Interview: The Intuition Consulting Firm's Eshena Roman Talks Marketing Music as a Product

The Intuition Consulting Firm is built on strategy, something Chief Marketing Offer Eshena Roman admits should be a given for any marketing firm."It may sound crazy to even mention, since we’re talking about marketing, but you’d be surprised how many firms don’t have strong strategists that get to know you and understand where you fit in the market place,” she says.

Operating a small business themselves, Intuition Consulting Firm is known for taking brands to the next level. We had the pleasure of getting to know the Intuition Consulting Firm through Eshena, who had great advice to give to artists needing to market their music. “With us being so grounded in strategy, Research is a huge part of what we do. We’re going to dig into your bacground to determine the people who attend your concerts, buy your music, and follow you on social media to identify the trends and be strategic."

Read the full interview below. 

For starters, tell us a bit about you, Intuition consulting, and what it is you all do. What kind of services do you all provide?

Intuition Consulting Firm provides marketing solutions for mostly small businesses, but also brands. We come from a brand strategy background so we bring that insight and knowledge on what it really takes to elevate your brand, amplify your product. Sometimes small business owners have a great idea but don’t know how to market it, so we help them deliver strategy on that end.

We also help companies learn how to communicate their brand effectively to consumers. How can you communicate a campaign of experience that really connects with people to get them to be a part of your brand experience? We deliver services like traditional marketing, PR, digital social strategy, etc. Really, whatever we feel will help make them better!

How can your services benefit the upcoming musician?

One of the wonderful things we really love about music is that you connect to it, right? You have a deep emotional connection. For marketers or a marketing firm like us, that's exciting. We’re able to take that emotion, that feeling that’s triggered by the production, performance and distribution of music, and think, “How do we best package it in order to get people to support it?" 

So for our upcoming musicians and record labels: Okay great, you’ve got this great music, also known in traditional senses as a “product,” but how do we identify the consumers (the fans) who’ll like that music enough to make an investment? How do we package it so they want to be a part of it? That's where we come in.

When Marketing hip-hop artists, how important is it to maintain a social media presence?

Oh, it’s huge. It’s HUGE. Social media, what’s so wonderful about it, you have a way to have an indirect conversation with a potential fan, directly. Social media allows you to package (and you’ll hear me say that a lot) how you want to be received by the greater community.

People who do it right like our Beyoncé's and Taylor Swift's, who are able to release albums without traditional marketing practices, do so because they stay connected with their fan bases. They put content out that that get shared a picked up by new people that introduces them to new fans.

Consistent posting allows you to stay top-of-mind, but also develop a relationship and get-to-know the people who are following you and following your music. Make them feel like they’re apart of something. Social media let’s you do that easily and quite economically, I might add.

So when marketing and/or branding, do you find it harder to promote an individual or promote a product, business or service?

It can be difficult based on the individual themselves. With music, it’s a passion project, right? It’s like Erykah Badu, “I’m an artist and I’m sensitive about my stuff," you know?

It’s something that came directly from you, so you take it personally. In that regard, it can be difficult on the client side when I offer critique for you and you take it as me critiquing your craft. But when we talk about music, it’s actually a product.

So it’s hard sometimes for individual artists, depending on where they are with their creativity, to take that critique and hear recommendations. But as long as they can get with their music being a product, it’s not difficult at all. Our goal is to sell, but that can be a bit difficult when you’re working with intellectual property, aka music.

Your firm specializes in start-ups, but can you all Help businesses transitioning out of that phase?

Oh absolutely. A lot of our experience is grounded in working with large brands and we’re talking multi-million-dollar-budgets-just-for-marketing, type-brands. And I think that’s what helps us and makes us different, because if you’re a small business owner looking to take it to the next level, why not tap into a resource that can tell you, “this is how they did it. These are the lessons that we’ve learned working with these mega corporations, and this is what we can apply to your plan.”

So we definitely have the skill set to speak to those coming out of their start-up phase, because that’s critical. Relying solely on your network and word-of-mouth won’t work for your when you’re trying to transition to amplify your business.

Having good PR is essential to maintaining any successful business. Are there any common problems that the head of start-up businesses should be weary of?

Not really understanding their story, is often a problem. I think sometimes people have an idea that’s so close to them, they think “This is who my product is for, and this is what it can do.”

...but when I look at your website, product and packaging: we don’t get that. You know it because you’re the voice creator and the mind behind it, but how are you telling that story for people who have never experienced this before?

Also, remembering what is and isn’t newsworthy. Things that may be exciting to us, being so close to the business, may not garner the kind of traction or success outside of the business. So evaluate the situation when you make an investment in PR; what’s going to deliver the most bang for your buck?

Have you found it easier or harder to market music, opposed to other products?

Easy and difficult, it depends.. When you talk about a generic product like soap or clothes, people are looking to create an emotional experience because we know when tap into emotions we’re more likely to get a response. Music already does that naturally. It makes you smile, makes you laugh, makes you cry.. So emotion makes it easy.

The problem, though, is that music isn’t always universal. Just because a track is the best thing in the world to you, may just be because it reflects your taste. The difficulty in marketing music is determining who will have the strongest response to the sound and how to reach them. Sometimes we have to tell artists, “We know you want this audience to like this record, but based on what we’ve seen, they aren’t going to buy it.”

In reflection of your accomplishments any everything your firm has done so far, what advice would you give to a young entrepreneur looking to start their own business?

Start.

Sometimes we get blessed with divine sparks of inspiration, but don’t put action behind them. It’s not easy, entrepreneurship is a scary thing. Musicians are naturally entrepreneurs because of the product, their music, that they want people to buy into. It’s scary to think about putting something that means so much to you out there, hoping for other people to pick up what you put down. But don’t deny the world what you we’re meant to bring to it!

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