USC Thornton School of Music: The Circle of Fifths
- pjwoolston
- Dec 15, 2024
- 2 min read
Situation
Like all schools, the USC Thornton School of Music sought to develop recruitment materials and content that was actually relevant to the students they were recruiting. They wanted to produce stuff that musicians would keep and use, not just discard. They wanted to produce something with utility that could even outlast the lifespan of the product that held it. They knew from experience that material about the school had no staying power. They were looking for something that was sticky.
Solution
In the Woolston Inventive tradition of making everyone smarter, we identified the circle of fifths as the perfect content to capture and brand. The circle of fifths is an important and useful tool for musicians, but even more than that it is beautiful and iconic. Two ways that we captured it stood out as particularly popular:
Sticker: Stickers are immensely popular with students. There is so much content in the circle of fifths that a sticker would have to be on the larger side to be intelligible. Fortunately, music students in particular have larger surfaces that they enjoy adorning with stickers. It is very common and in fact popular and trendy for musicians to put multiple stickers on their instrument cases (especially for larger cases like a cello or tuba!) and their music folders.
Frisbee: What do you do with circles? You throw them to friends through the air! We took that same circle of fifths design and put it on a frisbee (importantly, a high quality frisbee not a cheap throwaway). Simultaneously, we developed an accompanying distribution plan: We gave them out at auditions. Music school auditions take place nationally in January and February. Musicians travel across the country to the schools where they are applying. Their experience is inevitably affected by the weather of the season and their comfort. Los Angeles, the home of the USC Thornton School of Music, benefits disproportionately because it is beautiful there year round. We gave out frisbees on the lawn during audition weekends creating an experience and a memory. Then several weeks later as students navigated inches of snow in other locations, they remembered that experience because they still had the frisbee! They could already find themselves nostalgic to go back to Los Angeles, positively influencing recruitment yield.
Success
The school has had to make increasing production runs of the stickers. They are so popular that they can’t keep them in stock. The frisbee also has been immensely popular, even finding an alternative use as art in music studios.
