Contemporary brand strategy creation and portrayal of a music artist on social media : A management perspective

Abstract: The technological advancements in the web 2.0 era have been argued to have had a great impact on creating brand strategy and conducting communication. The music industry is categorized as a high interactivity industry, thus the interaction between marketing practitioners and consumersis high in its nature. Though, as consumers are empowered to either engage with or ignore marketing campaigns, the importance is argued for developing a deeper relationship between the brand and the consumer. Thus, how to strategically create the brand to reach the target audience has become the challenge. Once managed to establish the brand with a congruity, leveraging the marketing communication can set the foundation for retaining and establish relationships with the consumers. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to provide a deeper understanding on how brand strategy is created in the beginning of an artist’s career and how the brand is communicated in the online environment. From this, one research question was proposed; How do managers create brand strategies as a foundation for the portrayal of an artist’s brand on social media? This thesis has both a descriptive and exploratory nature with aqualitative and deductive approach. The strategy chosen for this study was a casestudy conducted with managers in the context of actively handling brand strategy creation and communication on social media. The collection of data was through interviews with managers from respectable companies within the music industry. The respondents chosen was based on a judgmental sampling, thus selected on the basis of their experiences and insights in an artist’s brand. The data suggests in correlation with theory, that the aim with the strategy takes the direction towards creating a foundation for a bond between the brand and the consumer in a consumer-brand relationship. Expressed in the findings, two perspectives exist when creating strategy and how each further affects what managerial decisions of the brand are based on namely; brand as a person or brand as a product. These two perspectives are each described as separate aspects in the initial stage of the creation of brand strategy. Though, in a longterm it was expressed that both perspectives are equally important to consider regardless of the initial focus to managed the discussed relationship.