Analysing the Role of Music in Establishing Brand Identity through Luxury Fashion Films

Whether through intertextuality, or apophenic tendencies, the human brain has been reported in many existing studies to possess the ability to create links between certain musical ideologies, and other completely non-related mediums. This thesis aims to discover the ways in which audiences perceive music in the context of luxury fashion films, and how by understanding these perceptions during the creation of a fashion advertising campaign, fashion brands can enlist sound design and original compositions to better deliver their brand identity to the intended audience. Through the identification of musical characteristics and their perceived meaning when analysed in conjunction with additional forms of media, a formula for the composition of fashion campaign soundtracks can be devised. Examples of existing studies noting pre-existing perceptions of musical tropes will be examined in order to apply their relevance to this study. Throughout this thesis, hypotheses on the most prolific of these characteristics will be stated, with the relevant data extrapolated from surveys and references put into practice through the creation of an original visual fashion campaign film and two contrasting yet structurally similar musical accompaniments. A survey analysing this film and subsequent scores will be constructed, with the data collected used to prove the proposed research question, as well as speculate on the possible implications that this data possesses for the relevant field and future studies.