Delivering on your rebrand’s promises

You're launching your refreshed brand -- but how do you ensure that customers' experience keeps your new brand's promises? Glenn Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer at the Houston Symphony shares both how they rolled out their new brand and how they are making their event experience match it.

Robin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, vice president of strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest again today is Glenn Taylor, chief marketing officer at the Houston Symphony. So Glenn, welcome back to Brandonomics.

Glenn: Thanks, Robin. Good to be back.

Robin: Well, Glenn, you have shared with us some of the strategy behind the rebrand of the Houston Symphony this year. I wanna know now how you launched it. How did you roll this out?

Glenn: Yeah. Well, we had fun with that. We had the really kind of big message of our centennial season being announced and launched, so we combined the two messages – felt we could get the biggest bang for our buck and kind of the most attention. And after announcing that 100th year season, we had this big party at Jones Hall, invited all of our constituents, board, volunteers, audiences. And after that, we did wanna make sure that the kinda larger audience in Houston knew about it, so we launched a kind of traditional media campaign, some billboard outdoor advertising, heavy on the digital side, of course — wanted to generate that social media buzz. But we also wanted to do some kind of grassroots elements and use street teams. At a lot of our events around that time, we had presence there with fliers and kind of generating a lot of excitement at events as well.

Robin: Okay. So all of this messaging and information you’re communicating is letting them know what they could experience when they get to the symphony itself, so what would that experience be like? What were you communicating around that?

Glenn: Yeah, and actually, our tagline around that announcement/coming out campaign around our new brand was, “Have you heard?” It was that play on words about have you heard what’s new and have you heard the symphony? And so it’s kind of an invitation. And at the symphony itself, yeah, the brand – we really wanted to live in the customer experience, at the concert. So not only did we – do we continue to kind of vary our products, the type of concerts you can experience at the symphony – talking about approachable, we have everything from music of Led Zeppelin to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, so there’s a whole range for a lot of different audiences. But yeah, we’ve been looking at the concert experience at Jones Hall. How can we really make it exciting, dynamic, and in the lobby – the moment you walk in, having entertainment in the lobby, working with all of the different constituents, vendors, people involved in providing that experience to make sure that we’re delivering on something dynamic, exciting, passionate.

Robin: So sharing the promise up front and delivering on it when they get there.

Glenn: Absolutely.

Robin: All right. Well, thank you for sharing that, Glenn.

Glenn: Yeah, my pleasure.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

The mission of the Houston Symphony is to inspire and to enrich the lives of Houston’s diverse citizenry through outstanding symphonic music performed by our great orchestra. For 100 years, The Houston Symphony has upheld this mission.

https://www.houstonsymphony.org/