Find your sound
Making music should be fun and engaging. We wanted to bring that experience to the people.
Brand
- Novation
Date
- September - December 2019
The Team
- Simon Peacock – Creative Director
- Christien Michaels – Lead designer
The project
Novation was preparing to launch the MkIII series of Launchpad controllers. We wanted to make an impact, we had to make an impact, we had to change the customer base back towards music makers. EDM and the ubiquitous Launchpad lightshows had started to decline and with that, so had the sales. It was going to take a mighty effort, something different, something that will get the media coverage needed to make that change. We wanted people to come and try the product, talk to knowledgeable users, learn, play and have fun. Experience music making. So, it was decided, we’d open a shop, an actual physical shop.
The kick off meeting set the tone for this beautifully, “We’re not witnessing the death of retail… we’re seeing the death of boring retail.” said Rich Johnstone, VP of Sales. From that point I knew there was an opportunity to push the creative hard with this, we had the chance to change the way retailers think about creating more engaging customer experiences, nothing gets me more than challenging ‘the norm’.
Building the concept
The current music-tech retail landscape is a cluttered, characterless, boxy mess. You wouldn’t want to spend any more time in these stores than you had too, that and the weird guy in the corner hacking his way through the opening chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit on repeat makes it a grim experience. Although customers are spending more time shopping online, when it comes to instruments and music-tech, at some point you’ll want to actually hear and touch the products before your hard earned cash is pulled from your clenched fist. Brands are competing within crowded markets to win consumer affinity and awareness, doing that in an era of heightened digital communication, it’s necessary to connect. With all of this in mind we wanted to create an experience.
The Journeys campaign was running alongside this, its core message was about finding and using sounds around you. What we did was blend that message in to this project, settling on ‘Find Your Sound’, and to bring this full circle neatly you could actually play the sounds collected from the Journeys project on the Launchpads in the store.
Launchpads are known for their bright coloured pads, they can create millions of different colours so we focused that huge colour palette down to lively mix of bold colours. The typography remained modest throughout, the simple message dominated all the touch points created.
"… at some point you’ll want to actually hear and touch the products."