How to lead a product launch using classical symphonic form

Product marketing as a classically-trained pianist. Or: what you learn when you get a degree in music.

Earlier this year, my team and I launched a major new product at an EdTech SaaS company using Sonata form, the structure composers have used to write symphonies and sonatas for over two hundred years.

Objective for the launch

Our primary objective was product adoption. But since this new product also meaningfully altered our position in the market, the reach needed to be broad and the launch a splash—big, omni-channel, and coordinated for maximum impact.

To execute a launch successfully, you have to tell a coherent, consistent story across marketing channels while also unfolding and developing key messages over time.

We needed to figure out what story we were going to tell and how we were going to tell it.

Storyboarding the launch

We started with our go-to-market (GTM) brief, including positioning and messaging for the product, all of which was informed by market and customer research. That messaging will typically show up in a GTM brief looking something like this.

You have an overall message, and maybe a tagline that further distills the essence of this new product. And then you have additional key messages that speak to the functional or emotional benefits of the product, with supporting data points to back up those messages.

And if you’re in the fortunate position I am, you have a talented brand and copy team to turn those messages into crisp, punchy copy.

But these are just the messages.

To bring them to life in a product launch across channels, you want to see how these messages show up across those channels over time—email, YouTube, social media, blog, in-app surfaces, and so on.

So we turned to the channel owners and asked them to develop a storyboard specific to their channel based on the key messages and timeline laid out in the brief.

The ask: here’s the objective and here are the key messages, how do you recommend we use your channel to deliver these messages? What does that storyboard look like?

With that in mind, we put together an initial storyboard capturing what would be happening on which days starting with launch day, one day post launch, and so on. It looked something like this.

Initial drafts of these storyboards yielded great ideas, but putting them all together produced a series of stories rather than one cohesive story.

Exactly how would the email and announcement post align? Would that third email send and the Instagram post four days post launch make sense together for someone seeing both?

More importantly: would these assets work together to drive home the same messages to maximize impact?

A series of disjointed storyboards does not a coordinated product launch make.

We needed structure, an organizing principle, something that aligned the channels across time, so that when a user or a prospect saw a message on social media on a given day, they saw the same message in their inbox.

See something once, forget it. See it seven times, you start paying attention.

We took a step back.

What was missing was a unifying structure for our two key messages. And through the eyes of a classically-trained pianist, “structure” and “two key messages” sounds a lot like Sonata form.

Sonata form

Incidentally, words have meaning. When you hear that a piece of music is called “Piano Sonata No. 32” or “Symphony No. 6 in F Major,” that’s telling you more than just the name of the piece—it’s actually telling you something about how the piece was composed.

Even if you’ve never heard a particular sonata or symphony before, you still know that the piece probably has three or four movements and that the first movement will almost certainly use Sonata or Sonata-Allegro form.

“Sonata form” describes a structure using three primary sections: an Exposition, a Development, and a Recapitulation.

At their most basic, those sections work as follows. Of course, deviations from this structure, large and small, abound in the literature.

Selections from Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor, D 784, are included here for illustrative purposes.

Exposition

The Exposition introduces two distinct musical themes, i.e. melodies and their associated harmonies. Then first theme establishes the piece’s key, so when you hear that a piano sonata is “in A Major,” the first theme will be in the key of A Major. In this example, the key is A minor.

Then you’ll hear a second, contrasting but usually complementary theme—something that’s typically different in character or mood, presented in a different key than the first theme. In this example, the second theme exudes a warmth and calm that contrasts sharply with the yearning, almost eerie, first theme.

Development

The themes are then expanded upon in the Development. This is where a composer takes those themes introduced in the Exposition and explores them in any number of ways. A composer might shorten or lengthen them, use fragments of the themes, put them in different keys or moods, slow them down, turn them upside-down, put them in different instruments or registers, and so on.

Here, Schubert starts the Development using the first theme, though in a distant key and with a murming accompaniment in the left hand instead of having the hands playing in unison.

And here, still in the Development, the second theme is heard in a different key and in now the left hand, while the right hand dances with a different rhythmic motive introduced earlier in the work.

The Development ultimately provides significant freedom for the composer to expand upon the themes they’ve presented earlier the work.

Recapitulation

The Recapitulation provides a repetition of the Exposition with minor differences: you’ll hear the first and second themes, though now both in the same key.

In this sonata, the first theme returns in the original key, though with the second half of the theme now in the bass.

An example of deviation from the standard form, the second theme in this particular sonata returns in the parallel major of the first theme rather than the original key itself, now breathless rather than calm and reflective.

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Some sonatas or symphonies will also have an Introduction at the beginning, before the formal Exposition. And some will have a Coda (from the Italian for “tail”) at the end. But these are less common, especially in earlier sonatas and symphonies.

Altogether, a piece using Sonata form—e.g. a piano sonata or symphony—will probably look something like this.

The result: by the end of a movement or piece using Sonata form, you are now very familiar with those themes.

You heard each theme in its basic form at least twice: once in the Exposition and once again in the Recapitulation, and possibly three times if following the custom of repeating the Exposition in its entirety before moving on to the Development.

In addition, you’ve heard those themes again any number of times played and developed throughout the Development section.

On another level, such a structure conveys coherence while facilitating flexibility and creativity. The Exposition and Recapitulation provide order while the Development allows for a departure from the comparatively rigid structure of the outer sections. You might also think of it as Order, Disorder, Re-order, a journey that offers both balance and depth.

A classically-informed launch playbook

We went back to the team and asked them to tell the story through their channel within the confines of an updated storyboard that looked like this.

From here, we worked to implement the right approach for each channel. Not every square above was filled in, and in some cases, a specific asset straddled a couple squares. The point wasn’t to be dogmatic with the form, but simply to allow the form to give us what we needed:

• An impactful product launch, delivering a big splash

• A story coordinated across channels over time

• Repetition of key messages

We’d built a GTM storyboard inspired by Sonata form.

Here’s what overlapping the two looks like.

A successful launch

We made a splash and moved thousands of customers through the funnel to drive product adoption. Within two weeks, we:

• Repositioned our company in the marketplace

• Generated awareness of our new product portfolio among hundreds of thousands of existing customers and prospects with clear, repetitive messaging and an impressive evolution of our visual brand

• Drove trial and adoption among a significant portion of our user base

• Acquired and converted hundreds of new users with a top-converting paywall in-app

This was just the beginning. With a product roadmap packed with improvements and new features, the best is yet to come.

What we’d built was a solid foundation to iterate on, with opportunities for additional experimentation, targeting, and evolution over time.

For a peek at what we launched, check out the landing page for this product launch here.

Coda

I’m often of the opinion that there is nothing new under the sun. By which I really mean: peel back a layer or two and you quickly find a common thread, an archetype, a recurring pattern.

In music, in marketing, similar patterns emerge.

The emphasis on repeating key messages in marketing even has a name, something you might hear referred to as the Rule of 7. This is the idea that a prospective customer needs to hear about something seven times before taking action on that message.

Conceptually, the Rule of 7 aligns to our basic neural wiring and specifically the importance of pattern recognition. In other words, we are wired to look for and respond to patterns, sometimes even making up patterns that don’t otherwise exist.

So in the first place, our minds seem to crave structure. And on a second level, a structure that emphasizes repetition, creating patterned familiarity, seems predisposed to be to our inherent liking.

Sonata form provides internal structure within a piece of music by emphasizing the repetition of thematic material. I’d argue that Sonata form also serves as a meta-structure by giving listeners a mental roadmap of what to expect when listening to a piece of music, even one they’ve never heard before.

Along these lines, the emergence of a structure like Sonata form in music, or the concept of the Rule of 7 in marketing, is simply a manifestation of our own neural frameworks.

Extended coda

Beethoven was famous (notorious?) for extended codas. You’d think a piece was ending, only to see it rush past its first and second apparent endings and run on for another minute or three.

In similar fashion, I extend the last point to highlight the transferability of skills across fields. I often hear from artists, musicians and other ‘non-traditional’ professionals in the business world about how others don’t understand the relevance of a background in the arts or humanities.

I offer this story as but one example of how a learned approach to formal structural analysis in one field can apply seamlessly to that of another, unlocking the creativity of dozens of colleagues and shaping the experience of the hundreds of thousands of customers and prospects impacted by a product launch.

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Audio samples in this newsletter were recorded by me. Here’s a recording of the entire first movement of the Schubert sonata, performed by Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires.