The Man
For the music marketing project, with my group, we chose the song "The Man" by The Killers. We could change the name of the band and we decided on the name "Orpheus". Orpheus is a character of Greek mythology, he is the god of music. We knew this would appeal to our target audience.
Our genre is a combination of alternative rock and indie music. Our target audience for indie music consists of a majority of men, 14-30 years of age, low salaries, who enjoy the arts. Our target audience for rock is mainly men, 14 to late '50s, unskilled workers/supervisors/students, they have artists as role models. Both types of target audiences are very similar so it was easy for us to make our brand appealable and approachable to both of them. We did this by going back to the arts ( e.g.: the name of our band and the story behind it) and getting a streaming service that works for people of low income (like students).
We took reference from two bands which we share a target audience with, Coldplay and Arctic Monkeys, to look at what we wanted to do. We found that, in Coldplay, what worked in terms of marketing was keeping fans in mind at all times (through social media, personal interactions with audiences, making fans part of concert experience, and innovation in music and performances), which is understandable given that their target audience sees band members as role models. What worked with Arctic Monkeys is very similar, building relationships with their fans (social media, email, meet and greets). Also, very importantly, they offer FREE DOWNLOADS. Giving their target audience, people who most likely have low incomes, chances to listen to their music for free is crucial for music distribution and popularity gain.
After looking at these examples we asked ourselves:
Who are we? We decided to make our band reflect who its members are: artists. We gave it a very artistic feel with even our name being the name of the god of music, Orpheus. We are also advocates, we care about problems and we expose them, through our music, in artistic ways. We wanna give back to our society, we are going to donate 20% of our earnings to Arts Council England, an organization dedicated to distributing the arts to all people. Like our great examples, we decided we wanted to connect with our audience and keep them updated, making them part of the experience. We thought a great idea to do this was by posting on our blog some sheet music or vide previews to let audience critique and give us feedback on what they wanna hear. Through every decision we made we asked ourselves: how would our target audience take this? What is more convenient for our target audience? Based on that and on our personal interests, we made our decisions.
Our marketing products are simple. Up to now, we have a basic shirt with our logo and name; a shirt with our album logo and name, and a pin with our band logo and name, as those are very popular throughout our target audience.
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BAND SHIRT |
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ALBUM SHIRT |
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PIN |
The process of creating this band and campaign was very fun and entertaining, but it was also hard. Creating a brand for our band is an experience that taught me a lot. I learned a lot about how much research needs to be done to get things done, to pitch your idea to producers. I learned every little thing you do, at least at the beginning, has to be connected to your target audience and/or goal. With my group, we were very careful balancing what we wanted as a band with what our audience would want and created a perfect mix, without losing our identity. That was challenging to do. Developing a marketing campaign was fun, especially since we preferred to try and get unique ways to market our brand, which we thought would also give us publicity by giving us that advantage of standing out. We went in ways like giving previews and asking fans for feedback to even getting random people in the streets to perform in our music videos. A common marketing technique that we used was releasing a music video. The production of this one was interesting. We tried to produce it in a way that would reflect our brand, paying close attention to shots and acting; we knew the idea behind the music video since we wrote the song.