Strategy tool "Plek" positions brands with music

"Plek" was created by the agency Atoll developed and is now available on plek.mx available. At the heart of Plek is a map with playable music samples, created by partner company Audio Network originate. The tracks stand for specific emotions and in their entirety form a comprehensive semantic space. In this space, brands are marked as an area or point at the appropriate place for them. Each brand gets its individual profile In contrast to sound branding, Plek does not aim directly at the creation of acoustic brand elements, but sees itself primarily as a fundamental framework that helps to uncover the emotional core of brands.

Comparison of emotional meanings

Brand managers can use the stored music tracks to record and evaluate positioning scenarios more quickly. Among other things, because the degree of focus of brands becomes easier to recognize: Emotional contradictions are more noticeable on the musical level than on the linguistic level. Plek shows its strength particularly in the exploration of differentiation possibilities when several brands are compared with each other on the basis of their emotional meanings. The distribution of musical pieces and emotion words on the Plek Map has been empirically validated. It is based on studies in which test subjects describe the extent to which they associate certain pieces of music with certain emotions. The statements were converted into degrees of relatedness using a statistical procedure (t-SNE) and visualized as distances between data points.