Building a Brand & Spotify
By Maria Perou, a member of ePiRoê agency
How to build a brand
In order to explain to our classroom how and what it takes to build a Brand, we had to look thoroughly into the Hubspot & Rebrandly’s guide. This article made us familiar with the basic characteristics of a «brand». First things first, we understood that the internet has changed things in the branding industry in various ways. Even though, in the online world everything goes faster, building a brand still needs time. After all, the ultimate goal of every brand is to stand out and bring something different to the table, in order to be recognizable.
Moreover, Hubspot & Rebrandly’s guide mentions that a brand’s strategy consists of the consistency and the content of this particular brand. The brand consistency is about the design, tone, illustrations, domain name (short, easy to remember and spell) and the links. On the other hand, a brand’s content has to be right to the point and eye-catching, while simultaneously offer high quality and understand the audience.
When referring to the components of great branding, the writers talk about the web design, content creation –which will make the brand known- and social media — with which the brand will interact with its clients -. Of course, a brand has to propose its values. This will be achieved by answering to the questions : what you do, how, for whom, what makes you different. Also, some ways of achieving that goal would be the identification of the customer, the understanding of their needs and goals, the reputation of the best qualification in the market and the cogency.
An important thing to do while building a brand is to analyze the personas of the brand’s target audience. These personas are distinguished by a person’s demographics, job level\seniority, typical day, pain points, information sources and objections. Distinguishing these buyers personas will help a brand developing highly targeted content and refining personas over time.
Taking into account that content is representative of the brand, when building a brand we have to think about the social presentation of it on social media handles such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. On the same topic of social presentations, we have to put our brand into play. This will be achieved by creating a particular tone and voice of the brand, mixing personas expectations, reflecting how you want your brand to be perceived and applying to all the content. The presentation of the brand’s website is also really important. The website’s structure and appearance must follow an ergonomic design, be organized, offer links and be according to the values and content of the said brand.
SPOTIFY — AGE OF ME BRANDING STATEGY
The second part of our assignment was to select and present as a case study an Interbrand case Brand or any Brand of our preference that belongs to the “Age of Experience” OR the “Age of Me: Branding Strategy”. The goal was to help our classroom understand what are the elements of their branding strategy approach that make our brand case study a good example of Experiential Branding or Me-Branding strategy. We decided to choose Spotify as our case study, because they are a big digital brand that belongs to the “Age of Me: Branding Strategy”.
Then, we found some information about this brand in order to present it in class later that week. Based on our research, we found out that Spotify, a Swedish company founded in 2006, is a digital music service that allows its users to access millions of songs across the world, share their music as the creators and explore the musical preferences of their friends and favorite artists.
The Spotify app is divided into Spotify free and Spotify Premium. Spotify Free is a free service which includes advertisements and connects only to wifi, whereas Spotify Premium is a monthly-subscription service owned by Spotify that gives the listener more freedom, with the absence of ads and offline listening. In general, the app offers a wide range of tracks (over 50 million), podcast titles (over 700 thousand) and has 271 million monthly active users.
The vision of the Spotify app is to be a platform where:
- Creators share their work freely
- Everyone can enjoy an artistic immersive experience
- Empathize and connect with each other
- Feel part of a greater whole
Their mission is:
- To unlock the potential of human creativity
- To help millions of artists, both famous and aspiring live off from their art
- To connect fans with artists through music
The main idea behind Spotify is to offer “the right music for every moment”. Essentially, Spotify positions itself as a soundtrack to people’s lives by having multiple playlists for every kind of music taste, mood or activity. Also, this application enables a personalized musical experience, as it provides songs for every activity and feeling. Last but not least, users are able to create and share their own playlist/ music.
More of Spotify’s capabilities consist of:
- The creation of personalized playlists, based on the previous songs the user has listened to
- With the feature of liking and disliking a song, it can satisfy both individual and collective needs
- The recommendation of other playlists and genres in accordance to both the user’s preferences and trends
- There are playlists with the name of activities that capture or create the appropriate emotional experience
Reading about these branding strategies, our team got to know more about how we would build our own brand.
Check out the articles of the rest of our ePiRoê agency team members: Elena Alid, Anaëlle Nd and Crystal
Big thanks to our professor, Betty Tsakarestou, for her help and guidance!
