Hector Muelas
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Hector Muelas, Global Chief Brand & Customer Experience Officer, Allianz.
Hector Muelas is the current Global Chief Brand and Customer Experience Officer at Allianz. Prior to joining Allianz, Hector held different Executive positions at renowned companies, including LMVH, Apple and RIMOWA. With over 20 years of experience, Mr. Muelas’ is a high-profile creative giant. He is known for having efficacious leadership strategies and being remarkably results-driven.
As an award-winning Brand leader, his international and multicultural expertise remains integral in fostering and revamping the brand strategies at Allianz.
Please note: The details are based on the time of the interview and may have changed since then.
“Going back to the idea of creating a visual identity, you create palettes and flexible models for a brand, so it's funny for me to hear that the default audio for a brand is a jingle or sonic signature or whatever, as opposed to treating it as a sound palette.”
— HECTOR MUELAS, GLOBAL CHIEF BRAND & CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE OFFICER, ALLIANZ
Uli Reese: Let’s start by hearing about your role at Allianz...
Hector Muelas: I’m the global brand and experience officer at Allianz, in charge of marketing and creative communications, as well as customer experience.
Reese: How important is audio in building a brand?
Hector: It's beyond important, it's essential. At a fundamental level, we understand brands through our senses, and we know through lots of research and data that there are certain senses that are better equipped to build an emotional reaction – and sound is one of them. I see it as an essential part of a brand strategy, and it can obviously take on a million different articulations.
Reese: Where has this explosion of interest in sound come from, and where is it going?
Hector: Number one, I think I'm better at understanding the world through the lens of culture than I am at understanding it through the lens of systems. Through the lens of culture, audio has become one of the pillars of cultural contribution. Cultural pillars come and go in waves, and I think ultimately, as a consequence of the proliferation of new platforms, we’re in this demanding attention economy where everyone is pulling at you and asking you to be fully engaged. Visual culture does not allow you to have a ‘passive relation’ with an interaction. You have to look at something - but with sound, there's a level of latitude, and you can decide how you engage with it. I can hear something from a playlist from a brand that puts me in a good mood, or have a deeper interaction with it on a platform like Clubhouse. That's the cool thing about audio. It’s a less enslaving tool for a marketer to build a relation with a customer, versus exclusively visual. And they don't have to come together at the same time anymore.
Reese: Many iconic brands have a rich visual history, and thanks to the pandemic transferred to audio - but a lot of CMO’s admit they were caught off guard. How do we make our brands future-proof in this brave new world, and how do you deal with this at Allianz?
Hector: Number one is the role of a CMO and the obsession with platforms, as opposed to behaviours which is where we should be putting our emphasis to start with. We need to start with how we want the consumer to feel and then figure out the best way to express it, be it through smart speakers or whatever - or looking at the future, which will most likely be through artificial intelligence, quantum computing etc. Secondly, sound just went from being this nice thing to have, to now being mandatory. Iconic brands know what their purpose is, what they stand for, what their mission is, and what their brand values are, so it's very easy to build in an audio strategy. In the case of Allianz, if our brand mission is the core belief that we're capable of great things, and that we're not afraid, I see how that could pivot into audio. I can see what a confidence-building audio strategy would look like, and that it can be its own track within a marketing department. It doesn't need to be ‘let's go and put music on that makes you feel confident’ in a commercial. But it needs to be there, and it needs to be done through the lens of brand values. If you don't have that homework down, then it's going become another accessory you spend time with for only the next six months until the trend moves on. And finally, if you look at the amount of time that's spent on design guidelines and marketing environments, on visual guidelines, and photography, and logos and fonts, it’s clear that we don’t have that same level of emphasis for sound. What are the sonic guidelines for a brand? I’d love to see the same level of rigour seen in visuals put in place for sound.
Reese: The sonic experience is different to the one of 20 years ago, and the usage of sonic logos is falling. They almost seem like relics. Do you agree, and where are you with all of this at Allianz?
Hector: We’re not there yet, but with my arrival, we're starting to design and conceive the brand as a global entity. Allianz, as a natural evolution, is looking to become a more consumer-facing brand. And because we're doing this in 2021 and not 2000, we get to learn and leapfrog. We’re now asking ourselves what role does audio play in this whole global strategy and in financial services.
“Going back to the idea of creating a visual identity, you create palettes and flexible models for a brand, so it's funny for me to hear that the default audio for a brand is a jingle or sonic signature or whatever, as opposed to treating it as a sound palette.”
Thinking about sonic systems in the same way as visual systems is a really interesting idea precisely because we don't know what the platforms will be in the future. It’s about diagnostics and not about platforms.
Reese: Mark Phillips, the VP at McKinsey Digital Labs said, ‘My analogy is that a sonic logo is like a name badge, while a DNA driven sonic identity is like meeting somebody in person’. Would you agree?
Hector: It’s a good analogy. I think good brands do two things; they are an executive producer, then they're a curator, and if you want to continue with the music analogy, I would say they're also a producer and a DJ. Good brands create things from scratch and also have a point of view. They're good at picking up things. So when you look at a sonic strategy, you should be thinking about your original palette and your identity. Again, it has to come back to brand values. You can develop all the sonic identities you want and make them as complex with instrumentation and whatever, but ultimately, it's about the emotion or the idea you're trying to convey. And by the way, if your brand is about love, then yes, there may be a couple of songs from the Beatles that maybe fit your strategy. And also, a third pillar now is voice, which is something that brands are going to have to look at when it comes to AI assistants and AI interactions.
Reese: Finally, Jane Wakely, the CMO at Mars said, ‘I believe that attaching yourself to somebody else's brand dilutes your brand. Borrowed relevance is just a poor man's approach to creativity. How many times are you going to have to stick yourself next to the cool kid for you to realise that you have to be the cool kid, you need to have a brand identity, and you need to have a point of view, it doesn't work by writing someone else's coattails.’ Agree or disagree?
Hector: Hard disagree. I think with the language she used, you can see there's a bias because associating yourself with other people doesn't mean associating yourself with the cool kids. It doesn't. This has nothing to do with cool, but I think in the arsenal of the modern marketer, you have to understand the synergies and the overlaps of your brand. I think maybe she's referring to the fact that if everyone is listening to Billy Eilish, let's use Billy Eilish. But if you're a conservative banking institution, maybe it doesn't really match your brand, so in that sense, I would agree, but at the same time borrowing equity if there's a band or a song that perfectly encapsulates those values, then you should do it. This is a battlefield; anything goes.
Note: The interview took place in Munich, Germany on the 5th of May 2021.
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