Hitting the right note for brands

Read an in-depth article about Strike a Chord, Radiocentre’s major 2015 research study, by Planning Director Mark Barber. This piece originally appeared in www.warc.com

Hitting the right note for brands: How music’s multi-layered effect drives brand recognition and enhances engagement with advertising

Music in advertising significantly enhances emotional arousal. It can be a crucial element in ad effectiveness by increasing attention to and recall of the ad, the brand and the message. Music also increases intent to purchase, and can increase actual sales by 10%-30%.

Research produced by Les Binet and Daniel Mullensiefen and published in Admap – Marketing to the senses: music gets under your skin in March 2015 and The power of Music in October 2013 – illustrates these assertions.

With ad-funded streamed music services replacing personal music collections, radio audiences maintaining record levels of reach, and readers of print increasingly migrating online, the opportunity for brands to exploit music to communicate with audiences has never been bigger.

So it comes as no surprise that a recent study from the brand consultancy ‘Sounds like branding’ revealed that 97% of band managers in multinational companies believe that music can strengthen a brand. However, the same study reveals how this inherent belief in the power of music for brands isn’t converting into action – only 38% of those same brand managers claim to have a defined brand sound.

Working with Push London, we spoke to over 60 people from across the ad industry – including creatives, planners, and advertisers – to understand better the barriers to and opportunities for using music in a more defined way for brands.

They told us that music is a complicated topic and generally an afterthought at the creative execution stage of the process, rather than a strategic consideration. But they also acknowledged that using music consistently has untapped potential for brands in terms of enhancing brand recognition, repositioning a brand, and driving efficiencies across the media mix.

Our interviewees were interested in new information which could demonstrate the effects of music when used consistently in a brand’s advertising.

Are ads that use music consistently more effective?

We started by creating a definition for ‘consistent use of music’ in advertising: ads that have used the same music track over consecutive campaigns across more than one year and across multiple media. Pertinent examples include British Gas and Blur’s ‘The Universal’ or British Airways and the Flower Duet from Lakme.

Previous research studies (‘In-store music effect on wine sales’ North, Hargreaves & McKendrick, 1997) demonstrate that music is capable of exerting significant emotional influence at a subconscious level. This creates a real challenge from a research perspective – it’s difficult to articulate exactly how music makes us feel – therefore being able to measure the impact of music using traditional approaches is tricky.

To understand the effect of music on the subconscious mind we partnered up with Goldsmiths University, which is ranked number one in the UK in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. We settled on an approach called NeuroQual, which essentially involves combining the best of qualitative research and EEG to analyse both implicit and explicit responses.

We wired 16 participants (in the world of EEG that is all that is required to achieve statistically significant results) up to an EEG rig with 32 electrodes, and we measured the electrical signal (or activity) in their brains. This gave us the information participants aren’t consciously able to provide: their implicit response to the stimulus.

During the experiment we also asked participants a set of questions relating to likeability, familiarity and brand fit which they scored on a scale of 1 – 4. This gave us their explicit response to the same set of stimulus.

The stimulus consisted of 27 radio ads, split into three separate pots of ads: nine that used music consistently, nine featuring tactical (or one-off) use of music and nine that didn’t feature any music at all. To ensure that the test was robust and credible, the stimulus featured ads for a range of product categories which were matched across our three pots of ads, as were broad types of music. All ads also had a sister TV campaign. For the purpose of this study we were only interested in assessing ads at a collective level to compare averages across our three pots of stimulus rather than revealing data for individual campaigns.

The results of the test on our three sets of radio ads in terms of explicit response were very clear: ads that use music consistently are more familiar, liked more and fit better to the advertised brand. This reinforces learning from the ‘Familiarity Principle’ (or the ‘mere exposure’ effect) that repetition of something that is not intolerable becomes more likeable. It also reflects what we heard from advertisers about the importance of music for brand recognition and hints at the tonal fit of music with a brand that develops over time. To support these findings, within the first few bars of music for consistent ads, many participants demonstrated almost instantaneous brand recognition.

“When I heard the music to the Lloyds ad I instantly remembered what brand it was. It was the same with the British Airways and British Gas ads. I would know it instinctively without seeing it – the music is the brand.” (Male, 25 years old)

When considering the EEG data, we focused on beta and gamma band frequencies as these have been proven to indicate increased ‘brain activation’ or what we might term ‘engagement’. They are also associated with activation in the reward centres of the brain – so additionally indicate enjoyment of the stimulus. Finally, a recent study has identified gamma and beta band response as a neural marker of commercial success.

To a large degree the implicit response data captured through the EEG test mirrored the findings from the explicit test in that the ads which used music strategically generated significantly greater beta-gamma activity than ads with tactical or no music, most vividly demonstrated in the brain maps.

At an aggregate level this represents a 23% increase in engagement for ads that use music consistently compared to those that don’t use any music at all – and perhaps more interestingly it shows a 41% increase in activation for consistent use of music over tactical music.

The final stage of the EEG study consisted of an Instantaneous Gamma Amplitude Analysis to evaluate how levels of activity in the gamma signal varied as the ads played out. Gamma response was revealed to be much higher in ads that used music consistently compared to those that used it tactically, demonstrating that the higher engagement levels generated by consistent use of music are sustained throughout the duration of the ads.

The EEG results are particularly interesting as they reflect what we learnt from the explicit data: consistent use of music doesn’t put off or deflect listeners. On the contrary, this is scientific evidence that tells us repeated and recognised music actually has the opposite effect and reaches out and engages people with advertising at a deeper level.

Conclusion

These findings reveal how music, when used consistently in advertising, helps brands communicate.

Beyond their widely acknowledged ability to boost brand recognition, ads that use music consistently are better liked and more rewarding; score more highly on familiarity and brand fit; and demonstrate significantly greater ‘engagement’ at a subconscious level throughout the duration of the ad. Collectively these findings link strongly with contemporary theories of brand communication (Sharpe; Binet and Field), specifically how brand saliency is optimised through using sensory cues like music repeatedly to enhance ‘mental availability’ and build subconscious emotional attachment to the brand.

In summary, all of the existing and new evidence we have gathered points to music being an incredibly effective tool for engaging audiences with brands and their advertising. Music is worthy of far greater consideration by advertisers and agencies at the strategic stage of the creative process.