The Music in Marketing

Finally the weekend is here and there’s always something special about Saturday mornings. The breeze, plants and even the furniture at home feels different and stress-free. The lungs take it easy and the first sip of a hot cuppa feels well-earned after a hectic week that just went by. It becomes more interesting when your kids join you at the table for some tête-à-tête which is otherwise a distant reality on regular weekdays. Interesting doesn’t even begin to describe itself when my little one starts quizzing me on my favorite topic ‘Music’. She leaves me with some food for thought and what follows next is this piece, which had to be given shape inspite of me wanting to make it a lazy Saturday.

Music and Marketing have been my personal and public identity for long – the former being born with me and latter dropping by a little later. While my corporate identity as a Marketer is fueled with experience, go-getter spirit and the audacious nerve to break through, Music is pure passion making me the person I am today. Being driven by an appetite for both, knowingly or unknowingly I tend to draw parallels between the two for easy exchange of roles from a corporate marketer to a composer and singer performing on stage.  

Both are two different endeavors, yet so similar. I derive happiness from both and the collective experience makes it feel like one. Why do I see the two as one and why should I try and make the parallels merge – two questions which she asked, which I’ve tried answering below.

It’s all in the Rhythm!

Each one of us wake up to a rhythm or pattern playing in our head - from snoozing off that timer to entertaining door bells, dropping kids to school, setting forth for office so on and so forth – the self-programmed pace is pretty much obvious. Moreover as we make headway for work, we come across billboards, traffic lights and vagrants standing at points endearing enough to get registered in our heads as landmarks to our destination. This pattern of placement whether it is the billboard or the traffic signal is a strategically thought through exercise to meet a specific purpose. I have been a marketer for a good long time and all the buzzwords in my business from conceptualizing, to strategy, messaging, positioning, impact, connect and experience end up circling around the question of pattern and timing.

So what has this ‘pattern’, ‘timing’ and ‘rhythm’ to do with music? Well, the concept of pattern or rhythm dates back to the Vedic era when the Vedic verses or chanda’s (as we call in Sanskrit) were constructed in a 4/4 pattern meant to be recited or sung in a particular tempo. Later this 4/4 pattern and tempo gave birth to ‘The 4 Bar Theory’ which till date stands second to our survival mandate after oxygen. Little did we know that all of us have this inbuilt 4 Bar Theory that gives the required rhythm to our routine activities.

One doesn't need to be a musician to understand the nerve shackling impact of a missed beat in a song.  Be it Music or Marketing, it’s all in the timing, pace and rhythm. The sooner a marketer realizes it, the better!

No Influence – No Gain. No Impact – It’s vain!

A major motive of Marketing is to influence a targeted set of public. It’s not successful marketing until you influence the right people and create the desired impact with them. Ofcourse a lot goes into figuring your ‘right public’ as not everyone can be your target consumer or audience for a particular product or solution. Music like Marketing, influences and impacts us in a certain way.  It is about sound waves hitting our eardrums in a manner to make us either dance, laugh or cry. Moreover right notes of a raga or song have the ability to control more than 100 nerves in our body making the overall experience therapeutic.  Just like an erroneous marketing campaign takes us nowhere, wrong notes in music have the ability to lead us to trauma in split seconds. The impact of music to our health, mood, thinking and overall well-being is beyond imagination – the same as what we want to achieve through our marketing campaigns!

The final Zen

What is marketing if it doesn’t leave you with a feel good factor? What is marketing if it fails to engage, engross and absorb your attention? The process of planning, strategizing, rehearsing, experimenting and coordinating with other team members remain the same whether creating a marketing plan for a solution/product or curating a concert for a live audience. What we crave for is the ultimate zen after a successful completion of both. What is marketing and what is a live music concert if the unique value prop for both is not etched out clear? What a musician gives to it audience is an experience of a lifetime and what a marketer gives to its business is the RoI for that every spent dime.

Huh! This probably answer’s my kiddo’s questions!

As you can see, I have a delicious mix of Music and marketing in my life, hope you have some interesting mixes too! A Saturday noon well spent in putting my thoughts on paper – Weekend Rocks!