Russell Tripp is a Managing Partner at AVF Creations - You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/avfguy.
What's your favorite song? Who's your favorite musician? You probably have one - or possibly more than one. Why? Because music has an intense emotional connection for human beings. Music can invoke in us everything from love to sadness to hate - and virtually every emotion in between. Music has been used in the treatment of depression, autism, cancer, and countless other physical and emotional disabilities and illnesses.
So what does that have to do with promoting your business? Everything. People make purchase decisions based on emotion, although they often believe they are making a rational decision. The rationalization usually comes afterwards, convincing ourselves that we've made the right decision regarding a purchase, but the actual purchase almost always comes out of an emotional decision.
We're all probably vaguely aware of how our own emotional state can affect other people's first impressions of us when meeting us. If I'm down or depressed when someone meets me, they're probably not going to have a positive association with their first meeting of me. What may be less obvious is that the other person's emotional state has just as much, and possibly more, impact on their impression of you the first time you meet. If the other person is elated over some recent good news at the moment they meet you, they're much more likely to have a positive impression of you. This goes for your business brand as well.
Using a positive musical message in association with introducing your brand to potential customers can go a long way toward building a positive mental image of your company in that person's mind. The landscape may have changed considerably since the golden age of TV advertising when characters like Speedy Alka Seltzer could sing their way into the hearts and minds of middle America extolling the praises of carbonated water, but that doesn't mean the folks responsible didn't know quite a lot about what they were doing in promoting the brand. You don't have to believe the often overly cynical outlook of shows like Mad Men to believe that ad agencies in that age knew even then how to evoke a desired reaction in the audience.
What does that mean today? We may be seeing a rebirth of the jingle (whether the new baby makes it past infancy remains to be seen) after a long time when jingles were out of favor. Freecreditreport.com has a very effective campaign based entirely around the songs performed in its commercials.
And when your ad campaign prompts spoofs and online contests with lots of entries, you're probably doing something right.
Subway's "five dollar footlong" jingle has spawned new ads showing "ordinary people" (i.e. - potential customers) trying (and sometimes succeeding) to sing their catchy tune. Even in the often mass-media/TV-bashing world of social media, the use of music to convey the message is catching on.
So, music as a means to an effective message is definitely viable and definitely worth checking into.
