Music as a means of branding
The emotional significance of acoustic products for business and society is increasingly becoming the focus of research. Now the TU Berlin is also launching a project on acoustic branding.
Music is emotionally charged - today it is just as much a part of atmospheric store design as lighting, colors, decoration and even smells. It can stimulate consumption, create feel-good moods, trigger enthusiasm or even promote brand recognition. The industry has recognized this and is focusing on audio branding. Stefan Weinzierl from the Audio Communication department at TU Berlin explores the extent to which brand attributes such as sportiness, elegance or youthfulness can be represented by musical content and its acoustic properties.
Two large American companies currently monopolize the global market for in-store music. This is set to change. Weinzierl and his team of researchers want to lay the foundations for this. The team wants to develop a tool with which marketing agencies can automatically select a program selection from large music archives as a playlist that matches the respective brand values. An intuitive user interface is intended to conceal the complexity of the underlying mechanisms, which use information about the socio-cultural background of the listeners as well as information about the sonic signature of the music.
The tools should enable professionals to offer high-quality audio branding services and thus compete with the major US players. However, small and medium-sized music producers and labels in Europe should also be able to benefit from marketing their musical creations as in-store music.
In addition to the user-oriented aspects, the project also aims to cover knowledge-oriented aspects: How is the meaning of music constituted? What internal and external musical factors are behind this? To this end, resources are to be created for a large-scale empirical study.
