The Importance of Music in Sales & Advertising

Advertising refers to a process by which a separate and distinct party takes to entice another party into the processing of buying a product or service (Klein, 123). Advertising is different from a one-on-one mode of selling whereby the buyer gets enticed to buy the product or service, but rather it is the mode of selling, which attracts a larger base of potential buyers. It would be wise to note that advertising varies completely from persuasive selling since it depends on the aspect of mass media. The purpose of directing advertising to the mass media is because it is capable of reaching prevalent social gathering rather than a single entity or person.

The origin of advertising goes back in time when the only form of advertisements was print media in that newspapers got produced with the intention of attracting a larger reader base where subscription got sourced. It was time when revenue came from both the subscribers and the advertisers who needed there products to be sold to a large number of people so that the newspaper sold news to subscribers and paving access to the market at large.

 According to Huron (558), commercial broadcasters, just like their counterparts in controlled-circulation magazine, tend to use their business undertakings to match media markets to those with advertising needs. This specifically means that entertainment through music is the product to be sold but rather used as a tool of the trade. The products of broadcast are the audience while the customers are the advertisers themselves. The effectiveness of advertising through the media associates closely with the success achieved by way of advertising to the public at large meaning that by this mode of advertising the stipulated objectives of any given organization are set and achieved completely.

 Efficient broadcast advertisers are supposed to possess substantial amount of experience in matching given images to music so as to come up with a social motivation. Advertising agencies have been conducting an overtime research for products to find out the mode for which the public would receive the product at large. The use of music when advertising is a practice used for the purpose of serving promotional objectives, which are going to be discussed in detail as follows:

  Music in Advertising is used as an Entertainment Tool

It is argued that good pieces of music possess the ability to make advertising more appealing and attractive. When an advert includes an effective piece of music, it engages the attention of the audience who will take time to figure out the cause of the music and, as a result, be notified of the product which being advertised. According to Huron (559), the origin of music in advertising dates back in vaudeville whereby the music was to sweeten the spoken narrative sales pitch. This meant that the originator of this music aspect understood the fact that music would engage the attention of the audience who would in turn act indifferently to the unwanted interruption. It is arguably right to indicate that the entertainment aspect of music arrests any gross experiences music hence become enjoyable to the targeted audience at large.

 Music has been constantly used to convey advertising aspect. The use of music to broadcast commercial radio adverts reflects the urge and the need created by the product developers to have a significant portion of the market for their products. There has been no exception in the music which will be used to advertise a product. In recent years, different genres of music have been used to advertise different products, for instance hip hop music and rock have been known to hit airwaves as advertising accompaniments for product which range from shoes to beauty products.

 Music as a Structural/Continuity Tool for Advertising

Music is sometimes used as a tool of putting or rather tying together a progression of visual images or rather chains of dramatic episodes or a list of product or service applications altogether. This aspect of music in sales and advertising is referred as “continuity of functionality”. This aspect is said to have originated from the film industry; whereby it was used to smoothen the progression of unrelated scenes of edits, as it was used as a point of conjunction to this images. The advertisers used music as a form of continual backdrop for the visual images.

The second structural function in line is when music is used by the advertisers to put emphasis on the visual episodes during product campaigns. For instance, in 1983 a radio station used music to campaign for the “sausage mcmuffin”, a McDonald’s restaurant product. The advert began with rhythmic strings, which were playing concurrently at an interval of ten seconds. The purpose for applying the rhythmic strings was out of the fact that the advertiser wanted to lessen the tension until the climax of the advert whereby the product was presented to viewers in the form of animation.

 The advertiser saw the need for opening the advert with the aforementioned rhythm since it was intended to serve the dual purpose of building theatrical tension, which in turn was seen to predict the name of the new product during the campaign.

 Music Used in Sales and Advertising for Memorizing Purposes

It has been argued that the major use of music in adverts is for the purpose of letting the consumers to be familiarized with a product and, in fact, memorize the product altogether. A research conducted to predict the importance of music in sales, indicated that consumers preferred to be associated with a product whose familiarity was beyond doubt recognized by a larger percentage of people. When music was used to advertise products it was found out that the consumer would initiate either whispering the product’s name in the form of a song or singing the advert song itself. As one of the most peculiar matters about human beings, the whispering and singing occurred even when the mind was unwilling.

 This means that connection a product has with a song did assist the consumers to recall the product and ended up by purchasing even more of it. It is also argued that the impact left by adverts with music background was far much bigger than the impact experienced by taking photographs and other forms of visual images. In the early 1960’s the classic jingle was an approach used to assist consumers in memorizing products. For instance, in a recent advert the residents of Toronto were presented with a jingle melody which encoded the telephone number.

 The purpose for carrying out the campaign was to instill the consumers with a readily remembered number, which in fact eliminated their need for taking so much time to assessing the pizza delivery service. This advert caught attention of the consumers, as it is recorded that the company made great sales during the period for which the advert run on the television set. The digits of the telephone number to the Pizza Delivery Company were melodically presented so that consumers could easily memorize them. The name Pizza was also sung in order to increase the ability of customers to memorize the name of the company (Knopper, 65-70).

Music as a Lyrical Language Tool in Adverts

The use of music in adverts permits the conveyance of verbal message in a quiet way. The advertising agents have been on the forefront in using this approach to exploit the connectivity between the uses of songs and peaking in that matter. The relationship established as a result of this connectivity is used further to distribute the factual data by way of emotions. The combination of speech and songs is said to provide the advertisers with various openings, which they direct for purposes of attracting the attention of consumers at large. When presented with a written advert, it is simple to distinguish the parts, which need to be sung and those, which need to be spoken. The process of identifying the parts to be sung and those to be spoken depends on the use of either first person terms or third person terms in that matter.

 Broadly, the brand advertisers’ agencies are perceived to be concentrated with producing adverts with poetic lines in order to increase attention of the consumer towards the product which is being advertised. It is also true to stipulate that the use of music in adverts instigates the peculiarity, which arises between competing products or services and in most cases tends to weaken altogether and the only way of diminishing competition from a trivial product is by way of creating music to advertise on the same. Critiques have continued to stipulate that adverts which are meant to increase the consumer base use musical language to demand critical reflection than the use of spoken statements on the same subject.

 Music in Adverts as a Targeting Tool for Sales increase

It has been noted that the advertisers of products have always been concerned with identifying the target market for specific individuals. The advertisers have done this by showing interest in media whose population composition matches market segmentation without difficulty. The choice of media to be used is based on the selection permitted for a certain group or classes of potential consumers. Focusing of the product to specific potential markets is referred as targeting. It is widely known that when a company chooses to target a market then it is well placed in terms of it is revenues.

 The major advantage of targeting arises when much attention is focused on the product hence most consumers are engaged in product recall, which in itself increases the sales of the product. A suitable approach to targeting is brought about by the ability to optimize the accessibility of the product to larger market segmentation while taking caution to balancing the amount of money used to put the advert on the media. This is to say that a mixed medium is far much more favorable strategy which organizations can use to increase their sales margin. Different genres have been identified with different social groups and this peculiarity of behavior in human beings has been used extensively by advertisers whose mission is to sale a product to a specific target group. For instance, the younger generation is identified with hip hop kind of the music and it will, therefore, be illogical to advertise a product targeting the youth with an instrumental. Music in this scenario is, therefore, used as a mechanism for addressing audiences (Anderson, 6-13). Therefore, it is wise to note that radio and television advertisements are the most suitable forms of advertisements which specify the market into different social classes, life styles and the particulars in the material ambitions put in musical style.

Music as an Authority Establishment Tool in Sales and Advertising

In advertisement music is used to develop the credibility of the advert by ascertaining its authority in general. A common way through which music creates authority in adverts is by allowing the inclusion of testimony from experts in that field. For instance, in America the Sinodine Toothpaste Company used the testimony of the American Dental Association to increase their sales margin.

All in all, it is wise to note that positive use of music is somehow encouraged in the sense that it puts more emphasis of a product and may, therefore, steer the sale margin upwards. It is also true to observe that the use of music in adverts is a trend, which is developing and when companies use singing celebrities to promote their products the resultant effect is increased sales which translates into an increase in profits. However, caution should be deployed when choosing songs which are to be used in the available adverts.