The Music Dimension: Branding for the Multi-Sensory Women’s Market
Buzz-worthy ad campaigns have long hinged on music choices. Take, for example, Volkswagen’s use of Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” a few years back, or more recently, The Gap’s Lenny Kravitz/Sarah Jessica Parker music video style ad to the tune of “Lady.”
A campaign with a well chosen soundtrack like either of these creates an emotional experience, whether the audience is aware of that intention or not. And emotional connections with customers, using multi-sensory tactics, are what marketers have sought for years.
Still, the future potential of using the sense of sound, by way of music, is great. And the possibilities go much beyond an ad’s soundtrack can, in all of its thirty seconds. For the women’s market, in particular, the opportunities may be immeasurable. Here’s why:
• Women are web thinkers and multi-sensory shoppers, and they take it all in – from the organization of your web site or store, to the dust on the shelves, to the causes you support, to the auditory signals they get along the way.
• Women like to know that a brand “gets” them, and music is a powerful way to reflect relevance.
• Women are looking for authenticity. They are interested in seeing the people behind the brand and they like to identify with fellow customers. A shared appreciation for music can deepen an already authentic connection.
A Woman’s Auditory Sense
A woman’s brain is, in fact, wired for auditory clues by nature. According to socio-anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of The First Sex, “All women’s senses are, in some respects, more finely tuned than those of men,” and, “women, on average, also have superior hearing.”
It all goes back to a woman’s need to keep track of her newborn’s cries and breathing. And it extends beyond pure baby-love, as Fisher writes, “Sounds can rally the emotional core of the brain, tripping feelings of nostalgia, yearning, ecstasy, despair or fury. Music can inspire a person to march toward the enemy, charge the goalposts at a football game, even recall an incident that happened 30 years ago.”
Though men, certainly, are inspired by sound in similar ways, their brains are wired for more linear thought processing, giving them the advantage in visual or spatial reasoning. The non-visual, perhaps more emotionally tied, elements of reasoning are more finely tuned in female brains. This is where music enters the brand picture.
Beyond Ad Campaign Tracks
Because a woman’s brain continually takes in many sensory cues and thus, has many opportunities to be touched by emotion, she may be more likely to ruminate about something in a decision-making process. There’s just a lot more to mull over – from tastes, textures, smells and sights, to sound.
Most established advertisers like Volkswagen and The Gap take the time to ensure the ad campaign music to which they tie their names is congruent with what their customers have come to expect. Music needs to make sense not only in an individual ad campaign but also in relation to other sensory touchpoints along the path of in-store or online customer experience. If not, the disconnect can be especially obvious to women and shake their trust in a brand.
Interestingly, and but for perhaps a few specific youth market campaigns, companies have not made integrating music into their brand identity a priority. Or, they have made a superficial attempt and called it good. Even the Pepsi /Apple iTunes giveaway, though garnering plenty of buzz within the marketing world, went flat with only 5 million of the possible 100 million tracks being redeemed as of April 2004. (Link to news article referencing that stat: http://news.com.com/Pepsis+iTunes+promotion+goes+flat/2100-1025_3-5201676.html?tag=nl )
Why did it fail to generate the expected results? The program didn’t narrow its focus to deliver any one particular type of music to any specific and well-defined group of people in any new way. Rather, their program seems to have been a matter of attaching brand names and offering free music to people who were already perfectly happy to pay for their downloads without buying all that soda. There’s nothing emotionally connecting about that. The Pepsi/iTunes effort missed its chance and wasted the potential power of sound.
Umpqua Bank, Music and Community
Unlike the Pepsi/iTunes example, the sort of musical connection that truly taps emotions takes no less than the comprehensive research and detective work an ad agency normally conducts during a brand development process. Only full immersion into a brand, its competition and its customers will result in the sweet spot of identifying relevant music and understanding how it should be shared with a specific market.
Rumblefish is a Portland, Oregon-based company that takes this music/brand issue seriously. Their mission is to integrate music into brand stories, or to develop “music identity” (a term they are trademarking) for their clients, tapping into local music communities as much as possible. While Rumblefish has been very successful working with youth-oriented brands like Red Bull, founder Paul Anthony has his eye on the emotion-driven women’s market as well.
In fact, one current Rumblefish collaboration that touches a predominantly, though not solely, female market already, is their work with Umpqua Bank.
Beginning in 1996, Umpqua underwent a transition from being a financial institution toward branding themselves as a “store” (from branch design to customer service and beyond). Right from the start, the bank’s CEO, Ray Davis saw the need to include sound/music in the multi-sensory approach for the extra-pleasant retail experience he envisioned.
With Discover Local Music Project (DLMP), Umpqua is collaborating with Rumblefish to introduce local musicians to new audiences in an innovative way. As the bank’s web site describes the vision: “Being a community bank allows us to do things larger banks simply can’t. Like opening up a world of great local music for our customers just to say thanks for joining our banking community.”
Briefly, the Discover Local Music Project is akin to the direction Starbucks has taken with their curated CD collections and their more recent Hear Music relationship. Bank members can walk into Umpqua’s lovely Pearl district store in Portland, and sit down at a table to create their own CD of songs by local artists. In the fall, members will also be able to login and do the same from their home computers. (The site can be accessed from both www.umpquamusic.com and www.umpquabank.com , and will eventually be available to non-bank members who will be able to use a credit card to make their own CDs). If members need help discovering new local artists, they can link to pre-packaged selections created by recognized community names such as Paul Lindsay, former singer with Paul Revere and the Raiders, or Erin Boberg, a fine art curator for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
If it all sounds very un-bank-like, that’s the idea.
Umpqua is building deep and solid connections with their customers at a broad range of touchpoints. The bank is tending to a woman’s multi-sensory way by integrating local music into the brand and making a connection in unexpected ways. Furthermore, what DLMP/Umpqua delivers reflects a real understanding of their customers’ musical tastes, interests and emotional triggers. Finally, by tapping into local musicians and using locally recognized curators to help guide the CD creation a bit, the bank acknowledges the importance of community and relationships as a long-term investment in serving its members.
Music and the Future of Marketing To Women
All things being equal, brands or retailers deliver services and products that can be found other places in the same or slightly different form at a variety of price points. Because of this, the marketplace is already scrambling toward a new world of customer-driven marketing. There is still much room to grow in terms of sensory branding, but the music element may be one of the final and least tested frontiers of customer connection yet. But it can be so worth it if your market is largely women.
When you develop a music identity that derives from the authentic heart of your brand, and then take the time to find where that intersects with the music interests of your women’s market, your brand’s customer experience gains a powerful and competitive sensory edge.
Isn’t it odd that the sense of sound, in the form of music- with all its emotional significance for women – is perhaps the last thing on a brand’s long list of customer touchpoint priorities? Watch that change.
First published in PSFK, July 2005
©2005 ANDREA LEARNED
