BRANDING
Maestro
Chris Wilcox of PEL Services looks at the importance of
sound in creating a consistent brand for your facility
“W A soundtrack should address
hat song are you?” In a brief moment
of unguarded downtime the other
day, I did one of those online personality tests whereby the resulting song is meant to represent your personality and is arrived at by answering a stream of daft questions about what clothes you wear, your favourite colour, what makes you angry and so on. I shared it with my friends on Facebook and soon they were all at it, some delighted with their assigned song (You are so beautiful – OK then!), some less impressed (come on, The Joker – really?) It was just a bit of fun during the dull
commute to work – not to be taken too seriously… Or is that really all it was? Comments from my friends hint at something more fundamental: these songs represent a common experience, a common language we all can engage in. You see, music is undeniably powerful. Yet it’s also intimate and often subliminal.
Don’t leave it to chance Health clubs, spas and salons plugged in to the power of music a long time ago. It’s now rare to enter one and not hear music, whether it’s in the background or front/centre in key areas of the site.
But the choice of playlist can be hit
and miss, or lazy and formulaic. Silence is awkward and instinctively avoided, but it’s often the case that individual staff are left to improvise by plugging in their mp3 player with their own choice of tracks on shuffl e, resulting in a playlist that can be the polar opposite of what the brand represents. This in turn has a direct and negative impact on the intended experience for customers. For clubs that have invested energy
and resources into developing their brand, leaving something as important as a brand’s soundtrack to chance is, at best, risky. For starters you have the issue of potentially causing offence through inappropriate lyrics on a track. But it’s not just about avoiding
offence. Music has a positive contribution to make. It represents an excellent opportunity to reinforce your brand’s identity and even provide a richer brand experience. I believe the time has therefore come
for health clubs and leisure centres to pay expert attention to this area of their business, developing a brand soundtrack that adapts their sound to different demographics and applying this audio- branding consistently but adaptively over days, weeks, months and years.
84 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital
emotions and desires while retaining a brand’s identity
What are your options? So how can this be done? It’s about matching the music directly to the brand and, just as importantly, to the customer. But that’s not as easy as you might think. Our experience shows that success
comes from understanding your target market’s emotional and rational desires and habits, refl ecting this in your soundtrack while at the same time retaining a clear brand identity. The delivery of that soundtrack
then has to be fl exible enough to accommodate customers’ requirements as they change throughout the day – and across different regions if you have a number of branches. For large organisations with multiple
clubs, an in-house live radio feel – syndicated across all clubs – is one highly effective solution, albeit an expensive one. The radio stations have to be staffed by experienced professionals who are fully immersed in the brand and understand the customers they’re playing for. The stations are run very much along similar lines to real broadcast radio stations, with playlists,
August 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
Music
PHOTO:
WWW.SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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