Brand Stories: tapping into song lyrics for another kinds of storyteller

I’ve been working on a number of brand story engagements lately. And I really enjoy observing where insights emerge – and how projective techniques can help stimulate creative expression.



For me, great song lyrics often inspire ways to help tell a story.


One of my favorites is:

"I once had a girl,

or should I say, she once had me."



"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" first appeared on The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul. It is one of several songs on the album referring to an antagonistic relationship with a woman. When asked about the meaning of the lyrics, producer George Martin answered, “My wife is going to give me a hard time for saying this. It was one of John's indiscretions. I remember we were sitting at the veranda outside our hotel rooms in St. Moritz and John was playing at his guitar and working out the text. He felt that Cynthia had tricked him to marry her.” Martin referred to the words as "a very bitter little story".



The song is a lilting acoustic ballad featuring Lennon's lead vocal, signature McCartney harmonies in the middle, as well as the first use of the sitar by a rock band, of course played by George Harrison. The exotic instrumentation and oblique lyric represented one of the first indications to fans of the expanded musical storytelling and experimental approach the group was adopting.



Another of my favorite song lyrics is from Jackson Browne’s “Fountain of Sorrow.” He writes in the opening line,


“Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer,
I was taken by a photograph of you.”



In both these examples, it’s the twist of the meaning and perspective that makes the lyric so memorable.



Do you have a favorite song lyric that tells a story?

Sunday funnies: Song Map

A road map made up of 390 song titles: from Highway to Hell to Penny Lane, Itchycoo Park to Heartbreak Hotel. And just like places in our own neighbourhood, some are really good and some are best avoided – remember Love House by Sam Fox?

For the real music geek there’s an A-Z key on each print listing all 390 songs and the bands that sang them, and we’ve set up a playlist on Spotify to accompany the Map providing 23 hours worth of music.

Unlimited edition Litho Print for £20 plus p&p
http://www.wearedorothy.com/art/song-map-unlimited-edition/

* P&P is £3.95 for addresses within the UK and Europe. If you live outside the UK or Europe please email take@wearedorothy.com for a cost for international shipping before you buy.

Sharing music: a powerful way that humans bond

This weekend, I started listening to the audiobook of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

The Columbia University professor is probably the country’s best known neurologist. He has the ability to make the complexities of neurological disorders understandable to laymen while portraying the afflictions of his patients in a compelling and compassionate way. 

When the book was first published, writer Scott Horton of HARPER'S Magazine put 6 questions to Dr. Sacks about his remarkable study of music and the human brain.  

Here's one of the exchanges:

4. You suggest that we favor language as our primary medium for the communication of ideas, but your book develops the case for music as another important vehicle. Doesn’t this suggest that music and language have the potential to reinforce and support one another as media of communication?

There is a great deal of debate about the relationship between music and language, and speculation about which capacity evolved first. It has often been suggested that music emerged as a by-product of linguistic capacities. But musical rhythm, with its regular pulse, is very unlike the irregular stressed syllables of speech. We will probably never know the answer here, but whether parts of the brain evolved specifically to process music, or music happened to make use of neural pathways that arose for other reasons, it is clear that music has been central to the human enterprise for 40,000 years or more. Bone flutes, some of which date back even further than this, have been found at Neanderthal campsites. Sharing music is one of the most powerful ways humans bond together, and this has obvious survival value. We still use music in this way, to come together in singing religious songs, holiday music, national anthems, protest songs, even “Happy Birthday.” If we had a time machine, it would be fascinating to learn how early music and speech came together in the form of song. Steven Mithen, in The Singing Neanderthals, proposes that speech and music developed simultaneously, as a sort of song-speech, which later separated into spoken language and music.

Read the full interview at harpers.org

10 feel-good songs to work on your C.H.E.M.istry

1. Islands in the Stream, Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers
2. Lost in Love, Air Supply
3. Up Where We Belong, Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes
4. Cruisin’, Smokey Robinson
5. Somebody’s Baby, Jackson Browne
6. Louisiana Rain, Tom Petty
7. Hungry Eyes, Eric Carmen
8. Feels Like Home, Randy Newman
9. I Think We’re Alone Now, Ritchie Cordell
10. One Rose/ Hot Buttered Rum, The Red Clay Ramblers

What’s on your feel-good playlist?

26-year-young classical pianist Lang Lang: a distinctive brand with a great story to communicate through the CHEM-istry of music

One the way to Seoul, Korea I read about Lang Lang. He’s a young Chinese pianist making headlines with his appearances, his dynamic gestures in concerts, his outrageous clothes and hairstyles – even his YouTube videos.

Lang Lang says these are “important tools to express myself. We don’t need to be confined to the conventional image of pianists, do we?”

He continues, “I agree the focus should be on music and performance. But I don’t think that should be the end of it. In this day and age, you need to take a new approach to music, or you will be thrown into oblivion. It’s hard to draw the general public to classical music just by releasing records and performing. I’m just trying to make it easier for people to enjoy it.”

Lang Lang has written an autobiography, designed shoes, and done charity work. He recently started a foundation to help young muscians realize their dreams and provide scholarships, even working with high school music teachers to improve music education.

He was asked how classical music could become more prominent in this rapidly changing world. Lang Lang responded, “There are a lot of things that music can do, and the greatest of all is its ability to communicate. Music is the most beautiful tool of communication between people. It can connect individuals at all distance. I think this is something only art can do.”

http://www.langlang.com/landing

We at Stinson Brand Innovation constantly look at all mediums and senses to express a brand through our tool, C.H.E.M. (Connect, Honest, Easy, Motivating). Thinking about the insights from Lang Lang, what song (or what kind of music) could be used to better communicate the story of the brand you’re currently working on? Post your comment.

5 Grammys for 2 of music's best brands -- Alison Krauss and Robert Plant

"Raising Sand," the stark, rootsy album by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, won five Grammys Sunday night, including Album of the Year. Plant and Krauss' "Please Read the Letter," produced by T Bone Burnett, also won record of the year.

You can read my blog posting from the week the album was released at http://brandinnovator.blogspot.com/2007/10/innovative-music-pairing-is-creative.html

26% effect of music on vascular function – a healthy dimension of sound

Researchers are finding that listening to music can benefit you physically and mentally.

In fact, listening to upbeat music that you like can actually promote the functioning of blood vessels. Blood vessels will expand by 26% by listening to music you enjoy. This has been found to aid cognitive recovery and decrease the risk of blood clots. Upbeat music is also found to be a great motivator of physical activity.

When building a brand, I encourage our teams to appeal to all the senses so that the brand becomes memorable. Too often, branding initiatives can get stuck on just the visual details -- but what about going beyond visual branding to sonic branding?

The element of sound could connect a brand to enjoyable (and now, more healthy) feelings.

GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: excerpt from The Big Moo, by Seth Godin

Shaun Considine rescued the greatest song in the history of rock and roll—from the trash.

In 1965, the VP of sales and marketing at Columbia Records took a look at Bob Dylan’s new song, “Like a Rolling Stone.” He didn’t listen to it—he just looked at it and decided it was way too long to be released as a single. It would never get radio airplay and wouldn’t sell, he said. Dylan refused to compromise the length. So, astonishingly, the master (one second short of six minutes in length) was thrown into the trash.

Shaun was working at Columbia at the time, as the coordinator of new releases. Shaun found the record — a studio-cut acetate — wrapped it up, took it home, and listened to it over the weekend.

As it happened, Shaun was part owner of a hot New York City club at the time, called Arthur, on East Fifty-fourth Street. This club was so hot that Dylan himself had been turned away (he showed up in “wine-stained, beer-splattered Army-Navy store couture”).

Shaun slipped his copy of the song to the DJ, and the place went nuts, including two influential people who happened to be in the audience—a DJ from WABC and a programmer from WMCA, two of the most important stations in New York.

The two radio guys rang up Columbia and demanded copies of the song. Columbia complied — they even shipped it in red plastic to flag it as a hot record. Despite the conservative fears of the marketing department, the record was a hit.

If it weren’t for Shaun, Rolling Stone magazine would never even have heard the song, and certainly wouldn’t have chosen it as the number-one rock-and-roll song of all time.

Maybe you don’t own a rock club. Maybe you don’t know Bob Dylan. But you’ve still got as much power as Shaun Considine.

What’s in the trash that needs to see the light of day, needs to be run by a customer, or tried out on a playground?

(Listen to the song “Like A Rolling Stone” in a whole new light…click here)

10 favorite songs of Kate DiCamillo, author of “The Tale of Despereaux”

Children’s novelist Kate DiCamillo wrote “The Tale of Despereaux,” about a daring mouse, while listening to Bach. She likes Lucinda Williams and Bruce Springsteen, too. “What ties them together is honest emotion,” she told WSJ magazine.

Here are Kate’s 10 favorites:

1. Cantata BWV 82, J.S. Bach — Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
2. Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1, J.S. Bach — Yo-Yo Ma
3. Badlands –Bruce Springsteen
4. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road — Lucinda Williams
5. Chin Up, Cheer Up — Ryan Adams
6. Enlightenment — Van Morrison
7. No Regrets — Edith Piaf
8. Son of a Preacher Man — Dusty Springfield
9. Sweet Old World — Lucinda Williams
10. Warm and Tender Love — Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell

The animated “Despereaux” hits theaters Friday.


http://www.thetaleofdespereauxmovie.com/splash/

Sync® from Ford: Live + online for a 360° marketing experience

There’s been plenty of talk about how to create a true social marketing that would leverage events with the web and connect to traditional leads. In recent workshop I attended, Connie Fontaine, manager of experiential and multi-cultural communications at Ford Motor Company, showed how it can actually be done.

The brand is Sync, a feature created by a partnership of Ford with Microsoft. It lets a Ford driver control the radio, phone, and MP3 components with vocalized commands. (read more about it at http://www.syncmyride.com)

Connie described a rather engrossing ethnic networking/social media/viral crusade featuring young teen friends, Kim and Seana. They crossed the country performing and delivered videos of their adventures along the way. While the webisodes may have seemed somewhat scripted, the women were real. In fact, Connie surprised the group at the end of her talk by having Kim, the singer/songwriter of the pair, perform a song live. While it might be a tough crowd – more than a hundred marketers in a conference room – she proved herself to be a genuine buzz-builder. (see more about it at http://syncmymusic.msn.com/)





This allowed Connie to summarize the Ford Sync approach to engaging and connecting the events to lead-generation:
• Act different…Have fun!
• Be relevant…What do people want? Where?
• Be entertaining
• Be vital, integral part of plan


If you are thinking about live + online for a 360° marketing experience, what are the potential applications for health, science, and technology marketers?

When you develop an event with Stinson Brand Innovation, your team can integrate both live and online media to meet your objectives. We consider how tactics can be connected from branded events to social networking to lead generation.