How Background Music Affects Brand Perception
Music has the power to subtly guide buyer preferences without them realizing it. Whenever you stumble upon an old favorite song, you likely recall vivid moments from your past. Customers subconsciously bond your brand to melodies they find familiar or stirring, which is invaluable for recognition and recall over time. Repetition strengthens these unconscious links, boosting your image and clinging to the client's mind whenever those songs resurface.
The question of how music affects brand perception is a very applied question by its nature. It’s relevant for advertisers, people working in the marketing industry and also musicians or music consultants who try to sell music to brands to enhance brand perception. So there’s definitely a commercial angle to it.
While it might blend in with it sometimes, music isn’t just background fodder-it’s your brand’s identity in sonic form. There’s a reason we love the McDonald's “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle. It reassures us, it makes us smile.
Music is also a powerful tool for building identity and loyalty, serving as the foundation of your sonic brand. The goal is to identify your ideal brand identity and to build familiarity through recurring audio themes.
At the end of the day, while there might be many factors that go into what defines a “good” or “bad” song, it’s best to think of music in terms of what fits or doesn’t fit your brand’s identity. The first step to discerning between good music vs bad music for your marketing campaigns and videos is to find the right music for your brand. For better or worse, as a form of art, music is subjective. That’s why stakeholders should take a moment to reflect on their preferences before deciding on the music for their projects. Ask yourself questions about your brand. Is your brand bold, playful, serene, or luxurious?
Music has a solid link to our most profound memories. You've likely experienced how well-selected songs can elevate the tone and energy level of a setting. Over time, visitors associate your curation with consistent quality experiences worth returning for. As individual tastes in food and décor vary, not all customers share identical music preferences. Consider discreetly surveying your most frequent patrons to better understand their preferred styles. Perhaps classic rock energizes aging baby boomers, while synth-pop puts youth in good spirits. Adjusting your soundtrack with the demographic mix in mind shows customers you value diversity of backgrounds. Versatile music keeps all feeling welcome and engaged throughout their visit.
The Psychology of Music and Brand Association
There’s a long history of using music in commercial contexts and with brands and advertising campaigns but research only started about 25 years ago. People have tried in the lab or in experimental settings to pair certain brands or products with music. The music presented with the brand does change brand perception, obviously. But not all types of music work for all products and all brands, there’s a bit more to it. So you need to know three things. You need to know the values of the brand or the positive of the brand that you want to transport, you need to know features of the music that you’re going to use and characteristics of your target audience.
There have been studies from the 90s that looked at musical fit, the fit between the music that’s being played and the brand that’s being advertised. They found very prominently but the better the music fits the product or the brand, the more effective it is in enhancing positive brand perception.
As we’ve covered before, the psychology of music is quite fascinating. This isn’t new information, per se, but studies continue to cement the fact that music is a crucial part of how people perceive different people, places, and things.
Matching melodic themes to your company values or target demographic profiles creates memorable tone associations. Rather than superficial stimuli, strategic background music helps forge authentic heartstrings that repeatedly draw clients back. Ultimately, your customers' happiness should be the top priority.
The Role of Contextual Factors
There’s also a whole other layer of psychological research that contextualizes these investigations. It does fit within the know condiments framework of biases and heuristics of human cognition. It basically states that in many situations we don’t make rational decisions, especially in daily activities. The chewing gum we buy at the till or the shampoo that we grab quickly from the shelf aren’t decisions that we think long and hard about because we don’t have to, we don’t have the time, it’s not a big investment and there’s hardly anything that can go wrong. But especially these decisions that we make all the time where we don’t invest a lot of thinking, they are open to biases and heuristics, so they are often not rational but driven by contextual factors.
Contextual factors can be associations that we make with a specific brand or that we recognize a specific logo from previous episodes. One of these factors that can come into play is music. Music is a stimulus that is good for introducing an emotional context for almost any information that is presented with it. So if a brand or product is present with music on TV or radio or in other contexts then even though you might not be paying special attention to the music, it sets the context, it puts you in a certain mood, it gives associations, it has a style or genre or there’s a singer. If it’s popular music and you’re familiar with that style it will remind you and you will associate something with it and these associations then get remembered and committed to long-term memory.
That’s very hard to suppress because we don’t have any conscious control over the associations that we commit to long-term memory. At the point where you present it again with a brand choice or the choice between different products maybe this positive association that was initially triggered by the music when we were first exposed to the brand will come up in that choice, situation, and it will have the effect that you’re a bit more likely to choose brand A than brand B just because it has been presented with music that you happen to like or that comes to your mind in that situation again. So that’s a mechanism that describes why music is a very good candidate for enhancing brand perception and why it’s particularly useful and effective. It does creep under the radar in the sense that we can’t really suppress it and it’s often connected to an emotional way of processing which is quick and we don’t scrutinize it cognitively.
That’s different to arguments that are made as part of the message. For example, if you say: ‘This car is so much more effective in its fuel consumption than other cars’, this is something that you can challenge cognitively, you can compare the information with other information and you can have your own cognitive defences against that advertising message argument. But that’s not the case with music, so if a car ad is paired with, say, music by John Lennon and you happen to like John Lennon, there’s no cognitive defence that you would build up against that or you might not even notice that there is an emotional effect of the music on brand perception.
Obviously, it’s not a silver bullet and it’s usually not massive effect sizes that would sway our opinion or purchase intent from one product to the other. There are many other biases and heuristics that influence purchasing behavior, the most important one being like “I buy the stuff that I bought last week and I was satisfied and happy with it”. But yet, especially for small consumer products that are purchased around the country all the time presenting the brand and advertising with music can make a difference to sales and it can help building up brand perception over time. So emotional brand building is something that doesn’t pay off immediately. A brand wouldn’t notice that in their revenues next week but over time your brand might develop into a premium brand or a brand that is seen as better or more attractive or interesting than another brand if you’ve invested into brand-building in the longer term. And then you can actually sell your phone twice the price than a competitor phone that might have very similar technical qualities just because people want that brand and they’re willing to pay a much higher price than would be justified just by manufacturing price.
Matching musical styles to core customer moods and the nature of their visit creates seamless integration into their expertise. Consistency in strategically pleasing soundscapes nurtures loyalty as return customers expect, appreciate, and look forward to the cheerful ambiance. Most importantly, respect your patrons' diverse musical tastes by ensuring audio levels never overpower their conversations or natural encounters with your business.
While constancy avoids tune overload, too much repetition induces irritation. Leverage this human preference for the recognizable by developing rotating playlists of similar styles. Within reason, encore the tune's observations suggest spur memories and positive affect. For example, acoustic ballads highlighting new products build brand alignment without overt mentions. Carefully curated themes prime customers towards desired discoveries and actions through empathetic vibrations beneath deliberate thought.
The Evidence in Consumers’ Brain Waves
The evidence is in consumers’ brain waves: Study participants who were shown the version of a commercial that included music in the background had higher emotional arousal and attention level that those who were shown a version that only included narration.
The frontal lobe region was activated more in the group that watched the advertisement with background music, which supports the idea that music induces emotional arousal. Purchase intention was stronger in the group that watched the ad with background music.
“The significance of background music is particularly true in sports advertisement, where even stronger effects can be created by blending dynamic sports images with rhythmical music,” Uhm said.
Hyun-Woo Lee, a sport management researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology within the College of Education & Human Development, said the research team used quantitative electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain waves of women who participated in the study. The study used two television ads produced by Korean sports goods company Prospecs that aired in 2012. Attitude toward the brand and purchase intentions are a separate matter from brainwaves, though.
The Influence of Music Tempo
Diversified purchases of consumers can help companies balance sales and inventories, which is of great significance to company profits. Variety-seeking behavior refers to the tendency of consumers to seek variety in their product and service choices (Ratner and Kahn, 2002). While existing research has explored the internal factors and external factors that influence consumers’ variety-seeking behavior, little is known about the impact of background music, an important environmental cue in retail establishments, on consumer variety-seeking behavior.
The present research investigates the influence of background music tempo on consumer variety-seeking behavior, along with its underlying mechanism and boundary condition.
According to previous studies, the mood and meaning conveyed by music is determined by musical structural features such as pitch, timbre, and tempo (Scherer et al., 2001). Among them, music tempo is the most important structural feature that influences the expression of music (Juslin and Lindström, 2010). Can background music tempo affect consumer variety-seeking behavior? The current research has significant theoretical value. We not only identify background music tempo as a new environmental factor influencing consumers’ variety-seeking behavior, but also contribute a new outcome variable of music tempo. In addition, the findings of this research provide marketers with guidance on how to influence consumers’ diverse purchases by selecting and using background music, which has important practical implications.
Key Findings on Music Tempo and Consumer Behavior
Five experiments revealed that background music tempo affects consumers’ variety-seeking behavior (Study 1a, 1b & 4). Specifically, fast-tempo background music increases consumers’ variety-seeking behavior (Study 1b). Arousal mediates the main effect (Study 2), as fast-tempo background music increases consumers’ variety-seeking behavior by enhancing consumers’ arousal. Moreover, participants’ familiarity with the background music moderates the impact of background music tempo on consumer variety-seeking behavior (Study 3). Only when consumers have a high degree of familiarity with the background music they listen to, the tempo of the background music will have a significant impact on their variety-seeking behavior.
Numerous researchers have explored the factors that influence consumer diversity seeking (Zhang, 2022). These factors mainly focus on individual and social factors, such as gender (Faraji-Rad et al., 2013), power state (Jiang et al., 2014; Wang and Jin, 2022), emotion states (Roehm and Roehm, 2005; Chuang et al., 2008), physiological states (Huang et al., 2019) and social environment (Ariely and Levav, 2000; Ratner and Kahn, 2002; Etkin, 2016). Only a few studies have explored the physical environment factors that affect variety-seeking.
Although existing research has explored the impact of some environmental factors on consumers’ variety-seeking behavior, there has been a lack of research solely focusing on the influence of background music, an important physical environmental cue, on consumers’ variety-seeking behavior. In particular, the effect of different structural features of music on consumers’ variety-seeking behavior, such as music tempo.
Music consists of structural features such as rhythm, melody, timbre, and tempo, which significantly influence the emotional and semantic conveyance of music (Scherer et al., 2001). Juslin and Lindström (2010) found that music tempo is more powerful than other musical features in determining people’s response to music. Furthermore, music tempo is easier to identify, measure and modify than other structural features. Tempo is the speed at which a piece of music is played and is usually measured in Beats Per Minute (BPM) (Bretherton et al., 2019). Generally, a tempo range of 70 to 110 BPM is the preferred tempo range (Holbrook and Anand, 1990).
Music tempo has a wide-ranging impact on individuals’ emotions, cognitions, and behaviors (Oakes, 2003; Xiao et al., 2020). For example, several studies have demonstrated that the tempo of background music influences consumers’ pace of action. The music tempo is a determining structural feature in the influence of music on consumer arousal level (Gomez and Danuser, 2007; Liu et al., 2018). Arousal level is the degree to which a person feels excited, stimulated, alert, and active, and is an emotional dimension ranging from sleepiness to extreme excitement (Das and Varshneya, 2017).
Fast-tempo music increases people’s arousal (Droit-Volet et al., 2013). Because fast-tempo music can convey more information and possess more stimulating elements that require more cognitive resources to process than slow-tempo music over the same period (Hahn and Hwang, 1999; Husain et al., 2002). Several studies have shown that fast-tempo music is associated with happiness or excitement, while slow-tempo music makes people feel calm, depressed, and sad (Webster and Weir, 2005; Hunter et al., 2010). The impact of music tempo on consumer emotional arousal is also reflected in some physiological indicators, such as breathing rhythm (Gomez and Danuser, 2007), heart rate (Mikutta et al., 2013), and skin conductivity level (Dillman Carpentier and Potter, 2007). The effect of music tempo on the level of consumer arousal will further influence their behavior.
Previous research has shown that consumers’ need for stimulation changes with arousal levels. When consumers are in a high arousal state, their need for external stimuli becomes higher due to higher intrinsic stimulation levels (Di Muro and Murray, 2012; Gullo et al., 2019). Then consumers will employ stimulation-seeking behaviors to fulfill their heightened need for stimulation, such as exploratory behavior and approach behavior. As an effective way to compensate for consumer stimulation levels, variety-seeking behavior also can fulfill the stimulation needs of high-arousal consumers (Kahn, 1995; Etkin and Mogilner, 2016). Therefore, we posit that when consumers’ arousal level is increased by fast-paced background music, consumers will increase their variety-seeking behavior.
The Moderating Role of Music Familiarity
Consumers’ familiarity with a piece of music depends on how often consumers are exposed to it or how much they know about it (Hee Park et al., 2014). The level of music familiarity influences how consumers perceive and process the music they hear (Hahn and Hwang, 1999; Scherer et al., 2001). People prefer music they are familiar with to music they are not familiar with (Zissman and Neimark, 1990; Schellenberg et al., 2008). Ali and Peynircioǧlu (2010) demonstrated that listeners’ familiarity with music increases the intensity of their emotional responses to the music. Accordingly, we infer that the effect of music tempo on consumers’ arousal levels will vary depending on their familiarity with background music.
When consumers are more familiar with the background music they hear, they are more involved and have a stronger perception of the structural features and emotional conveyance of the music, at which point fast-paced background music can effectively increase the level of consumer arousal; When consumers are not familiar with the music they are listening to, they are less involved in the music and receive less information about the music, and thus the tempo of the background music cannot have an effective impact on their arousal.
Practical Implications for Marketers
In the end, open questions are, can you identify, can you automatically identify music that would fit a brand? For example, can you search music databases with the brand profile that would return a list of candidate tracks that would fit that brand? That’s a really interesting question, and again, developments from music information retrieval might be relevant here that pick up so-called softer attributes like emotions or mood or human associations that we have with certain types of music and that we might have in a similar way with certain types of brands. On an emotional level, the brand and music could be matched even automatically.
But what is really important to evaluate is whether a particular song fits a particular brand or product. So there should always be empirical testing before a TV ad goes out or a brand decides to sign up to a new music- or audio-profile and a new sonic campaign. Even if you think a certain piece of music fits a brand you would always need to validate that with the target audience, because your target audience might have a different music taste, might have grown up in a culturally different world, be older or younger than you. It’s very hard to judge what these people make off a particular song, whether they think the association between song or music type and brand type is actually fitting and is enhancing the positive values of the brand.
You can leverage this by handpicking a soundtrack highlighting the merchandise you aim to promote. For example, playing acoustic hitmakers may attract those leaning toward your new eco-friendly line. Your clientele likely reflects diverse cultural backgrounds in a globalized world. While catchy pop hits have broad appeal, respecting cultural nuances strengthens relationships. For example, playing traditional folk or salsa for Latino customers during busy times fosters inclusion. Immersing in other musical heritages also shows open-mindedness.
Have you ever noticed how workplace background music affects your colleagues' moods and productivity? The right music can subtly lift your spirits and feelings of well-being. Playlists featuring a mix of popular hits from different genres have been shown to improve moods the most. Conversely, avoid playing anything too slow or depressing, as that can undermine positivity and productivity. Have you ever noticed that time seems to fly by when you're focused on an enjoyable activity? Research finds that fast-tempo background tunes significantly reduce how long people feel they've been waiting. Choose a variety of upbeat tracks to keep the energy high and minimize restlessness.
As a background music provider, you understand the power of a carefully curated playlist. For example, a lively jazz or lounge playlist conveys a relaxed yet sophisticated vibe with which higher-end clients would connect.
Using Music Licensing for Marketing Projects
With all of this in mind, how do you actually use the right, good music for your projects? It’s with music licensing, of course. Here’s a helpful guide that covers everything everyone should know about music copyrights. Soundstripe music is pre-cleared for all your marketing needs and can be safely used in your social media videos and ads.
So, research and understanding of your current and target audiences are crucial. The format in which you deliver your content is also quite important. There are significant differences in how videos and ads are displayed online today. The goal isn’t to find just good music, it’s to find brand music that connects with your audience.
If you haven’t already, check out the Soundstripe library, which features nearly 60 thousand tracks from Grammy-winning talent and rising independent musicians.
