One of the best parts of our job at Merit Mile is the ability to work with a variety of companies in a number of different industries. Engrained into our DNA is the ability to dig into new entrepreneurial ideas, learn quickly, and apply best practices to achieve sales and marketing goals. Although we’re all pop-culture aware, and we like to think we maintain a high degree of today’s sense of “cool,” the reality is that market forces in the current-day music industry are moving and changing at speeds that quickly evolve yesterday’s hip into today’s passé.
Enter Resounders.com, a music portal dedicated to showcasing opinions that get to the root ideas of the only people that matter – the consumers. With emphasis in the growing hipster, jam band and Indie rock genres primarily, Resounders.com is all about creating a public online environment for music neophytes as well as savants, and sharing stories, opinions and ideas therein. The people behind Resounders.com spend most of their time listening, performing, and attending live shows rather than creating and executing marketing and web strategies for profit. Similarly, the personalities stewarding this platform would prefer to make the site all about the users, and steer rather than drive the community of opinions on a number of subjects in the category.
To support this vision, Merit Mile had to start from the very basics, by conceiving the brand name, “Resounders”, as our first initiative. We liked this brand name for many reasons: it truly supports our content sharing mission; it’s a single, actionable term; and as luck would have it, the domain and all the right social media handles were available. In the land of the startup, these factors contributed significantly to the initial branding and associated decision making. From there, we had to create a fun yet professional logo and brand identity. There’s no denying that the integrated vinyl album embraces everything that was fun about yesteryear music, but also sets the tone for a growing trend in music consumption today.
Similarly, the color palette needed to be light and welcoming, yet still maintain a high degree of established professionalism. Moving onto the website, Merit Mile created a simple and editorially focused web platform that makes it easy to absorb and contribute content. The CMS is driven by the ever-popular and continuously-improving WordPress engine, but maintains a high degree of customization particularly in the Shows and Featured sections of the site. On the whole, we are proud to welcome Resounders.com to the Merit Mile family, and we hope you enjoy the community and the vision as much as we do.