Casio reimagines its pianos for the streets with new sub-brand and marketing drive
Venerable music brand Casio has launched a new sub-brand, #CasioPro, hoping to make young creatives fall in love with piano. To do so, it is collaborating with with rising musicians.
CasioPro artists
Jack Terroni, product marketing executive Casio, told The Drum the company’s new sub-brand was envisioned as an enabler for emerging singer/songwriters. Upon Terroni’s arrival at the company around a year ago, himself an accomplished musician and producer, he noticed that there was “a strong range of studio and stage piano we had no vision for, they were marketed more traditionally”.
When one thinks of piano they may well think of “stately homes and marble halls", a perception that won't connect with the younger demographic, Terroni admitted. An entirely new message was created to connect with a generation of “young musicians who are recording and composing in the comfort of their own bedrooms with a piano and a laptop”.
Terroni reckons he’s spotted a gap in the sector: “There were no marketing assets that speak in that language, the piano was preserved as the instrument of the privileged."
As such, he sees it as his “personal mission” to use the brand to enable creativity in London’s music scene, “facilitate a street movement, a counter culture”.
There’s an end game, at the moment numerous artists including Louis VI, Blue Lad Beats, Ruby Francis and KZ the Producer, some of whom have collaborated with Terroni in the past. They are being celebrated on the CasioPro website, activity which will see digital and social support.
The partnership grants exposure to the line of pianos and in return Casio drives footfall and exposure to their work. Video content is to follow later in September, but Terroni assures that this sort of grassroots support of music is “the antithesis of the X Factor”.
The campaign, aided along by PR agency DawBell, is set to run in relevant lifestyle publications like Noisey and Dazed, to a degree emulating the tone – and hopefully some of the success of – the classic Adidas Originals work.
Terroni concluded: “Piano has the real capability to provide relaxation and catharsis to people, it is a form of therapy, it is important for people in these difficult times to have as much access and opportunity with these instruments as possible."