The consumer journey is often a “noisy” experience. Customers are met with numerous brands, marketing messages and purchase decisions that they have to sort through. Sometimes, those choices require a non-traditional solution: sound.
Susan Rogers, a professor in the Music Production and Engineering Department at Berklee College of Music, spoke to us about what makes the human brain find a sound attractive and how you can leverage this psychology to help consumers make the best decisions for themselves.
What is psychoacoustics?
In addition to the natural wirings of the brain, humans also have innate senses that help drive decisions and add clarity to a situation. Psychoacoustics, the study of how humans perceive different sounds, was birthed from a scientific desire to see just how intricate sound can be.
“200 years ago or so, scientists wanted to map the human body. They wanted to map all of our senses. Psychoacoustics is a sub branch of that,” Rogers said. “It’s the mapping of the human brain and the sonic world.”
What's the connection between sound and marketing?
To best explain the connection between sound and marketing, Rogers uses music as her medium of choice. She says there are three paths in the human body through which music can cause a change in us:
1. Physiological: Produces a change in heart rate, greater levels of excitement
2. Cognitive: Can make us think of certain things
3. Emotional: Sparks various emotions
What’s one way all three paths come together at once? Popular songs that get played and remind you of a certain time, place or feeling.
“The whole brain is always processing everything coming in through its senses. When a song is popular in the environment, the odds are that you’re going to hear it when you’re in a really good mood,” said Rogers. “So later on when you hear it again, it’s going to trigger a positive association, and you’re going to feel good.”
This is often why brands will play popular hits in their marketing campaigns. Whether it’s a song that’s currently on trend or a song that was loved in the past, it can produce feel-good emotions in consumers when they hear it while interacting with your brand.
“Marketers recognize that if a song was really popular, the odds are good that a lot of people at some point in their lives enjoyed hearing that song. Then they grab that song and use it in their advertisements,” said Rogers. “In fact, research shows that it doesn't even have to be the original song. It could mimic the song or change the lyrics to talk about the brand, and that works just as well.”
Aside from music making people feel good during an experience, it can also help to provide people with a better understanding of your brand and how it will fit into their lives.
“If I’m in a store and they have music in their playlist that happens to be in a genre I’m not a fan of, I won’t shop there again. Instead, I’ll feel like this isn’t the music for me, and this isn’t the place for me,” said Rogers.
This is all the more reason why picking music should be a careful practice. What sort of thinking do you want your customers to be engaged in and what sort of decision-making process do you want them to have?
“If you’re a young person and you go into a store that sells any of the things you normally buy, the decisions you’ll be making have to do with how well you’ll fit in with your generation. To young people nothing matters more,” said Rogers. “When you feel like you belong, it makes it easier to say ‘Yep, I’m in the right place.' ”
Hearing the “right” music can also determine what actions a customer takes when inside a store. Rogers described a 1999 study by psychologists interested in seeing how music would impact consumer purchasing decisions. The study took place in a wine shop where researchers played French music and German music on different occasions. The study showed an uptick in purchases on French wine when French music was played and an uptick in German wine purchases when German music was played.
Another study based in the United Kingdom looked at how much money and time people spent when eating at a restaurant. Over a period of three weeks, the restaurant played pop music, classical music and pure silence. When the restaurant played pop music or nothing at all, there was no drastic difference in the amount of time or money spent by restaurant-goers. But when classical music was played, patrons stayed longer and spent more.
“Classical music has associations with money and status and class, so when people heard it they perhaps thought, ‘I have money, I can linger here,' ” said Rogers. “When researchers looked at the receipts, they saw that most of the additional expenses were on coffee and appetizers: coffee after dinner — people stayed longer — and appetizers before dinner.”
But this doesn’t mean playing music is always the best decision. If your product requires really strong decision-making it might actually be helpful to have your customers shop in silence.
“Let’s say we have a young couple going into a furniture store, and they don’t have a lot of money. They’ll have to make a really careful decision because this is a big purchase and the item will have to last them a long time,” said Rogers. “Any music might make them say, ‘I can’t think clearly, I have to get out of here.' ”
And this psychology extends beyond music, as well. Anything that can be heard can be used as a marketing tool — including voices.
Voice assistance technology like Siri and Alexa have taken the world by storm, and it’s partly due to their human-like traits.
“The human brain evolved to process the most important sound in our world, which is the sound of human speech,” said Rogers. “If a device like Siri or Alexa had a very machine-like robotic voice, it would convey information but it wouldn’t convey any emotions. If manufacturers can make it human-like in its qualities, we’re going to experience more positive emotions interacting with it.”
Marketing isn’t all about what meets the eye — sometimes it’s about what catches your ears. Whether we’re aware of it or not, sound plays a role in consumer behavior and purchase decisions. You just have to be open to what you hear.
