USC Thornton School of Music: Musician Swag
- pjwoolston
- Dec 15, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 20
Situation
The target population for recruitment by the USC Thornton School of Music was highly specific: Rather than a general public population (such as what the university was targeting), the Thornton School of Music was recruiting elite, highly trained music students. They sought recruitment swag and merchandise that would be more resonant with this population than the things one might generally find passed out, such as t-shirts, stickers, water bottles, etc.
Solution
We helped the school develop swag that was uniquely useful to the target population. Identifying such items comes only from a true understanding of both the kind of student they were looking for and the things that would be useful for them, in other words, swag that would be sticky, such as:
Pencils: Musicians always need pencils. They are a requirement for rehearsals where they need to mark notes and reminders on the music they are practicing, and those marks need to be removable (i.e., not in ink) so the next performer could start with a clean part. Providing branded pencils to students is a great opportunity for exposure; providing branded pencils to influencers in the bands and orchestras, the youth groups, and the honors groups (such as the conductor, the librarian, the administrators, etc.) is even better. Conductors always insist on their musicians having a pencil at rehearsal, but there are always some musicians without pencils; where you can give one pencil to a student, you can give scores of pencils to the conductor and now there are plenty on hand whenever there is a need.
Erasers: As noted, all of those marking have to be erased! So there is a similar need for erasers. Branded erasers are even more helpful for the influencers who are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the returned parts have any markings erased, including any from students who forgot.
Music staff paper: Musicians often have assignments to write bits of music, and beyond that they often have their own musical ideas they want to capture as they begin composing and arranging. Having music staff paper on hand is essential for ideas and projects. It is relatively easy now to find music staff paper online and print it, however in this period of development it was not quite as easy. We posted branded staff paper to the website and became known as an extremely convenient source to get staff paper on demand. Further, we met multiple needs by providing both 12-line staff paper which is ideal for writing 4-part harmony, and 10-line staff paper which provides a little more room for writing.
Gig bags: And of course musicians always have so much stuff to carry around that it’s helpful to have a bag in which to put all of those odds and ends! We rolled out a variety of sizes and formats before finally landing on one that was extraordinarily popular with our target population, precisely because it was so useful!
Success
We quickly found that we couldn’t give out enough pencils to meet the demand! As popular as they were with music students, music teachers and conductors appreciated whole bundles of pencils precisely because they always needed some on hand that they could give out without needing to retrieve them. Administrators for music groups in particularly absolutely loved the erasers because of how much easier it made their life, and the music staff paper increased traffic to the website. To this day, the school still finds opportunity in meeting this demand.
Postscript
In a subsequent iteration we upgraded from the traditional #2 pencil to a mechanical pencil. We felt that the increased quality, durability, and life of a mechanical pencil would provide greater staying power and utility for students. In fact we found the opposite! Students kept the mechanical pencils only about as long as they kept the #2 pencils, and that was only if they accepted one—we found that they avoided these because they inevitably looked more like pens than pencils, and writing on music parts in pen is absolutely forbidden. It turns out that not only is the standard #2 pencil incredibly inexpensive to produce and give away en masse, it’s also the ideal option!
