Right? That’s what Billy Joel said. It’s what most of our clients say at the beginning of our business relationship. That they trust us. Especially our jingle clients. Well we thought we’d walk you through it from our perspective. And keep in mind, 98% of our clients are completely awesome to work with. So here’s how it goes:
1. A business reaches out to us to inquire about having an original jingle written and produced for them.
2. We respond, providing the required details abut The Process, cost guidelines, and turnaround time.
3. We set up a conference call with the client and the decision makers, doing a deep dive into their specific business model, their demographics, and what kind of jingle would work for them. Sometimes the client has the style of jingle and lyrics all worked out and communicates that to us. But this is rarely the case. Most of the time our new client says something along the lines of “Well you guys are the experts! We trust you! We say ”That’s great….we’ll knock it out of the park for you!” (By the way, we say that because we’ve been writing, performing and producing music our entire adult lives. We’ve had a hit song on the charts. We’ve put kids through college doing this. This is who we are. This is what we do.)
4. We write up a music agreement for our new client to sign and away we go.
5. Within a week or two we’ve written and produced a tight, bright, hip jingle with a killer ear worm melody and vocals and we send it off to our client. (Bear in mind we’ve gone through many iterations of melodies and production ideas, discarding all of them except for the final version…which is what we send off.)
Now this is the point at which we get client feedback. And usually it’s good feedback ranging from “We love it!” to “We love it but we can’t quite understand this lyric, can you make some adjustments?” But a vey small percentage of the time the feedback like “We played it our office and nobody likes it.” Or “My husband/wife heard it and doesn’t think it’s good.” Sigh. And that’s when we explain to them the people who they are asking to evaluate their jingle have… Never. Been. Asked. To. Evaluate. Music. From. A. Marketing. Perspective. In Their Lives. Yet these are the people you’re listening to. Usually everything works out as we explain to them “You wouldn’t trust us to come in and evaluate how you’re running your restaurant chain…so why are you listening people with no music experience evaluate what we do?” So it IS just a matter of trust. Just like the Piano Man said.