R&R Partners: Build the Brand, Protect the Brand

I was listening to the jazz channel on XM radio and I thought about how much jazz is like marketing. They were playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” by Dave Brubeck (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSGm2x7DEB8). Of course, this is the jazz version of the song from Snow White (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0niwn2pOEno). The original is really a signature of the Disney brand. It has been done in different styles by a number of jazz and popular musicians because of the incredibly strong melody written by Frank Churchill. I like to think of it as a strong musical brand of sorts.   

Dave Brubeck’s version of “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

The Snow White rendition.

The Brubeck version is especially fascinating. The signature melody begins the song with a simple piano. This is the melody we all easily recognize – the core melody. It’s the familiar emotional territory we have lived with since we were kids. It takes us back to all the good feelings we had with Snow White and Disney and the youthful nature of our imagination. It makes me feel young and at the beginning of life, even though I am a little past the middle. Then the horns come in and it is the beginning of a journey. It leaps along that familiar melody jumping forward while dancing around the core ever so lightly, touching outside of it and coming back. It’s teasing us as to what is to come. It’s getting us ready for something. It’s telling us that this is not your childhood melody anymore. It’s alive. It’s free. And that freedom becomes more pronounced as it starts to keep smaller and smaller portions of the core until we are moving along and dancing with something familiar and also something brand new. They are living together as one. The core is still there, inside, but the new free-form world built around it takes us to new places emotionally. Eventually the piano comes back in to take us full circle where we hear more of that familiar core. And we think we are going to come all the way back to that same familiar melody. And for a second we do. But it’s not the same. And it shouldn’t be. It’s alive and changing. And it’s reflecting not only the changes in our lives, but the changes brought by those that interpret it.

A strong brand is very much like this. It has core values that make it what it is. Fans of strong brands are emotionally attached to that brand by the way it talks and feels to them. They recognize the core of a brand just like they would recognize the core of a song. And brands often need to reach people on different levels and in different places. Whether that is on a social level through Facebook or Twitter, or a new strategy that needs to be addressed within the brand structure, the core should always come through. Building and protecting a brand requires strengthening the core of a brand, while giving it the flexibility to stretch. And that is what jazz is like. 

Here is what someone reviewing the Miles Davis version of “Someday My Prince Will Come” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBq87dbKyHQ) said. … “This is what jazz is all about, it takes you out there and brings you back, nothing goes astray, everything is tight without feeling controlled, and is loose enough to slide the top down and find some back roads to roll through … or better yet, a back road where you can pull off to the side and turn up the volume as the afternoon sun sinks low, giving way to the purple skies of evening.”

Miles Davis’ version of “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

Miles Davis puts it this way … “Oh, you have some kind of form. You have to start somewhere. I mean, otherwise we’d all be living outdoors. You have walls and stuff, but you still come in a room and act kinda free. There’s a framework, but it’s just – we don’t want to overdo it, you know. It’s hard to balance. Sometimes you don’t even know if people like it or not.” That is what branding people do every day. They play with a strategy but make it feel free. And they find out if people like it by the results but sometimes not right when they are doing it.

Of course, he’s got creativity in spades. And he uses the same language when he talks about creating that advertising/marketing creatives do when he says, “That isn’t comfortable, either. I mean, the beat might be here, and he might be playing way up on top of it. You have to fix yourself sort of a point of balance – anywhere. That’s what I mean by not being comfortable. You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.”

Brands are complicated. They have life. They have ups and downs. They touch different people in different ways. They are affected by the things that happen around them and the passing of time. A brand that can stay timeless and still stay with the times is a great brand. Building a brand and protecting a brand is very much like jazz. You have to have a great strategic framework and put some incredible musicians to work on performing the daylights out of it.

Sounds easy, right? …

But if you want to know the one thing that makes brands most like jazz – it’s a quote from Louis Armstrong. When asked what jazz was he said, “If you don’t know, don’t mess with it.”