We live in a world where change itself is changing. And it’s changing the way we change.

What’s more, the quicker pace of change is accelerating the rate at which new changes emerge – fast.

Connecting via dynamic new vectors of search, social, sharing, smartphones, tablets and whatever else has been invented since I started writing this sentence, consumers have become creators – and creators have become consumers.

Not just of content, but of context – and contextual content too. In fact, content has become context – for consumers, creators, connectors and contextualisers.

It’s a world where new paradigms are formed, developed and discarded each and every day, by every one of us.

Patrolling the frontiers of innovation astride horses of opportunity, today’s marketers are not promoters but procreators – agents of humankind’s heartlove, as expressed by buying some old tat in a shop and droning on about it on Facebook.

Brand values, tone of voice and corporate storytelling have been powerful tools, driving explosive growth in our clients’ brand equity and the fees we can get out of them. But they can no longer guide us through the proliferating paths of participation and permutation.

We need something more – an emergent, trust-based reach generator that takes narrative, transactional and social beaconicity as its baseline going forward.

It’s no longer enough for brands to speak. They must learn to sing.

Enter Brand Melody™.

Just as a corporate ID is far more than just a logo, so Brand Melody™ is far more than just a jingle.

Brand Melody™ is the tune your husband whistles as he paints the fence with Ronseal.

It’s the joyful burbling of a six-year-old who’s being taken to McDonald’s in the front seat of an Audi. For the second time that week.

It’s the dulcet clinking of Peroni bottles in an achingly trendy Hoxton bar where web designers called Dan are chillaxing after a hard day’s wireframing.

It’s the Latin rhythm your teeth make inside your skull as you chomp through a whole packet of Cheddars after the pub.

It’s the mellifluous song of a blackbird in the soft light of dusk as he craps on your £500 decking from B&Q.

The emergence of Brand Melody™ opens up a new world. It’s world composed not of old-style ‘people’, ‘products’ and ‘companies’, but of synaesthetic social nodes connected by audible and ambient branding vectors. A world where an evolving ‘we’ is learning to compose a new, symphonically inclusive brandsong. A world where the way a brand sounds is just as important as the way it looks and feels.

Brand Melody™ is new, edgy and perhaps a little dangerous. So, inevitably, there will be those who ridicule it. They’ll call it a desperate attempt to reclothe an emperor stripped butt-naked by the failure of social media.

But for the early adopters, a new horizon of authenticity, engagement and connection is unfolding. And it’s going to be music to marketers’ ears.

What’s your Brand Melody™?

Tags: Brand Melody