Standing out as a business is tough.
In this aptly named “attention economy,” driven by the rise of social media and the incredibly high quantity of content available, getting your brand 15 seconds of air time in a potential customer’s mind is a great success. If you want them to remember you, those 15 seconds better have a massive impact.
So, how do you craft a message that speaks to your audience in a way that will actually resonate with them? Music might hold the answer.
Music has been capturing hearts and minds since the beginning of time. It is so fundamental to culture that it’s one of the phenomena historians utilize when reconstructing the timelines of past civilizations. It endures through centuries, and it permeates every level of a culture.
How do we take these lessons and apply them to crafting an experience with a lasting impact?
Make Your Message Familiar
Music, at its core, is about patterns.
The viral “Four-Chord Song” from YouTube’s early days is an excellent demonstration of this concept. In the video, the band, Axis of Awesome, cycles through about 20 iconic tunes, never changing from playing the same four chords over and over. It’s a good laugh that makes an important point about how music works.
The musical catalog of any culture is little more than variations on a theme, which isn’t a bad thing. This familiarity allows for connection with the listener, a language with which the artist can then inject their own uniqueness.
In the same way, seek first to make your audience feel at ease and open them up to the possibility of connection.
Make Your Message Memorable
Familiarity is safe, but it’s also boring.
Great artists don’t see the conventional musical patterns as a formula to follow, they see it as a language with which to speak—to bend and shape into a message of their own.
Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” both follow the exact same structure, but through expression in melody and lyrics, they craft a unique sound. Striking that balance between familiar and unique is what gives a song earworm status. It is how society finds itself with a melody—or message—it can’t get it out of its collective heads.
Make Your Message Meaningful
As you likely already know, having a song stuck in your head isn’t always a good thing.
Certain tunes seem carefully constructed to hijack the novelty-seeking part of our brains. They give no consideration to whether we’d like to give it headspace. While your brand, like a musical composition, needs to hook your audience, it must do so with heart. If all you do is capture attention without vulnerability, without communicating who you are, you risk being made into a meme, landing yourself in a situation where your audience is laughing at you rather than with you.
When Your Message Is All Three, Magic Happens
When music hits all three of these marks, it’s a transcendental experience.
All iconic songs have these characteristics. They work their way into their listener’s mind, and once there, they speak to the listener’s soul.
Think about your favorite song. Think about the first time you heard it, how it stayed with you, how you hummed it to yourself over and over, eagerly awaiting the next time you could get in the car and listen to it again in all its glory. That’s the magic. It’s popular yet powerful, marketable yet inspiring.
If you can capture that with your brand, your audience will be your biggest fans—and that’s all you could ask for. Good news, Mad Genius can help. Get in touch, and let’s turn your message into a perfect blend of unforgettable.