PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

This intriguing question comes via a media colleague, who found it in a Columbia Business School ad.

Clearly, we will be building mass brands and niche brands in the future, but what sort, with what tools and with what kind of partners?

I thought Kevin Maney’s perspective on this question was pretty interesting in his new Portfolio piece, “Free for All.”

When you look at the tectonic shifts in the music industry that have taken place since 1999, those days of paying $9.99 for a new B-52s album and $28 for a ticket to see them live seem like 200 years ago. For example:

* Radiohead lets the user choose the price for In Rainbows

* Nine Inch Nails releases its latest album only to its Web site (though, like Radiohead, you could pay a huge premium for a deluxe edition, both of which have sold out)

* Timbaland has cut an exclusive music deal with Verizon Wireless

* 99% of all downloaded music in China is illegal, and 85% of all CDs sold are pirated

* Concert revenue is surging ($3.9 billion in 2007), CD sales are cratering. If you’ve purchased a concert ticket lately, you know that all too well.

So what may be coming?

* All musical content becomes free, with a mass brand paying seven figures to give the CD away free with its identity and messaging associated with it. (Or to quote Maney, “Any day now, I expect to find a flash drive with a Radiohead song on it inside a specially marked box of Cap’n Crunch.”)

* Groups make money only from sponsorship and touring, using their music as the content play. (Since when did anyone ever pay for a music video, or a CIO for a white paper?)

* Lots more experimentation, “like a teenager’s goth phase.” To this list add Elvis Costello’s Sundance Channel talk show, U2’s 3D movie, and any number of endorsement deals, commercials, and merchandising plays assembled from industry fragments as the music labels begin to crash and burn.
In the end, it’s about giving away the perfect format of the artist’s brand for free (why not? It can be produced and sold for virtually nothing) but exacting a premium for the non-reproducible, thrilling, experience of the artist’s brand.

Does anything here apply to brand building in our world?

If the future of brands is about stepping beyond the perfect print and TV ad proscenium into the human experiential, I’d say just about everything.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Branding, Interactive, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.