Tracksuit is hitting the books today nerd style, and we wore wedgie proof underpants… so don’t try anything.
The Basics of How Music Affects The Brain
Before we get into the specifics of how music affects advertising, let’s take a step back and understand how music affects the brain.
Yes, yes… music releases dopamine (duh), and dopamine is associated with pleasure, reward, and motivation, so it plays a vital role in our internal reward system. Dopamine gets people to buy, and we’ve known this for decades.
Instead, let’s get specific on some parts of the brain music hits:
Nucleus accumbens – This guy is big-time important for motivation and reward. This is the component that makes that long awaited drop that much more satisfying.
Hippocampus – this is the part involved in memory. This is why we can even recognize a song, let alone all of our other experiences, like that ad we were spammed with 10 times while trying to stream YouTube 2 months ago.
Amygdala – Creates emotional responses like fear and anxiety. Insurance ads, health ads, banking ads or products wanting to induce FOMO leverage this little almond shaped cluster in the brain all the time.
Ventral Tegmental – Think emotions and pleasure, especially love. A high density of dopamine pathways get fed into this area.
Prefrontal Cortex – This part actually makes decisions based on a response to your current emotional state. It is perhaps our most rational brain region. Quirky, sharp and well thought out changes in music target this part more than any other.
Occipital lobe – which is responsible for visual processing…I’m looking at you video people.
Hyper nerds can read the sources in full:
journalijar.com/uploads/5f005b5d9c4cb_IJAR-32196.pdf
thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_04/i_04_cr/i_04_cr_peu/i_04_cr_peu.html
The Role of Music in Advertisement
Now, that we know a bit about how music affects the brain, let’s take a look at how it can be used in advertising.
Music is usually played in the background, supporting the main soundtrack or dialogue. The right track can make an ad more memorable, help it stand out from the noise, and even increase its persuasive power.
In other cases, sonic branding is in the spotlight. Branded music is a relatively common concept in advertising, and it involves using music to create a unique sonic identity for a brand. When done right, sonic branding can turn a company into a household name.
Either way, music is meant to:
Helps Consumers Connect With Their Inner Baller
You know, spend a lil’ more cheddar for the finer things.
In one study by North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick published in 1999, the researchers used a wine shop as their test case. They found that when the store played classical music in the background, people were more likely to spend more money and buy more expensive wine.
Over the two-week experiment, they also had periods where they played the top 40 hits of the day and periods of complete silence. In both of these cases, the music did not affect the average spending.
The researchers believe that the music made people feel more affluent, which made them more likely to spend more money.
Easier Memorization
Because music activates the same area of the brain as our long-term memory, we can use it to help people remember information more easily. That’s why you often hear jingles in ads – they’re designed to stay stuck in your head long after the ad is over!
Thus, music is a way to make an ad more memorable through implicit memory. Let’s take this study as an example. 120 Scottish college students were placed in four separate rooms. Each room played different sounds, including:
- American music (Beach Boys)
- Chinese (The Peking Brothers)
- Indian (Sunidhi Chauhan)
- No music
They were then given food menus with 30 different entrees from all three nations to memorize. Unsurprisingly, each respective nationality performed better when their music was playing in the background. The control group (no music) did the worst out of all four.
Now that we understand the basics of how music affects advertising let’s take a closer look at some of the key findings from scientific studies on the subject.
Communicate the Message
Okay this part is super interesting.
Researchers in the study below believe our fluency to understand music is connected with our early evolution with developing language.
“Somewhere along the evolutionary way, our ancestors, with very limited language but with considerable emotional expression, began to articulate and gesticulate feelings: denotation before connotation. But, as the philosopher Susanne Langer noted, ‘The most highly developed type of such purely connotational semantic is music’ (Langer, 1951, p. 93). In other words, meaning in music came to us before meaning given by words.”
I mean, woah. That’s some serious Terence Mckenna shizz right there. Go ahead and roll and one for your boy Darwin, and while you do that, let’s keep going, same paper:
“The mammalian middle ear developed from the jaw bones of earlier reptiles and carries sound at only specific frequencies. It is naturally attuned to the sound of the human voice, although has a range greater than that required for speech. Further, the frequency band which mothers use to sing to their babies, and so-called motherese or child-directed speech, with exaggerated intonation and rhythm, corresponds to that which composers have traditionally used in their melodies. In the same way that there is a limited sensitive period in which the infant can learn language and learn to respond to spoken language, there must be a similar phase of brain development for the incorporation of music.”
Stick that in your stock music pipe and smoke it.
Source:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618809/
1) Trimble M, Hesdorffer D. Music and the brain: the neuroscience of music and musical appreciation. BJPsych Int. 2017;14(2):28-31. Published 2017 May 1. doi:10.1192/s2056474000001720
Final Thoughts
To quote Michael Trimble1 and Dale Hesdorffer:
Music, if it does anything, arouses feelings and associated physiological responses, and these can now be measured.
“Arousing feelings and physiological responses” sounds a lot like what you big fancy ad wizards are trying to do, no?
Don’t be an anti-science goof ball by diminishing your beautiful high budget ad with mediocre stock music. Rather allocate a modest 5% of your ad budget to sound with a professional and get way more bang for your buck.