Question 2:How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

What is a brand?A brand can either be a sign symbol or word and is used to distinguish a company/product from its competitor to give the company a personal bond with the customer. A Brand helps a company to become known on the market and helps to give it a personality. One of the main reasons why certain products have been successful is because of there superb brand portfolio that they have.

Examples of strong brands that are known on the market today are:

What is a brand?A brand image is crucial to a band in order to sell their records to their primary target audience. Bands show their brand image in many ways such as their music videos and the products that they put out on the market. When researching about our own brand, we researched into bands that have very recognizable brand images and looked at how they show their brand image off.One of the bands we looked at when discussing this was Oasis. Oasis have a very strong brand image which is a British rock and roll band, they show this through their mise en scene, their attitude and the cd covers that they produce. Oasis share a very similar brand image to our own which is drug abuse, alcohol abuse and living life the full.

This is a poster produced by Oasis, and I think it really highlights their brand image. It shows Liam Gallagher posing in the photo wearing ‘rock and roll’ clothing and posing in a very cocky style way, which is typical of their brand image. The black and white colours give connotations of realism, which is another element of the brand image.

What is a brand?This is an album cover for Oasis, I think this is a great example of Oasis showing their brand image. It shows the band in an expensive house, with expensive possessions which gives off connotations of them ‘living the high life’. It also shows a car in the swimming pool which highlights that the band are rebellious and aren’t bothered about money.

This is the official Logo for Oasis, I think it is an excellent logo for the band and highlights their brand image very well. It is very bold and striking but at the same time simple and easy to read. It is in plain black and white and stands out which is something that oasis definitely do as a band.

What is your brand image?A brand image for any band is very important in their success, it helps the band to

target the right audience who will enjoy and purchase their music. Many bands have very strong brand images such as Oasis and The Rolling Stones. For our band, we wanted to create a brand image that was based on ‘rock and roll’. We wanted our image to be associated with the following:

-Sex drugs and rock and roll-Realism-Being Cool-Attitutidue -Being young-Experimenting

To achieve all of these areas of our brand image, we had to make sure that we incorporate them in all stages of our video and all of our ancillary tasks to create a strong brand for our band.

To achieve our brand image for our music video, we researched into different indie videos that had similar brand images that we wanted to achieve. We analysed them and picked out key bits in which their brand image is highlighted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaeLKhRnkhQ

Oasis- Cigarettes and Alcohol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W_hEdt1Xes

Arctic Monkeys- When the sun goes down

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAusT_Yl1gE

The Libertines- Time for Heroes

These are some examples of the videos that we analysed. We took ideas from these and included them in our own music video

What is your brand image?

The rock and roll image that our brand image is based around is typical of indie bands, which is the genre our band fits into. We wanted to create a brand image that perfectly fits in with the music of our band, we researched into bands that have similar music and got different ideas from their brand images that seem to work very well.To create our brand image we thoughts of mise en scene such as locations/props/actors for our video and ancillaries/ clothing.For our locations, we chose places that are associated with ‘rock and roll’ such as The Live Lounge indie bar that we shot our music video in, and the run down areas that we shot our ancillary tasks in.

What is your brand image?

Mise En SceneWe concentrated on the mise en scene of our video to make sure that it fit our brand image perfectly. For both the actor and actress in our video, we made sure we dressed them in appropriate clothing to reflect our brand image. For our actor, we dressed him in clothes that bands similar to our genre would wear, we made sure the clothes he wore gave off the ‘rock and roll’ element of our brand image. For our actress, we dressed her in a fur coat which is typical of a rebellious rock girl and highlights our genre well. Also, her red hair shows that she is wild and daring, another connotation of our brand image.

Our Brand ImageWhen creating our music video, we carefully thought about how we can show our brand image off throughout our video in different ways, we anyalysed other ‘indie’ bands and got ideas from theirs. Throughout our video we maintained the ‘rebelious’ teenager image through alcohol abuse, smoking and drug abuse. All of these insured that our strong brand image was maintained throughout our video.

Smoking

Drink abuse

Drug Abuse

Dancing

Ancillary Tasks.

As you can see, all of our ancillary tasks follow the same brand image. We have used a consistent house style throughout them all so that they all relate to each other. We wanted to follow our brand image throughout all of our products aswell as our music video, and to do this we used the same colours, fonts and logo for each one. Most of our ancillary's feature our actor and actress that have featured in our music video to keep the connections with them. We have used a vivid pink colour in all of our ancillary's as it shows that our band are not afraid to stand out from the crowd. We have also used black and white for all of them as this shows the realism of the shots, which is an element of our brand image.

Brand Identity.

This is a photo of our logo that we incorporated into all of our ancillary tasks, this helped us to keep a consistent house style for all of them. We have used capital letters for the logo and it really stands out and captures your eye, something that we wanted to achieve within our brand image. We have also used the vivid pink and black together again to keep the logo familiar to the music video and ancillary's

Pushing Boundaries. In many ‘indie’ music videos, the bands try to push the boundaries of the normal conventions in order to stand out and make their music video different. They do this in many ways such as mise en scene, editing and shots. According to Fraser and Goodwin, music videos for certain conventions such as a link between the music and visuals/cinematography and intertexuality. We have followed all of these general conventions but have pushed the boundaries in many other ways such as editing. We have followed Fraser and Goodwin's theory by having a link between the visuals and the lyrics. The song is called bad candy which is about cocaine, and our music video visuals are mostly based around drug taking.An example of the lyrics from our song are:Live your life hooked on a linebad candy keeps you feeling fine

These visuals definitely connect to the lyrics in the song as the actress is taking drugs and dancing.

We have pushed the boundaries of a music video definitely through the mise en scene, as our actress shows her breast while dancing on a night out and falls over drunk on the floor. Our video also shows both our actor and actress taking drugs during the night which may be seen as shocking the audience. One of the ways that we have pushed the boundaires of normal music videos is the way in which we have edited it. We have looked at different videos and got inspiration from different editing techniques. We got inspiration from The Libertines- time for heroes and also The Cribs- I’m a Realist. Below are some of the ways we chose to edit our footage to make it look interesting and different. I think all of these ways definitely push the normal music video boundaries. We also used editing to look as if the characters were blinking, relating to Peter Frasers conventions

Pushing Boundaries.