For my first assignment of this module, I was assigned to work as a group of four to create a marketing campaign for a band we could work with of our choice, so that we could then show our work in the form of a presentation. Each of us in the group took on a role for this marketing campaign that we were assigned to do. I picked to do the graphic design for our band’s marketing as I’ve had previous experience via A-level photography and some media. The aim of this assignment was to “Demonstrate understanding of marketing models and theory, and apply them to music business practice as appropriate”, “Evaluate a range of marketing initiatives and the need for blended marketing tools for maintaining a competitive edge”, and to Demonstrate and evaluate working practices, including negotiation and communication skills both within the marketing team and with the client/product, highlighting the importance of transferable skills” (SPACE, Uni of Hull, Leeds Conservatoire ,2025).
To do this, my group and I firstly established contact with our collaborative band to get to know them better and gather information about their brand identity. For example, who they are, how they do things, what they want, their target audience, their market audience, as well as their overall goals and how they want to be seen or perceived when being marketed. We additionally inspected their social media sites to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in order to see what could be improved as well as what they were lacking. During the process we found that they only used Instagram, barely posted, and had little to no engagement with their audience. In addition, there was no music of theirs to be found anywhere, they only had a few pictures of the band. The lack of content on our band’s social media pages was really holding them back from being successfully discovered before we initiated our marketing campaign. Despite this project only being a plan for our collaborative band’s future, by the time we finished, the results were both visually and significantly noticeable on their social platforms as their posts became more consistent along with their engagement with their followers. They additionally began using TikTok and YouTube instead of using Instagram as their only platform. In this portfolio, I will discuss my involvement within the process of this project, the ways in which we functioned as a group to form our presentation as well as the obstacles and challenges that we faced to reach our objectives.
For this project, we selected a band known as “After Midnight”, playing under the indie rock genre and based in the North Lincolnshire area. We used Instagram and discord as our source of communication between us to call and message so that we could share ideas, discuss our objectives and what could be done to reach them. When discussing with our band, we found that one of their inspirations was Artic Monkeys, giving us a good idea of how they would like to be presented/perceived. In addition, we were informed by the band that their primary target audience was preferably “young people who want to discover new styles of music”. To find the right target audience, one of the members in our group had family near where our collaborative band was based, hence when he went back home, he would get easy access to their gigs so that he could gather such information which would be useful to us. During this process of discussing, attending gigs, surveying attendees, and doing research, we found that the majority of people who attended our band’s gigs was from eighteen to twenty-two year olds, perfectly aligning with who our band wanted as their target audience. In order to reach and engage with this audience even further, we explored via books such as Music marketing for the DIY musician (2014) by Bobby Borg as well as a few sources from the web.
We settled to finally focus on two different marketing models to apply to our marketing campaign. One of these models was the R.A.C.E model. Reach, Act (interact), Convert, and Engage (Dr. Dave Chaffey, 2010). We decided that this marketing model would be the best to successfully reach our audience as it primarily focuses on the relationship between a product and its followers. Our band somewhat successfully prevailed in some aspects of this model. For their reach, as mentioned earlier, they branched out to different platforms such as TikTok and YouTube instead of solely using Instagram. In addition, they began to interact with their fans more by including polls in their posts for more interaction/engagement. Finally, they “Converted” their audiences by encouraging them to follow their other social platforms through their gigs. One of the challenges that we faced as a group was that we did not possess access to control over their social media account, limiting our influence on their progress and growth. To some extent, merely advising and guiding them was the most that we could do for them at times, notably due to their inconsistent replies in addition to lack of communication.
Why did I decide to take on the graphic design role for this project? Why is Graphic Design so important when it comes to marketing? Each and every picture you come across, whether it’s billboards, videos, flyers, magazines, books, social media, blogs, etc. The colours, the fonts, the pictures; it is all thanks to graphic design’s contribution. Graphic design is not only crucial for capturing an audience’s attention, but also for shaping how a product or message is presented and perceived.
With my contribution toward the graphic design aspect of this project, I thought I could initially research some famous bands who have succeeded in the graphic design area for ideas. I decided to research Guns n’ Roses as my primary example, as they have some of the most iconic rock logos in history. I came to realise that these logos were not all there from the start. This concept made me realise that graphic design can additionally be not only used as first impression propaganda, but also as a way to update fans with new content such as logos as well as album covers which is why it is so important.
Why were Guns n’ Roses so successful with their graphic design branding? It can be argued that the revolvers and skulls could have been seen as somewhat controversial back in their time, connoting violence and rebellion which is exactly what young people pursued back then. Guns n’ Roses was additionally a heavy rock band of course which was rather new to pop culture at the time. However, it can be argued that young people have always sought rebellion, precisely how RnB, Reggae or Jazz may have been considered rebellious previous to heavy rock/metal. It can be argued that young people still seek rebellion to this day, which is exactly why graphic design should be taken advantage of from a certain perspective to effectively target particular audiences, hence why it keeps on being so important to this day when it comes to presenting a product or band.
What had our band already done for their graphic design branding? Starting with their logo, it was bold yet simple, not overdone. However, it felt somewhat inconsistent with the drastic change in fonts between ‘After’ and ‘Midnight’; despite that, it remained an effective logo, with the colour orange- a colour that is not used very much hence could attract attention. However, I believe the colour red could have been increasingly more effective to some extent. Why? During a lecture for my A&R module, my tutor discussed how red is the most attractive colour due to its association with danger which is why it gets the most attention; additionally explaining why a lot of successful companies use the colour red in their logos such as Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Ferrari, KFC, YouTube, Netflix, Levi’s, CNN, and more, demonstrating that it is clearly done on purpose, which I found very interesting and useful for this marketing campaign from the graphic design aspect. “Red is hypothesized to impair performance on achievement tasks, because red is associated with the danger of failure in achievement contexts and evokes avoidance motivation” (Andrew J Elliot, 2007).
Proceeding, I inspected one of our band’s posters for one of their previous events to recognise the strengths and weaknesses within their graphic design to identify what could improve. I established that the poster they were marketed in had been organised and constructed moderately well. It contained a black and white colour scheme, distributing a strong contrast and making everything easy to read. It repeated the phrase “FREE ENTRY”, three times in a row, which is a method in advertising known as ‘message reinforcement’ to catch people’s attention. However, everything in this poster such as text was quite small, and there was plenty of room that could have been utilized. Additionally, perhaps some unnecessary information had been included in this poster. For example, where it said: “Solo sets coming from: Leif – Connie – Elyssa” despite no one really knowing who they are. There was no QR code or social media shown for people to visit or find out more about the event. Finally, the band had not exaclty been properly introduced- Owning to the fact that our collaborative band is not famous, their logo would have not really meant anything to anyone at the time since no one would have recognised their identity or brand yet. For example, the poster lacked pictures of the band that the audience would be coming to see and it did not really directly say to the reader what the event was, risking for audiences to misinterpret this poster for something else. Similarly, their competition lacked in some of these areas.
In order to find what kind of competition our band would be opposing regarding marketing, I contributed my share within the group by taking advantage of the Leeds Conservatoire area as it provides numerous promotional material for local bands of all sorts who are trying to get discovered due to it being a music school. I additionally put my network to use by surveying students and peers in the area to gather information about what bands could be considered competition. Proceeding, I collected numerous different social media pages from different bands and analysed them to inspect their strengths and weaknesses as well as elements that they utilised in their ads as ideas for us that we could use ourselves for our marketing campaign.
As mentioned earlier, one of our group members, who is originally from the same area as our band, additionally contributed to finding competitors by attending our band’s gigs and surveying the attendees which was useful to our marketing campaign as it gave us a wider insight into who else might be competition for our band. As I surfed through the social media pages that I had gathered, I came to the realisation that similarly to the After Midnight poster that was mentioned earlier, there were numerous things lacking that could be improved. For example, many of the ads did not directly mention what the event was. Some did not contain any pictures or introduction to the band. Others did not include any social media links or QR codes for people to find out more information about marketed event or band. However, on the contrary; some of the strengths that other bands prevailed in was that they did include pictures of their identity as a way of introducing their band and were straightforward with what the event was offering. Others on the other hand included social media links for the reader to find out more information about the product or event. However, I discovered that little to none of these ads had all of those things in one; it was either one or the other, meaning there were many things that these bands did not do with their graphic design that gave insights of what I could do for our marketing campaign’s graphic design.
For example, a band called KIOSK, included a picture of their identity and introducing who they were to some extent; however they lacked persona and did not particularly have a logo- they were not very clear about what their event was left plenty of space in their poster which could have been utilised. On the other hand, another competitive band for After Midnight within the music scene was called Coldwave, which similarly used pictures of their band to introduce their identity. They presented their own unique style in terms of graphic design by associating themselves with birds and blue/grey colour schemes. Most importantly, they provided a link for readers to book and find more information about the event; however, they did not include any links to their social media platforms for audiences to find out more about their brand.
Finally, my biggest contribution towards this marketing campaign was a poster I created for our band’s next upcoming event being a Talent Show in Lincolnshire. I took everything I learned from this journey and put it all into one single picture as something they could use as well as an idea of how they could be marketed further in the future. In a nutshell, their next event is a talent show in Lincolnshire where they will perform and showcase their talent for them to be discovered and expand their following. To make my ad for After Midnight, due to extremely low budget, I used an online image editor on the web known as Pixlr along with the Instagram story editor to add text. I used a picture of the band to merely introduce them to the readers. I was direct with what the event was by putting “Talent show” right in the middle. I included the band’s Instagram user along with a QR code that would take them to the Talent Show’s website so they could find more information. If it was not clear enough, I additionally placed a text that says “indie rock” (twice) so that people could know what kind of music they would be going to see and what could be expected from them. I additionally implemented the 4ps of marketing (product, price, place, promotion) (E. Jerome Mcarthy, 1960) by taking control over how the product, price, and place were presented. The price was displayed strategically, incorporating a promotional tactic known as ‘price anchoring’, where I listed an original price of £20, which was then “reduced” to £10, to create a perceived sense of value and urgency. As mentioned earlier, for the product, I got straight to the point, indicated what the event was, placed a large/clear “TALENT SHOW” text centrally located featuring the ‘After Midnight’ logo below. I included the time and place above, along a QR code as mentioned earlier to provide more information. In terms of promotion, the poster created was not only made to be placed on walls, as it was also designed for digital spread across social media platforms. The vertical orientation of the poster made it particularly well suited for mobile devices, ensuring accessibility and engagement among a wider audience, given the prevalence of smartphone usage.
Reflecting on this marketing campaign, I have learned and implemented numerous marketing models for this project which have significantly expanded my knowledge and experience within the music business scene. Not only marketing models such as ‘R.A.C.E’ or ‘the 4ps’, but also insights into concepts such as ‘price anchoring’ or ‘colour theory’ and how they are implemented into the world of business. The opportunity of working with a band has showed me the challenges that must be overcome during the process such as communication and commitment. Us group members within the marketing campaign could have certainly communicated substantially more, as we all firmly focused on our individual contribution and were somewhat unaware of each other’s work until the final moment. As a result, our marketing campaign has had our band, After Midnight, see huge benefits and growth, having them recently get signed to an indie record label known as Ultra Scope Music Group. Their social media has in addition significantly improved, as they have uploaded and been more consistent with their posts. They have moreover been a lot more engaging with their followers by sharing polls and asking what would be liked to see from them next. This has furthermore provided them with greater opportunities for them to perform at more events. Having just recently recorder their first single, they are set to release new music sometime in the next few months. We are very excited to watch this band excel and continue to grow throughout their career.
Bibliography:
RACE marketing model definition – What is? – Digital marketing Glossary
E. Jerome McCarthy – Wikipedia
Book: Music marketing for the DIY musician (2014)
Book: Psychologie de la couleur: Effets et symboliques (2000)
Color and psychological functioning: the effect of red on performance attainment – PubMed
