How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions? 

How do your products represent social groups or issues? 

How do your products engage with the audience?

The Mission Statement: “Freya offers a multi-genre vibe into the pop world. Mixing R&B soul, pop and electronica, Freya’s emotive atmosphere and tones give an ethereal and quirky performance style, providing fans with an ocular kaleidoscope with a multi-coloured and freaky aura. This new album ‘Faces In The Crowd’ features the new hit song ‘There Isn’t Much’ along with the most unique new songs. This extraordinary album is destined to rise to the top of the charts, connecting emotionally with fans all across the world, leaving everyone to want more.”

Any brand within the industry needs to be easily recognisable to its audience. This means that it is crucial for producers to create a blended, cohesive campaign and convey the above mission statement across all platforms.

Our mission statement includes key descriptors of our artist such as “quirky” and “emotive”. It is important that we focused on the mission statement that we created a package of products that is cohesive across our brand. The products we create need to be an accurate representation of our artist and her star image that allow us to create a metanarrative on top of presenting her as ordinary and extraordinary.

For example, my target audience would expect to see our artist as calm, elegant and ethereal. This idea is evident across all of our products, – during our music video whenever our artist is on screen she is shown wearing smarter, more elegant  clothing and either in nature or in a home setting. At the same time, our digipak creates an ethereal, mysterious vibe that helps to uphold the image created on our social media page.

The theory of ‘The Paradox of the Star’ is crucial within our marketing and branding aims, as it helps to present our star as both ordinary and extraordinary. To help signify this paradox, we chose to use our instagram page. By posting our star in normal everyday situations, such as hanging out with friends or going to the beach she is shown to be ordinary. However, we also posted behind the scenes images and clips as well as sneak peaks at our album and tour.

We researched professional Pop music videos, in doing this we were able to understand that videos within this genre often include a performance and narrative aspect, editing to the beat and have a strong sense of MES which includes bright colours, many different camera angles and shot distances, this included longs shots, tracking shots, low angles and high angles, as well as natural makeup and simple jewellery. We reviewed the Dua Lipa video, ‘New Rules’. It goes without saying that in doing this task we were able to focus on the generic conventions found within pop videos with the intention of using them within our own work.  These refer to Lacey’s idea of the Repertoire of Elements –  these are the key “ingredients” , this included the use of close up shots, editing to the beat to switch between angles or scenes, lip syncing, as well as the use of special effects and overall to sell the star. It was crucial for us to utilise the relevant forms of media language within our product to help signify and represent our narrative and brand as a whole.

During the production of our music video, we aimed to challenge the conventions of pop as we want to represent our star as a multi-genre artist. We chose to have a balance of performance and narrative throughout our video, this is not a part of the blueprint (Altman) that the audience would generally expect, however we felt that the use of these aspects combined with key features from the repertoire of elements (Lacey), together would allow us to create a music video that would fit the expectations of our audience, leaving them satisfied and fulfilling Altmans term of the contract and Lacey’s repertoire of elements. We were able to challenge these conventions through the use of editing to the beat, lip-syncing and selling our star. The use of narrative allowed us to convey the story of a broken hearted teenager trying to navigate life after the loss of her boyfriend. Throughout scenes such as the party, there is use of hand held filming, this is to help create the feeling of chaos within her life, this is then backed by the use of special effects such as flashing colours, fading between scenes and transitions.

It is important to represent our star and the genre in an appropriate way that fits our branding and helps to create a successful package across all of our products that appeals to our target demographic. It was important to think about the use of colour, font and composition when creating our product as it is crucial that the digipak produced reflects the correct genre.

When thinking about representation we need to think about showing our star as extraordinary and ordinary simultaneously. This refers to Dyer’s theory of star image when a star is presented as present and absent.

The main focus for our star image was representing our star as mysterious and a higher being. In order to represent our star, we employed the use of media language. This included images, colour, fonts, body language and costume to help us represent the genre and our star simultaneously, as it was important for us to have a clear use of visual signifiers to help represent our star correctly.

Through our DP, we wanted to represent our star as thoughtful, ethereal and mysterious. Our use of colour symbolises our star as an ethereal, dream-like artist. On top of this the use of an echo shadow on our album name infers to the psychedelic representation of the album and genre. Our front cover consists of a simple close up headshot of the star with a scarf carefully draped over her head and simple makeup. This helps to symbolise (Barthes) our star as a higher, intelligent being. It could be argued that Barthes’ idea of semic codes is prominent throughout our digipak, through the use of soft, atmospheric lighting and carefully chosen special effects that help our product to fit with other digipak designs seen throughout our chosen genres.

The most important aim of any marketing or advertising strategy is to engage the audience. Our main demographic was focusing on young females, however we allowed for our products to attract both genders. A perfect way to engage FREYA’s audience is through the use of a Social Media Page. It is imperative that any media text is encoded with signs and symbols that our target will be able to decode to help them receive the preferred text.

Gauntlett argues that we are all prosumers; we produce social media content as much as we consume it whilst Shirky adds to this by arguing that  that the wall between consumers and producers has broken down and that all consumers are partially producers, this is due to democratisation, so we were careful to include the audience in all of our decision making.

It was important to ensure that our SMP included Blumler and Katz essential elements to help engage our audience with our media text. These elements include social interaction. An example of this within our SMP is the use of the instagram stories feature to conduct a Q&A with our artists audience. This helps to create a more personal interaction from our artist to her audience and helps to keep the audience hooked on the content that she shares.

It was also extremely important that all the relevant information about our artist was readily available for our audience to find and consume to help adapt their personal identity. We were able to produce this information through the uses and gratification theory by creating a website, which we linked in the bio section of the instagram page, leaving our audience able to buy merchandise, find out more personal information about our star and other information such as tour dates and album releases. Our SMP also included captions, photographs and comments that fit with the ‘language’ of our genres encouraging the preferred reading of our audience.