How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary

texts?

What is a brand? A brand is a specific identity a product

creates for itself. A brand can range from words, signs or symbols which all are used to establish ideologies/connotations that buyers can associate to a particular product. It enables the seller to create a unique and distinct identity which the audience can refer to. Companies use branding in order to stand out from other competitors and to enhance success rates worldwide. Within the media industry, branding can differ from costumes, colour, fonts and mise-en-scene which all come together to create a brand identity. The brand allows the product to be well known and succeed. For our task it was important that we created a brand image in order to gain success within our product. Examples of successful branding are:

What is a brand? Within the music industry it is important for an

artist/band to have a brand image because it is a clear way of defining their genre, establishing a character/personality and most importantly helps to sell their records. Branding enables the artist to establish a relationship with their target audience and can also help with drawing new audiences in.

Artists incorporate their brand image in many ways, whether it be in the music video, album covers, advertisements and merchandise. They all contribute with helping to promote the artist. Without a brand image, the artist would have less chance of standing out therefore less chance of succeeding.

During our research we researched how artists branded themselves. One of the artists we looked at was Katy Perry. It is clear to see that Katy Perry’s brand image is feminine, crazy , sexy and fun. Katy has been able to keep her brand image cohesive through various branding devices.

Katy Perry illustrates her brand image through: 1. Album Covers. 2. Music Videos

Brand Image

The primary purpose of the album covers are to advertise Katy Perry’s records, however they also help with establishing her brand image to her audience. The use of the bright colour palette connotes a fun and vibrant personality, followed with the feminine persona (mise-en-scene) that also links to her brand image of being girly and sexy. The album covers are quite busy inferring that her music video is upbeat and crazy, just like she is. This can be seen in the eccentric hair colours that she has such as her blue hair in the ‘California Gurls’ album. The font that is used helps create cohesion because throughout all advertising for Katy, the font is all the same allowing her name and brand to be easily recognisable.

What is your brand image?For our artist to succeed, we had to create a brand image that would sell our artist to our target audience.

Our brand image is: -Young -Fun

-Sexy -Lively

Our target audience is :-13-19 year old -females.

We have chose young females as our target audience because we feel as though they would relate to our artist and their music the most and will easily create a close relationship with our artist.

We decided to focus on ‘Mainstreamers’ (Young and Rubicam’s theory), because this group tends to buy music from young, girly and sexy artists.

We then decided to link our brand image and target audience together in order to reach a chosen genre. Although we had already thought of using the ‘pop’ genre, we created a questionnaire to find out which genre was the most popular. From our results it showed that ‘pop’ was the most popular genre therefore we could go ahead with using it.

This graph shows that over half of the people we asked in our questionnaire preferred ‘pop’ from all other genres.

What is your brand image? Now that we had decided on our target audience, brand image and our genre, we then researched into

other artists that had the same similarities. This research gave us inspiration for our artist and information on how to promote her in the best way possible.

Our Brand ImageIn order to promote our artist Franki to the best of our ability, we had to include important features used in media.

Mise-en-Scene

Cinematography

Editing

Character performance

Our Brand ImageMise-en-scene It was important that we focussed on mise-en-scene for our artist in order to establish what clothing she would be wearing, as this would help with promoting her appearance in a positive way. We researched various ‘pop’ artists with similar brand images to gain an idea as to what mise-en-scene Franki should be wearing.

It is clear to see that it is vital that we dress Franki in glamorous and girly dresses, high heeled shoes and her hair and make-up needs to be more done than usual.

It is important than we dress Franki this way as it will help with creating a positive image of her, and also will help with the male gaze, therefore she will be popular with both males and females.

Our Brand ImageIn our video, we made sure that Franki was wearing a feminine short dress, she had high heels on and had

quite a lot of make-up on. It was important that we did this as it reinforced her girly image and linked with her brand image of being young and sexy.

Here Franki is wearing a bright pink jumpsuit, followed with a costume change of a tightly fitted black dress. These dresses reflect exactly what we wanted to; young and sexy.

Franki is also wearing a pair of pink high heeled shoes.

Franki is wearing heavy eye make-up and pink lipstick. This portrays her young and girly brand image,.

Franki has loosely ruffled blonde hair.

Overall, we have used mise-en-scene productively throughout our music videos and ancillary tasks.

-We have developed a constant colour scheme throughout, which is linked to the outfits that are worn in our video.

-The outfits that Franki wears are pink feminine dresses and heels, followed with a costume change of a black tight dress. Costume changes add variety and make the video more intriguing.

-When Franki dresses as a boy, the mise-en-scene is put together to make her look masculine; black blazer, converse shoes, white shirt and a hat is worn.

-We ensured that we kept the backing dancers mise-en-scene similar to our artists brand image. The dancers also have a costume change of red tightly fitted dresses to dressing like boys in black blazers and leggings.

Our Brand Image

Our Brand Image As we wanted our artist to succeed in the industry, we decided to add a twist to our music video. Through

analysing other music videos, we came across Mariah Carey’s music video for ‘Obsessed’. In this video she is dressed as a girl and a boy, this feature makes the video unusual, therefore more likely to stand out from other videos.

In this video Mariah is dressed very masculine, as her mise-en-scene includes a moustache and a beard. However the idea still works well and really caught our eye. Therefore the idea of Franki becoming a boy as well as a girl developed.

Our Brand ImageAs we had decided to use the boy and girl theme, it was vital that we carried it throughout our music video and

ancillary tasks. Therefore just like we did with the girl mise-en-scene, we had to establish a costume for the boy part in the video.

Here Franki is wearing a fedora hat in order to add masculinity to her outfit.

She is wearing a black leather jacket to give a clear contrast between the pink feminine outfit.

Black converse shoes are wore, again a clear contrast form the pink high heeled shoes.

Franki is wearing a white shirt underneath her jacket, this adds masculinity.

Black leggings are worn, a contrast to a short dress.

Our Brand ImageWe also had inspiration from Ciara’s video for ‘Like a Boy’. We liked the use of the boy and girl part being

edited to look as though they were stood next to each other. We thought that this would work really well in our video because it made a clear separation from the male and female parts in the video, we thought it was also interesting and eye catching.

In order to do this technique, we have to consider the micro elements that we use within our video. It is vital that we ensure that the music video links with our ancillary tasks because it creates cohesion as it creates a clear visual link with the music video and the artists products.

We also thought that including this within our video also linked with Goodwins theory of the lyrics matching the visuals as our song is called; ‘Boys and Girls’.

Our Brand ImageCinematography

The camera shots that we used within our video include:

-Extreme close ups, which are used to draw attention to things. We used this angle for this part of the video to emphasise Franki getting ready to go out, therefore applying make-up. This links to her young and sexy brand image.

-Close ups, which are used to establish a personal bond with the audience. We use a variety of these camera shots in our video because it is a clear way of showing facial expressions such as when Franki is laughing; this refers to her brand image of being fun and energetic.

Our Brand ImageLightingThroughout our music video, we used a range of lighting effects. For most of our video we used high key lighting in order to make it clearer and brighter. We also used this lighting to use for the ancillary texts, to make the photos clearer.

We also used side lighting on some parts of the video, this was to create a different effect.

Our Brand ImageMedium Shots, which we used to introduce the costumes and so that the artist can be perceived to the audience.

Long shots, which we used to demonstrate Franki’s body language and also to show off the dancer’s choreography. This helped to link to her brand image of fun and energetic.

Our Brand Image Editing

We used a variety of editing techniques within our video in order to make it more eye catching and appealing.

We used montage editing, fast cut to follow the pace of the music, we used reverse motion and colour corrections to Franki’s photos to make her look bright and vibrant.

We copied two images of Franki and put them either side of the original with different colour effects to make one look pink and one look blue.

We used techniques such as split screening and splitting the screen into 4.

Our Brand ImageCharacter Performance.

Throughout the video we have used many clips of Franki laughing, joking around and dancing. These clips are vital in our video because it links to our brand image of young, energetic and fun.

Ancillary Texts

Ancillary Texts

How have you constructed a sense of brand identity using media language- first in the video, then how have you continued this across the ancillary texts?

It was important that we made sure that our ancillary texts related to our music video. We did this in many ways:

-We used the same background that we used in the video on some of the ancillary texts. We made the backgrounds ourselves using Photoshop.

In this example, we used the split screen to define the two gender differences. We linked this to our front cover using a split screen of the two genders as in the video, one side is Franki dressed as a girl, and the other she is dressed as a boy. On the album cover, we have used the same technique; one side is pink and the other is blue. This immediately allows the audience to see a clear link with the video and album cover.

How have you constructed a sense of brand identity using media language- first in the video, then how have you continued this across the ancillary texts?

We also linked other backgrounds used in the video to another album panel and an A4 advertisement.

We created these backgrounds using Photoshop.

How have you constructed a sense of brand identity using media language- first in the video, then how have you continued this across the ancillary texts?

We repeated the cloning of Franki used in the video onto two of our ancillary texts. This enables the audience to have a clear visual link from video to artwork. We also ensured that the two album panels related to the theme of the song; the girly and pink coloured panel represents the female gender, and the mirrored image links to the male representation.

How have you constructed a sense of brand identity using media language- first in the video, then how have you continued this across the ancillary texts?

We have used the same font for the logo of Franki. It is important and vital that we have done this as it creates cohesion and enables her to be recognised by her audience, and unfamiliar audiences will know who she is. The choice of the font is girly and feminine, the love heart adds quirkiness, and the colours used are similar to our colour scheme of black, pink and blue.