Kieran Murphy
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Kieran Murphy, Head of Creative & Brand, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club
The Head of Creative & Brand of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, Kieran Murphy, is an established sports branding and innovation expert.
With +15 years of expertise, Kieran has led countless fruitful branding efforts that have improved the club's global presence and engaged a variety of fan bases. His natural ability to blend contemporary creative ideas with calculated marketing tactics has produced memorable campaigns that connect with fans worldwide.
Murphy's practical leadership abilities and collaborative style have helped the club develop a vibrant, creative squad. Tottenham Hotspur has continuously pushed the envelope under his direction, establishing itself as a trendsetter in the football world. His relentless passion for the sport and dedication to delivering exceptional brand experiences make him an invaluable asset to the club's continued success.
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“Essentially, when we're talking about brands, what we're trying to do is create this sense of trust”
— KIERAN MURPHY, HEAD OF CREATIVE & BRAND, TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR FOOTBALL CLUB
Uli Reese: You're the first CMO of a major football club to join the conversation. Please tell us a little about how you started your career.
Kieran Murphy: I've been in the creative industry for over 15 years and the sports industry for 11 years. I went to the University of Leeds, in the UK, where I studied graphic arts and design, which gave me a great foundation to choose this career. I was always drawing and coming up with spoof comics and parodies of TV shows. I took any chance I got to be creative. When I finished university, I started working for Clear Channel, which is known in most parts of the world as iHeartMedia. I was an in-house graphic designer, and I’d design for local companies as well as corporations such as Coca-Cola or Panasonic. The scope was fantastic and gave me a sense of what could be achieved in the industry.
Reese: For fans who support Spurs, it’s almost a religious experience in the stadium, especially when one of the players scores. You own your logo, but what about the sound of 66,000 people cheering? How important is that?
Kieran: All of our senses and touch points are there to be dialed up. We've focused far too long and too hard on just the visual. Sound is more impactful in some regards. If you're taking Tottenham Hotspur football club, Harry Kane became our all-time top goal scorer in 2023; it was a truly unbelievable moment for him personally, but also for every fan throughout the ages and for the club. It was brilliant, but if you were to watch it without sound, it just doesn't come close to what you were seeing. I wouldn't say it's even half the picture, so sound is so incredibly important, but people don't really see it as a powerful tool at the moment. When we're talking about our audiences, something like 85% plus consume content on their mobile devices rather than a desktop. We should have been thinking about this long ago, but maybe people weren't asking the right questions on how much more impactful these things could be with sound.
Reese: Audio right now is a land grab. When it comes to the economics, your logo is owned but not the songs that the audience sings, so ultimately, you’re at the mercy of somebody who's the owner of that sonic IP. Do you agree?
Kieran: It's interesting the way you view sonic branding because I’m not sure people are looking at it like this. They’re looking at it as something that’s come before, like a jingle from the forties or fifties. The jingle reinforced trustworthiness, authority and now, maybe people who look at sonic branding see it as something that will only resonate with their visual brand better if it coincides with some sonic branding - with their logo at the end of the piece of content, or before a piece of content, like Netflix. Is it seen as an intellectual piece of property that can be sold, replicated, or used across partnerships? Probably not, or not that I've heard. But it's really interesting that you see it this way because, in the mainstream, we’re only just bringing sonic branding back into our line of thinking - maybe that’s because of those old advertisements?
Reese: Nothing much has changed since the Intel logo, but we all now talk about sustainability, and I talk about sustainability too. In terms of audio and sonic, how is the future going to look?
Kieran: For sonic branding to be as effective as we would like it to be, it needs to work in tandem with [visual] branding. It also needs to work solo without [visual] branding. I like your analogy of the stadium as a church with people singing together and releasing this trust hormone and oxytocin. It's a feeling you can't replicate, but what you can do is encourage them. It leads me to this conversation I had with Simon Sinek [author and inspirational speaker] about tribalism. He put it quite simply; if you're on holiday to get away from the people you spend your time with, and then at the resort, you hear somebody across the bar speaking English, you start listening to the conversation. Then you hear his accent and think he's from the same part of London as you, and that's interesting. So, later on, you probably start speaking to him. What happens is you make this connection, and it's driven by our prehistoric sense of tribalism and wanting to feel part of a community. So you end up spending the rest of your holiday with a new friend who actually lives down the road, when in fact, you went on holiday to get away.
Essentially, when we're talking about brands, what we're trying to do is create this sense of trust.
Reese: Can you expand on how that resonates for you in terms of being a football club?
Kieran: In May 2023, in the UK, we had the King’s Coronation. I found it interesting when they started playing what friends refer to as ‘the Champions League anthem,' and of course, what others know as [composer Handel’s] Zadok The Priest. It’s really interesting when we talk about sonic branding, the importance of sound and its relationship to our brand, and how you can actually change people's perceptions and instill different emotions, feelings, and visceral reactions. If you’d taken this song when it was first released, the reaction would have been completely different. In modern day, everybody listens to this beautifully composed track but not actually for what it was originally composed for. I find it extremely interesting how you can manipulate these things for your own cause.
Reese: Finally, can you share your thoughts about how Sonic ultimately fits into the world of football?
Kieran: My team and I are all creatives, whether that be brand specialists, copywriters, or designers. We look at the world in our own unique ways and try to engage and communicate. Ultimately, it's all about building that community. It's about building a vessel that people are drawn to and want to be part of. It’s an experience. Football is a beautiful thing. Stadiums rose out of terraced housing - it's so much more than a sport or a piece of entertainment for the weekend. It's a religion, it's a community, and so whenever we're communicating anything across our brands, we're always thinking about our community and what it means to fans, old and new. As the football business goes forward, the commercial side of things is what gets spoken about more and more, and not the connection between players and managers and fans and the relationship between my grandfather and me and football. Those things are getting lost in the weeds, whereas to me, they're the most important pieces of storytelling and narrative, and that can be brought to life more with sonic branding.
Note: The interview took place in London, UK on the 2nd of June 2023.
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