Theses and Dissertations

Releasing music 20 years ago looks a lot different than releasing music today, and it is still ever-changing. Artists can make music in their bedrooms and release it independently by simply uploading it online. These artists can use social media to market their music themselves. But with it being so easy for new and small artists to put out a song it begs the question: in this customer era of marketing, how can new and small artists use co-creational marketing strategies, such as themes of nostalgia and hidden messages, to differentiate themselves? This project seeks to answer that question. In this partial creative project and partial research project, I tasked myself with writing and producing a song myself, then using that work to test these different marketing strategies. I distributed a survey where participants would listen to the song and then decide which of two visuals they preferred for a cover, merchandise item, and social media feed. Each set of visuals had one with a nostalgic theme and one that utilized hidden messages. This project discusses the importance of social media in an independent artist’s career and marketing efforts, as well as discusses customer-centric marketing and co-creation marketing strategies through nostalgia and hidden messages. I found success in a nostalgic strategy and interest in hidden messages. This research sets the stage for testing similar strategies by collaborating with other artists and their work in the hopes of creating guidance for independent artists when marketing their releases.

This thesis analyzes the evolution of social media and video marketing, as well as offers advice on how local restaurants can capitalize their marketing efforts on social media platforms using video. Due to the ever-changing social media trends and algorithms, it is vital for a local restaurant to understand the channels in which consumers are getting information, the influencing factors of the varying algorithms for each social media platform, and the topics consumers would like to hear about in order to market effectively. In order to test the research I have collected, I have produced four high-quality videos, which can be found in Appendix A, of menu items from the local restaurant Ingo’s Tasty Food and posted them on the restaurant’s Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok accounts. These videos range from 15 seconds to one minute and have been posted on different days of the week. My findings determined that the quality and length of a video does not have consistent effects on the engagement received on these three platforms, nor does the day of the week in which these videos are posted. Based on these results, I recommend that a restaurant focus on the content of its videos, rather than the quality, length, and day of the week posted.