Good marketing creates genuine value for customers and building lasting relationships. As opposed to pushing a quick buck with short-term goals, the long game of market research, planning, and strategizing is what makes a connection last longer than a single campaign.

That slow build means no two conversation sounds the same. It finds the specific signals that make one particular audience feel seen and those change completely from one segment to another. Even if the product is technically the same, one that resonates may still fall flat with another. Just like music, marketing speaks a universal language but it doesn't speak to everyone in the same manner.

During my time under the Republic Records PH team, that principle stopped being theory and became the actual job. Music I personally find myself coming back to sits pretty far from the roster of artists I was working on. I couldn't rely on instincts and personal taste alone to know what would land. I had to learn, artist by artist, with the help of existing insights from previous campaigns, what each specific audience already cared about and speak to that instead of my own.

For context, I started as a Marketing Intern in label management at Universal Music Group, and was kept on for an additional month as a freelance creative post-internship. This case study explores my expriences and process behind

Currently one of the biggest girl groups in the Philippines, XONARA debuted on May 16, 2026 consisting of a multi-stop arc of pop-ups, meet & greet, performance, and music video premiere. I'm actually familiar with XONARA's general aesthetic, but their song "Tabi" sits outside what I'd usually listen to. P-pop group fandoms have their own specific culture I don't naturally move in, since I don't really follow group acts unless they're a band.

Preparing for their debut was one of the most hectic stretches of the internship. I was taking on ad hoc tasks while still fulfilling ongoing responsibilities especially on the pre-event guidelines (FAQs & What to Expect), which needed to be airtight even after multiple revisions and changes in content given almost no room for error. On the event day itself, there was a lot of live filming and documentation, especially with the members on camera, requiring myself to think fast and stay attentive in the moment, not just executing a plan made in advance.

To figure out their identity, I immersed myself in similar aesthetics, studying what "screamed XONARA" without having much to work from. My earliest piece for their debut, the Instagram event template, was made with almost no official assets: no complete icons, no mascot, just the logo and a single reference photo from their very first debut announcement publication material. That meant being extremely attentive to detail by identifying what read as unmistakably XONARA and keeping the design simple enough to work around such limited material.

Beyond the debut itself, and post-internship as a freelancer, I also put together a slambook-style piece getting to know each member individually. A different kind of research, less about visual identity and more about who each of them actually is as a person. This fed back into how I approached their content going forward. It went through two drafts with entirely different visual directions: the first leaned into their darker red-and-black aesthetic, while the final version shifted to more of a scrapbook feel with its dilapidated notebook finish, camo accents, red-and-black doodles, and a denim background as a cherry on top. Landing on that second direction was its own small lesson in not settling for the first idea that technically fit the brand, but finding the one that actually felt right for the format.

The photobooth poster wasn't originally my task either. The initial design ended up getting scrapped, and I was trusted to redesign it from there. I reinterpreted the official campaign assets into a graffiti-style photobooth print piece that extended the event's playful, fan-centered visual language.

XONARA

Early in my internship, I focused heavily on Zack Tabudlo's content — enough that I found myself absorbing the hip-hop aesthetic of that era, even dressing the part for a few days just to stay in the right headspace. Like with other artists, I learned the visual and tonal elements that made up his identity and worked to stay consistent with them. During this stretch I worked on his 2 billion streams milestone content, the Wishbus poster and behind-the-scenes coverage, the "Tunay" OOH billboard asset on EDSA, music video behind-the-scenes footage together with track remix used for the BTS edit, lyric videos, and Spotify clips & poster.

Zack's branding usually spans a wide range of the Filipino demographic, but "Tunay" was a distinct departure from his previous work. As a result it made planning content for his TikTok fan page a genuine creative challenge. Based on the account's insights, despite views reaching into the low thousands, the page likely got shadowbanned. However, it didn't stop the creation for new content. One video ended up breaking past 10k views, well above the account's usual baseline. The shift in Zack's overall direction at the time threw off my usual approach. It challenged me, but I learned to adapt instead of giving in to the struggle by refiguring out what would actually work, rather than relying on what had worked before.

ZACK TABUDLO

Moira's identity leans soft and artsy such as muted greens, yellows, browns, florals. Her music matches that aesthetic closely in a way that's demure and quiet like Billie Eilish's "whispering" style. I never worked with her in person, but handled a few pieces of content for her, including a Valentine's campaign edit under a "the perfect song for ___" concept for her, positioned as "the perfect song for those who are brave enough."

This is also where I introduced mashup editing to her fan content — my own idea, since I hadn't seen past intern work in that fanpage use that format before. Choosing which songs to blend meant paying close attention to what actually matched her tone rather than just picking songs that were popular

For Jayda, I worked on sample content, streaming milestone graphics, a Valentine's campaign video, a day-in-the-life video, and casual fan edits.

One thing I noticed while working on her content: her artist identity was still finding its footing. She'd moved through a few distinct eras, but none had fully anchored yet aside from her connection as Lorelai in Project Loki, a crime drama live action adaptation of a Wattpad novel of the same name.

That wasn't necessarily a shortfall; each era still worked in its own way. It was more that nothing had stuck as the signature identity yet. Part of my job as an intern was figuring out how to market her in a way that felt fresh but still consistent and quite notably, the content connected to Project Loki was consistently the highest-engaging material I made for her.

Justin, on the other hand, wasn't a primary focus during my internship, as he didn't have ongoing campaigns and releases at the time. His identity was easy to place: R&B, somewhere between bad boy, gentleman, and lover boy, with a soothing voice like Jay R. The one piece I made for him, a Valentine's campaign edit, wasn't a hard brief to crack. His discography is already anchored in love and the feeling of being in it. I positioned it as "the perfect song for those who believe in slow, genuine love," a concept that came together naturally once I looked at what he'd already built.

MOIRA DELA TORRE, JAYDA, JUSTIN VASQUEZ

Marketing looks easy when you only see the surface, all the success stories, and events. However, being in the process of figuring out how to communicate a message to a specific market that isn't yours takes effort.

Every artist I worked on required a different kind of listening: XONARA meant learning a fandom culture I wasn't naturally part of under real time pressure; Zack Tabudlo meant staying consistent with an identity that was actively shifting under a new single; JAYDA meant helping shape an identity that hadn't fully settled yet; even one-off work, like Justin Vasquez's Valentine's edit, still needed to sound like him and not like a generic template.

Despite how different each of those challenges were, I think passion & actually loving what you do plays a real part in the outcome & how fulfilling the process can be. I've always loved music, but working inside a record label sparked that love further into something more specific: an appreciation for how much invisible work and effort goes into making an audience feel like an artist's message was made just for them.

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