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?
In order to effectively create a brand we researched Mumford and sons, like ours they have constructed a brand with a positive message that relates to your audience. This reflects our artist's ideologies as well as the audiences as they find our products interesting desirable and attractive. We are using this same method of AIDA to ensure our products engage and suit our target audience.
Our mission statement is ‘Hopeless Romantics is the newest indie folk band around. We aim to bring back old-school romance with a modern twist. Hopeless Romantics will bring a playful vibe to romance that will have you wishing ‘Snapshot’ was written about you. The highest quality of music is created through persistence, Brotherhood and talent to provide you, with a pleasurable and relaxing experience. Our music will bring lovers together and encourage them to value their love story. Illustrating that our band are openly romantic and playful.’ Constructs a coherent set of messages and values that our brand is passionate about such as nature, family and pets.
Our metanarrative (Dyer) is shown between our products from our band's continuous playful behaviour. For example on our social media page, we have featured some behind-the-scenes images to tease our audience but also to include images of our band having a good time promoting their ideologies.
We continued this with one of the images appearing on our front cover. The image of the drummer teaching the guitarist how to play is ironic and shows our brand's brotherhood and illustrates their playful honesty to the target audience for the product. We reflected their lively personalities in our music video with the sunglasses sequence in our music video as the main character is hit in the face with the glasses.
There is a constant theme of nature throughout all three of our products. The background of our digipak being trees works together with the background of the performance element of our music video as well as the nature highlight on our social media page.
This is conventional to our genre and shows the kind-hearted nature of our band. This, as well as the sense of our band being goofy, is reflected in our other products such as our music video having sections where the band are just being themselves joking around. One other thing we felt was important was to
support a charity on our social media page. We did this by sharing water aids posts about being careful due to water scarcity. This ensures our artists are using their platforms to promote good ideas and support charities.
Our video does not have a themed narrative feel, we challenge this because our narrative has a clear beginning middle and end. Our music video is also generally conventional as we have used outdoor settings and nature to shoot our music video which is one reason why our idea is conventional. During our research, all of the indie folk videos we looked into were filmed in nature and the wilderness. Our lead singer is also the central character in the band which is generic to our genre. This is because our young target audience that we are trying to attract by using a complete narrative from the romantic point of view. as we found out in our research stage.
While producing our music video we followed the generic convention of our song having an intimate story in the video. This is due to the emotional context of the song that we chose. Our narrative has exactly a beginning, middle and end. This is relevant to what Altman said about how similarities and differences are what define a genre. We challenged the conventions of a thematic narrative as our story has a defined beginning middle and end. We chose to have our narrative like this as it suited our song and our genre. Formally music videos use a more thematic narrative that has a less defined story that can be broken up into three main sections.
Our heart graphics are not generically conventional but we added them to 
appeal to our target audience of a younger demographic we have borrowed pop conventions to do this. Like Lacy said the repertoire of elements such as the Iconography which our main point was the prop of an acoustic guitar is iconic and conventional to our genre.
Our smart casual costumes were formed by keeping our genre in mind and are conventional to our genre. We found during our research into our genre that the bands and performance elements' costumes are all smart casual clothing and nothing particularly unique. We followed the generic conventions with our mise en scene which is a signifier of the genre. After our initial research, it was soon clear that we needed a natural and outdoor setting. We did this as we were aiming to film in a balanced aesthetically pleasing frame. This is conventional due to the raw emotion-filled music that artists in our genre write. We also used poppy animations.
Our digipak demonstrates a brotherhood between the bandmates. This demonstrates a sense of unity and friendship between them. Representation is when an image and idea come together with an idea to imply and suggest meaning. Star image is used to connote our band's ideas, values and beliefs. The adjectives we have kept in mind that sum up the ideologies of our brand are; friendship, loyalty, rural, playful and honest. Our digipack and whole unit of work is targeted at a much younger audience to the traditional folk audience trying to attract and introduce a new audience to folk music.
The positioning of the band all standing next to each other in a serious manner demonstrates their unity and gives an empowering sense of a union.
Our image of two band members helping each other out is ironic as we as a brand is an advertising and selling talent whether it appears that one bandmate has forgotten how to play the guitar. We chose the film strip design as this demonstrates how we are attracting and introducing a younger audience to folk music. Our film strip does this by bringing a more fun and quirky idea into folk music. 
Green colour and trees folk and natural feel which is conventional to our genre as it accompanies the raw emotion-filled music of our genre. We decided to have our images in a combination of black and white so that the key component in each photo stands out and is highlighted. This adds another element of engagement and also represents the rural traditional element of our genre as there is a combination of black and white images and coloured images to conform to our genre.
Interaction with an active audience is important for stars as a social media page is where they promote other products and start to generate a fan base. AIDA- Attention Interest Desire Action is a technique we used to design our social media page with our target audience in mind. The function of a social media page varies depending on how the star and audience would use the social media page to interact with each other. Most commonly a social media page is used to promote upcoming events and releases. However, social media pages are also a key place for artists to communicate and interact with their fans. Forming a platform for open discussion and a community and connection between the fans of our artist.
Our artists kept in touch with our audiences by having a Q and A element on our social media page. 
This allowed our audience to interact and ask questions to our artists as well as discuss the answers to these questions in our comment section. (Shirky) We also combined this with using the ordinary and extraordinary paradox (Dyer) by elements of our social media page showing how our stars are extraordinary such as our collab with timberland to create a merch line, which is a type of synergy. This allows our audience to engage and feel a sense of personal identity as they are relating to our artists to be inspired by their work and achieve similar styles and looks. This is an example of Blumbler and Katz's uses and gratifications theory. This shows that our band is successful and shows their views and attitudes. We also used images of our pets and other activities that are ordinary to create a relationship between our artist and audience as they enjoy the same things that the artists do. 
We kept our target audience in mind whilst creating our social media page so that we designed a page that they would love and be engaged with and have a preferred reading of. (Stuart Hall) We did this by including a promotional post about our band appearing on Iheart radio which has a younger audience.
We also used hashtags to give our social media page the most exposure we could. The filter we used over this image also adds a sense of secrecy as our band is on the radio and is going to announce something which will attract attention therefore more people will engage with our social media page to find out what it is our band is revealing. We used a combination of different techniques to ensure our social media page engaged with our target audience.