My group’s brainstorming/ planning for our music marketing project stemmed from our initial research on the marketing, cross convergence, and distribution techniques of individual musicians case studies. Since our song originally comes from a rock band, we decided to mainly do this research on bands from similar backgrounds, music styles and genres, and time periods. Through our research of these similar, comparative bands, such as Arctic Monkeys and Green Day, we determined there are many common factors within their marketing and distribution techniques in order to help promote these groups from starting new artists into well-known artists with tons of fans. Also, we noticed that these rock groups featured many stereotypical, symbolic elements of rock such as their dressing styles, colors associated, energy, and names. This allowed us to determine the classic rock and roll image we would be using for our newly named band: “The Ruthless.” An artist's image is created through multiple tiny, intricate factors from social media to colors associated with the band. We knew delving deeper into how to portray our band’s image and expand it would be the start of our marketing journey for this project.
In every case study we completed, the artists heavily utilized and relied on social media to get to know them on a more personal level, share important information, and sell merchandise. With this in mind, we created two of the most popular social media accounts used by artists to date: Instagram and Twitter with easily accessible usernames for fans that were available at the time, such as @theruthlessband and @official.theruthless. Two members of our group have been monitoring the social media accounts and posting details about the band, promoting their upcoming music video, promoting the merchandise and a tour, and more through promotional images we took of the main face of the band: the lead singer and guitarist. This is a great way to spread the word in general, but especially to the younger end group of our target fan audience as they are a generation largely present and influenced by social media. At the moment, the profile of both accounts is the group's logo which says The Ruthless in a cool, rock-style font and utilizing the colors we decided upon for our group. We ended up choosing the basic color combination of black, red, and white because these colors not only go well together and look sleek, but also the darker color scheme, even with the white because the colors are primarily black and red, help to even further contribute to the more rock and almost gothic theme we were basing the group’s brand off of.
Another huge part of this marketing campaign was developing our abnd’s website. Not only did this website have to include a bunch of factors, such as tour information, merchandise, music records for sale, images, logos, etc., but it also had to look appealing and continue portraying the brand we had already started making with the social media. Here we made a bunch of marketing decisions, such as having our new band go on a super small tour of their own, rather than tagging along to open for a much more well-known brand because this went along with our case studies more. This led us to also realize that another important factor to promote/ market our band that we didn’t really cover in our research was cross convergence in that our band should work with other bands or companies. With this being said, we haven’t yet thought of a way to collaborate in this sense, but we are continuing to brainstorm a way for this to happen as it is extremely important to further developing our marketing strategy. I also helped work on our merchandise, such as t-shirt and hoodies, and decided to create multiple designs in order to reach all audiences and styles. This being said, some designs just had the band logo on the front and tour dates on the back, keeping it simplistic, while others actually had a photo of the main singer and guitarist to help contribute to the physical image we want our artist to have and help promote the band whenever someone where’s/uses the merchandise in public. One of the last main areas of our marketing campaign that we realized we needed to cover, as we learned it was vital to many of the case studies we researched, was a personal connection and surprise elect of our band. Besides talking to fans through the social media accounts, our artist would need to do something special to help promote themselves and make fan connections. With this being said, we decided we will create a Q&A on the Instagram account and start a contest in which one lucky winner will win a personalized in-person performance from our artist and receive a meet and greet from the band. We also started discussing whether our group would have surprise pop up performances to interact with their fan base and be more likely to go more viral on social media and promote their music or not, but we still have to make a final say of whether that would be effective or not.
The main challenges we had while starting and continuing to go through this marketing campaign process were not being able to agree on something. For example, we really struggled with coming up with not only a realistic idea for our music video but also what type of music video it should be: promotional, storytelling, artistic, or a hybrid. Eventually, we decided on a promotional/storytelling hybrid because our artist is fairly new so getting our image out there in the promotional portion is vital, but we also wanted to keep it interesting and intriguing while having the music in the back, so we used the energy from the song to create meaning in a story that went along and ended up coming to a consensus on a angsty, young fighter wanting to pursue his dreams to go along with the hard-core rock stereotype. Some other smaller challenges we faced were making one cohesive plan with no holes or flaws in it while still making sure every portion of it was high quality and creative yet still effective. To do this we made sure to discuss the biggest pieces of our plan before we started to make sure we were all on the same track. With this being said, I think my group will continue to make a crisp, clean image for our artist through what we’ve already accomplished thus far in our meticulous planning and will continue to add on as we find possible small flaws or areas for even more improvement in the final details of this plan.
