Honda doesn't just want to putz with music-based marketing the way other car brands do. With the launch of its hugely ambitious Honda Stage music platform, Honda intends to blow away its automaker rivals like a bass-guitar riff drowning out a harp solo -- and join the cluster of top brands outside the car industry that are effectively playing to the music-hungry Millennial generation.
Honda Stage is a multi-platform program designed to meet music fans in environments where they're already searching for and consuming music, providing Honda an opportunity to further build brand awareness and loyalty. Adding to its significant music initiatives such as the Civic Tour that has entertained 3.5 million Americans since 2001, Honda will offer a Honda Stage YouTube channel devoted to original music content as well as 200 sponsored live events over the next year and tie-ins with music-industry giants ranging from Live Nation to Sean Combs.
In doing so, Honda seeks to elevate itself above what it considers the industry's wan music-marketing efforts to date that typically have been limited to one-off promotions for individual vehicle launches or sponsorships of a single artist or concert series.
"We want to take this to a whole new level that's not really being done by anyone else," Tom Peyton, assistant vice president of advertising and marketing for American Honda, told me. "We want to be a blue-chip company that gets into the music content and curation business and creates our own advertising platform from it."
In essence, Honda Stage is meant to put Honda in the same group of savvy non-music consumer brands outside the auto circle -- including Amazon with its new Prime Music service,
"If we can get Honda to be thought of in the same likes as Apple and other great Millennial brands, that's certainly my goal at the end of the day," Peyton said.
"Plenty of other [non-auto] companies have done a great job with music," he added. "But we think with more than 200 events lined up over the next year, as well as our online presence, we can have a constant premise and become known as a destination for music on an ongoing basis -- and that's the real difference."
The main immediate goal of Honda's s giant leap is to register more heavily with Millennials, who consume a big portion of their media online instead of via traditional TV, radio and print, and who have come to be known as the car-resistant generation. "When you're integrated correctly, especially with music, it increases your emotional appeal to [this] consumer," Peyton said.
And that emotional appeal, he said, translates directly into higher consideration and sales for the Honda brand. Company research showed that Civic Tour attendees increased their consideration of Honda vehicles by 34 percent over a control group of consumers. And sales data from the subsequent six months showed that such concert-goers actually made a congruently greater number of purchases.
Success for its new music brand also would boost Honda's non-automotive businesses, Peyton said. "We also would like people to think about Honda Stage in light of Honda motorcycles and other Honda products we have out there, especially as we continue with more green initiatives" such as the company's experimentation with "smart-home" technology.
If a Stage can be home for a brand, expect Honda to be living there in the years to come.
