Practicing Brand Alignment Can Help Music Brands Become More Powerful

Create better customer experiences with your company by being consistent with your brand.

If you’re in the marketing department of a music manufacturer, you’re probably busier than a talented, in-demand session guitarist. You’ve covered all the big marketing bases: sound strategy, social media plan, ad schedule, product videos, and plenty of PR in the music trades. It seems like your marketing plan is running on all cylinders.

So what are you missing?

You may not be practicing brand alignment. The term sounds like it comes from an Ivy League MBA seminar, but it’s easy to understand and critical to helping you realize the full potential of your brand.

If you’re not familiar with it, brand alignment is ensuring that the brand promise you make and present to your audience is reflected in the way customers experience your company. In a nutshell, it’s making sure that everyone—from the CEO to product development to sales to customer service to the people in the mailroom—is working from the same brand page. The talk and the walk match up.

When you have brand alignment, customers experience the same things that you promote through marketing. For example, if your brand promises to create easy-to-use products and unmatched technical support, then everyone in the company needs to deliver on that promise. If your brand is about cutting-edge technology, product development and design need to reflect that.

Brand alignment is all-encompassing. But when you achieve it, it’ll amplify your marketing efforts, reinforce your brand promise so it’s more deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of your customers, build loyalty and provide a strong platform for growth.

It seems like a lot of work, and it is. But there are simple things you can do to start getting your music brand properly aligned.

Get buy-in from the C-suite. They need to understand that the way their departments interact with customers, develop products and solve problems needs to be consistent with the brand.

Take the marketing out of the marketing department. Spread it to the rest of your company. Consider creating a booklet that lets non-marketing people understand what your brand is about and the core values that guide your company.

Involve human resources. Start getting new hires familiar with your brand and what it’s all about during the onboarding process. One music manufacturer shows all new employees a video about the company focusing on its long history and musical legacy— crucial aspects of the brand. Don’t assume that everyone you hire knows all about you. Most likely, they don’t.

Once you get the basics down, brand alignment becomes a matter of details and finesse. You can move to smaller things like how invoices look, the way salespeople answer the phone and all the other touchpoints that your audience has with your brand. Then you’ll be taking your music brand to a whole new level of sophistication.