How do your products represent social groups or issues?
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
How do your products engage with the audience?
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
In line with the Cambridge brief for Component 3, students are required to create a music promotion package for an album, consisting of a music video (MV), an official social media page for the artist, and a digipak. My group and I developed a fictional Indonesian pop artist named "Cinta Kyle"—a bold, confident, and slightly flirty 19-21-year-old Southeast Asian female artist. Her persona plays with deception, initially appearing innocent and feminine, though the music video reveals a more cunning side. Moreover, the music video reads the only form of teenage love as a negative, one sided relationship and explores complex romantic dynamics, resonating with a specific audience of teenagers and young adults aged 16-25.
Throughout the extensive research that we did according to pop genre conventions we conform the stereotypes of a Pop MV that represent social groups through casting only south east Asian casts. We take most of our inspirations from a well-known singer “Sabrina Carpenter” where she uses a kiss trademark as her essence and her target audience also matches with ours with Carpenter’s target audience is primarily young women aged 18-24, with over 75% of her listeners being female.
Based on our music video (MV) our product has represented social groups mainly through the clothings that the main and side character is using. (Fig. 1) The Star is using a maroon red top and black skirt that symbolises that she is bold, confident, and holds power. On the other hand the side guy is wearing a white colored t-shirt that represents purity and innocence. Throughout the MV all of the side guys are wearing white t-shirts which contradicts the Star that uses such a striking color. This also shows that the Star is the one with control or power over the relationships. In contrast, in the early part of the MV (Fig. 2) the Star could be seen wearing a light pink colored top which generally symbolizes softness, gentleness, and femininity. This shows how her character has transformed from a gentle and feminine woman to a woman that possesses captivating charm knowing exactly how to turn heads and take control. Additionally, the mise-en-scene of the high camera angles the clip when Cinta is laying in her bedroom using a pink pyjama shows that she is head over heels for the main guy where it can be seen that Cinta is acting giddy which conveys that she is deeply infatuated, emphasizing her vulnerability and emotional investment in the relationship.
Branding is one of the most important factors when creating a product, as it creates a memorable impression between the Star, product, and ideologies. We incorporated a variety of elements to create a sense of branding. One was to associate our star Cinta with the colour maroon and lipstick. We consistently included these symbols in our CD digipak (Fig. 3), music video (Fig. 4), as well as social media (Fig. 5). As a deeper shade of red, the maroon colour connotes a more mature feeling, while the pink is innocent and submissive. The two are used across our products to show the two sides to her personality. Another symbol we used in our branding is the lipstick. It conveys Cinta’s transition into womanhood and features heavily in the design of our digipak and music video. Finally, we also used consistent typefaces throughout our products. The serif typefaces convey a sense of elegance, sophistication, and personal touch which is aligned with the persona of Cinta that we wanted to showcase. We believe that repeated use of these typefaces will be instantly recognisable by our target audience. Additionally, the high-heeled boots (Fig. 6) is also apart of Cinta’s style as it can convey professionalism and a certain level of self-assurance this is after her heart is broken due to the toxic relationship that she encountered this relates to Dominant reading (Stuart Hall) with love being unreliable showing transformations of one’s character and how Cinta is able to take control over her own life after being in a one sided relationship.
Our products challenges conventions as we tried to create our MV as creative through combining both performance and storyline in the music video. Through creating a twist in the persona of Cinta which is feminine at first and how her persona switched to a bold character this is also align with binary opposites theory (Levi Strauss), femininity vs female empowerment as well as we tried to subvert the conventions of a usual pop genre as women in pop music video are often seems as passive which lead to our approach which is to make Cinta initiates and dominates interactions as she toys with her love interest, reversing the power dynamics as usually men are being referred to as the ‘player’ now we are making our female Star to hold that power which subverts traditional gender role this relates to Feminine discourse theory (Van Zoonen) as it challenges traditional norms and offers audiences an empowering and assertive female figure. Additionally, the minimalist and simple design of the back cover of the digipak is also unique as most pop digipaks tend to feature bright bold visuals and images of the artists to capture attention of audiences, in contrast, we use a deep maroon textured background with elegant serif typography. This gives the product a timeless, mature, and sophisticated tone, which subverts the youthful, bubbly aesthetic often linked to pop.
Through our digipak we conform to the generic conventions such as using medium shots of the artist as our main cover. This connotes the Star is the main attention and how we really focus on the artist in our overall product. The direct mode of address of the artist looking directly to the camera also speaks directly to the audiences which creates connections which conform the generic convention of pop digipak cover. We incorporated a cursive font with dark red color which we use repetitively throughout all of our product to create brand identity that our audiences could be familiar with (Fig. 7). Moreover, what subvert our digipak from any other digipak that we have researched would be the inside left of our digipak that is a shot of our Star’s reflection from a mirror which implies the mirror shot suggests a "hidden side" (Fig. 8) to Cinta Kyle, tying into her MV persona (outwardly innocent, secretly bold).
Additionally, our product engages with the audiences mainly through social media platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, as well as link trees (Fig. 9) Through social media we balance out to portray the artist in a professional yet personal manner. Star’s Instagram post contains informal pictures such as BTS of shooting the MV, childhood nostalgia videos, travel photo dumps while also being professional by promoting her album, billboard picture, as well as magazine featured artist. Not only that, Cinta also uses the Instagram story features such as question box where audiences could fill by asking anything and she replied some of them through videos (Fig. 10) this supports Social Relationship theory (Blumler & Katz) as it creates a sense of personal connections between Cinta and her fans even though followers are not interacting with her in real life, these digital interactions allow them to feel involved in her life and career this correlates with End of Audience theory (Clay Shirky) that the traditional passive audience has changed to a much more interactive experience especially due to technological advancement and new media taking over it has significantly increases the convenience of interactive social media.
Overall, the purpose of our product would be to create a brand identity across platforms and be able to create a consistent brand image that would be recognizable and align with our target demographics. I believe we have done our best in collaborating and integrating our media skills for our component 3 project.
FIGS LINK Incase being needed
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