Syncopate the Intrusiveness of Ad Music

Does music in your ads support the personality you want your retail business to project? Psychologists at University of Melbourne suggest you aim for a personality which fits how your target customers want to see themselves. A fundamental choice in store personality is between exciting and sincere. Different music styles project one over the other.
     Recently, a business professor from University of Virginia and the executive director of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra collaborated to further refine advice about harmonic, textural, and temporal characteristics of an ad’s background music. They noted how music draws the shopper’s attention. When the attention ends up with the message you’ve chosen to deliver, the music has fulfilled its marketing job.
     You might choose to fade out the music for the rest of the ad. If you’d like a shopper to carefully analyze a purchase decision, either don’t have music or use music which is barely noticeable. When customers listen to music, their attention is taken away from analyzing the purchase decision.
     In particular, if you’re wanting customers to try new brands or new products, eliminate intrusive music. Research finds that recall of messages from ads for unfamiliar brands is damaged more by intrusive music than is recall for messages from store or item branding with which the shopper is familiar.
     Frequent changes in the harmonies, texture, or tempo of the music aggravate the intrusiveness. As part of an ancient survival mechanism, our human brains are wired to put top importance on processing unanticipated background sound changes. Our prehistoric ancestors found this skill valuable for sensing danger and homing in on high-protein meals.
     That survival mechanism results in us turning our attention from an advertiser’s message when the music changes. Changes in tempo do it, and if the tempo was already fast, the effect is more extreme, say the Virginia/Illinois researchers.
     At first glance, this is disappointing news, since other research has found that fast tempo music motivates shoppers into action. The way to maintain the advantage is to keep the fast tempo steady, as long as the syncopation fits the personality of the retail business. The upbeat pace also facilitates the shopper’s processing of any changes in harmonies or texture of the music.
     Monitor the intrusiveness qualities so you can draw attention toward what you want the shopper to notice and away from what you prefer be hijacked before making it into longer-term memory.

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Compose Integrated Musical Atmospheres 
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