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10 March 2009/
“You can’t shut your ears”
by at 1:21 pm 10 March 2009
Filed under: Branding
Cliff Jones from the Sync Agency popped round to our London office today to give us a primer on sonic branding.
The main takeaway for me is that there really is some science to putting brands to music, and that — as with many things — NOT getting it wrong is halfway to getting it right (bookings went down after British Airways inadvisedly switched their telephone theme music to John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane”).
Jones says we’re influenced by music, and we even make decisions based on it, quickly and unconsciously. We have little or no control over how it affects our emotions.
Most remarkable of all, Jones claims that even if you hate a particular tune, you will, in spite of yourself, manifest the intended physiological response to it when you hear it in an advertisement.
‘What we do,’ he says (and I’m paraphrasing), ‘is engineer people’s moods using music for emotional leverage.’
Sounds dangerous. Sounds interesting. Sounds like an opportunity.
I remember a few years back when Intel started promoting themselves to the generic consumer market directly and most of us were thinking “who the hell are they and why should I care?”, and today just hearing the four notes of their audio brand is enough to recognise them (even when going to the toilet during the commercials). Applying this to a longer, less distinguishable “mood” is indeed scary and exciting…
Comment by Yves — 3/11/2009 @ 9:51 am