Current Topic: Strategy

Just some quick fun facts. Companies spend millions of dollars to discover the perfect amount of fizz in a soda. Eating chips with headphones on makes the experience less enjoyable. And the louder the sound of a shutting car door is, the safer a consumer feels - which is why car manufacturers see this as a feature instead of a bug. 

What do these phenomena have in common? They highlight the importance that sound has in consumer perception. But did you know that something as subtle as the sound of background music can affect your purchase decisions drastically?

Today we will talk about how background music affects consumer behavior. Because even when you are not consciously listening to the music being played, it can still affect your buying decisions. And not just a bit, but quite dramatically! 

Let’s look at some of the most interesting insights on how you can put music to work for you as a company.

Day in day out we are exposed to advertising on radio, television, YouTube, and all the other communication channels. So, it is important that you not get annoyed by them, right? Speech plays an important role in this. In fact, most of the brand and advertising strategies are based on the announcer’s voice, as this is one of the most valuable assets in marketing. Announcers can point up the importance of critical information by vocally emphasizing the most important words of a message, which determines the advertisement’s effectiveness (Wiener & Chartrand, 2014). The emphasis strategy influences the cognitive processing of the listeners by increasing the duration of words, projecting them more intensely, or raising the pitch to a high tone (Nadeu & Hualde, 2012; Rodero & Potter, 2021). But can too much voice-over emphasis backfire?

You may have heard the phrase “If you build it, they will come.” This assumes that the marketeer knows best and the market will recognize this and come to buy. If you, the marketeer, are in love with a product, it’s natural to project that love onto your target audience. However, it may be the right product at the wrong time, or just a product that doesn’t meet customers’ needs.

Marketing managers are only human, and humans have their own personal preferences. These preferences can become a problem, however, when they project them onto a target market that may or may not share their preferences. As a result, they may miss out on capturing sales for a product that really resonates with their audience, while they focus on marketing something that is not as appealing to their prospects. This tendency is called the false consensus effect, or FCE. 

Let’s say that you’re about to buy a new shirt or dress for a fancy dinner party, which brand would you choose? 

RAFUO or rafuo?

Which one did you like best? Chances are that, when looking for a conspicuous purchase as in this example, you’d choose RAFUO because it looks more premium. It is the extent to which the brand looked premium that helped sell the conspicuous product. Psychologists discovered that uppercase characters have a subtle, yet consistent effect on how premium a brand appears to be. 

For me, personally, when I’m listening to the radio in the morning and the host is telling a personal story, I find myself immersively listening and feeling empathy. However, the moment they talk about the daily news I’m just laid back casually. 

The same holds true for sales pitches where the salesperson starts by telling a bit about his personal life and background before going into the material.