saying ‘Oh No’, this created the consistency of the comedic element in her personality. The way in which we edited the pictures by increasing the contrast meant that we were further enhancing the artist facial features. Which helped us boost the brand image.

Props

The use of the green cassette in both the video and print works links the two together, it is also be close the being the artists second logo. It further establishes the brand of fun and animated, and creates a link that the audience will recognise; this is especially important for a new artist that needs to create recognition.

The use of netting in our video and print tasks is the most dominant image. It is the heart of the performance point in our video and is featured on the digi pack and magazine advert. This attaches another link of the brand image for the artist as this shows the artist cheeky and playful side. The audience also will have further recognition of our artist.

How effective was the branding in our video and ancillary tasks?

Relating back to the audience feedback from the music video and ancillary tasks, the participants managed to work out that the brand for ‘Taylor and the Rubies’ was fun, energetic, lively and entertaining. This confirms that we have successfully created the brand image that we set out to make, and that we have managed to combine the video and print works together effectively.