The Music of Marketing

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA took a while to grow on me. Frank Gehry’s landmark building at first looks like a jumble of metal cans and boxes haphazardly piled on top of each other. But look at it more closely — both inside and out — and you start to see how the swooping curves mix with the sharp angles to create amazing synergy and negative space. It’s whimsical and functional at the same time. I once sat at a conference in one of the rooms there and tried to sketch the contrasts between the concave and convex curves on the interior but gave up because it was so hard to capture the unique play of light on the surfaces. That was when Disney Hall started to win my heart. [Fun Fact: Last year, they had to sandblast some of the stainless steel surfaces of the exterior because they were so shiny at certain times of day, drivers were being blinded.]

All this is to preface the fact that last night I went to an amazing performance of the Israel Philharmonic at Disney Hall. Each piece was perfect, and I even got weepy at Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture. To add to the experience, a high school friend is the house manager there and he upgraded our expensive but lousy balcony tickets to seats right in the middle of the Orchestra section. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

And, sad but true, as I sat there with the gorgeous music washing over me, I started thinking about how I could relate the experience to marketing for this blog. Perhaps this is one of the 10 signs of blog addiction. In any case, while watching the musicians it all came together for me as an excellent metaphor for how to run an effective social marketing program.

• Nothing happens without a plan. The music score lays out exactly what will happen when the piece is played. Every musician knows what his or her role is, when their part comes on, and how to carry it out. So too, we need a marketing strategy and a workplan for how to implement it.

• Someone needs to take the lead. The conductor sees the big picture, how everything fits together. He keeps things moving and prompts the appropriate parts of the orchestra when it’s their turn to shine. He also gives immediate feedback, adjusting volume and tempo as needed. Similarly, an effective marketing program needs a manager overseeing it and making adjustments as needed along the way.

• Everyone has an important role to play. From the first violin to the guy playing the triangle, each musician adds his unique voice to the performance. Everyone is not playing the same notes at the same time, but the melody, harmony, counterpoints and percussion come together to create an amazing sound. In a social marketing program, we might have many different stakeholders participating in different ways, including our staff, funders, partner organizations, the target audience, secondary audiences that influence them, the media, advocates, etc. Each of them makes a contribution that adds to the effectiveness of the campaign.

• You need to know your audience. The music director of an orchestra must have a good idea of the types of composers and pieces that their audience most enjoys, and makes sure that the programs for each concert includes them. If they veer too far from the type of music the audience wants to listen to, that orchestra will start losing customers. We also need to understand our audience so that the products we offer are what they actually want.

• The audience will tell you how you are doing. For an orchestra, applause is immediate feedback that they are doing their job right and delivering what the audience wants. At the concert last night, the Israel Phil received a standing ovation after each piece and went beyond what they said they would do by performing an encore (which in turn received another 5-minute standing ovation, but sadly, no more encores). Feedback from our audiences (you are soliciting feedback, right?) either reinforces what we are doing so we can go above and beyond to deliver more or tells us that we are hitting some sour notes and need to figure out how to get back on track.

An interesting cap to the evening came on the drive back from Disney Hall, when the downtown weather suddenly changed within one block from a clear starry night to a thick bank of fog that appeared as though on cue from a Hollywood fog machine. This lasted until we passed Westwood, when the wall of fog disappeared and left us with the stars and the hills as if it had never happened.

Photo Credit: DonnaGrayson

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