Music’s multifaceted construction mirrors life’s complexity and reflects it’s diversity. Learning to make music can help a marketer understand:

Polyphony&harmony

Good music has rarely only one melodic line or ‘voice’. The beauty of the music, the greatness of the artistic effect, comes from several musical lines, following one-another, combining and melting together, building complex constructions and rich musical ‘texture’. The ‘voices’ of various instruments, with individual ‘story lines’ and complementary developments, will unite into a convergent polyphonic harmony.

Marketing is never only brand communication, only product promotion, or only channel activity. It is the complicated-yet-harmonized combination of all, the 4-to-7-to-many-more ‘P’s, and resonates through all the activity of the business, together with the complex reaction of all the people involved. To listen to the various ‘melodies’, to conduct the processes of the different ’instruments’ and guide all the relevant ‘interprets’ and stakeholders will make a true marketer the ‘concert maestro’ of the business.

Marketing is never only brand communication, only product promotion, or only channel activity.

Rhythm and Measure

All music is built on a rhythm and before the notes there was always the beat. A score’s measure, as a basic unit of musical construction, will define the beat, build the rhythm and organize the notes into music.

Marketing and communication need to feel the rhythm of the market and organize themselves based on measure(s) – KPI-s & metrics, to define and track the musical line of the activity. In music, the measure is a constituent part of the composition, while in marketing it should come directly from the business strategy and objectives and generate the rhythm of the market presence.

In music, the measure is a constituent part of the composition, while in marketing it should come directly from the business strategy and objectives and generate the rhythm of the market presence.

The power of silence and rest

We need silence in order to listen to the sounds and the absence of a note can be as powerful as the loudest fortissimo. Music is made of notes and rests and to build the composition you need to master both.

Market conditions and business requirements may push marketing towards being louder and louder, in the constant need to overcome competitors and reach an ever-indifferent listener in a noisy environment. But as talking louder does not necessarily make you right, the marketer has to learn to use both shouts and whispers, both sounds and silence, both notes and rests to deliver the composition of marketing to the ovations of the consumers.

And then, it’s time to end repeat.