Moments Later: What Music Can Teach Marketers

You are sitting at a restaurant, a bar or a store. Suddenly a song comes over the speakers and connects with you with an emotion or a special memory. A switch is turned on. It is as if the feelings between the song and your heart merge. The connection is visceral and you feel it in your bones as it reconnects you and an experience. You know that you can’t escape how the music takes you back on a journey from your past.

The noteworthy lesson for marketing professionals is that it is your job to find the voice of your brand so that it too can be powerful beyond the features and functions of your product. We mostly buy irrationally and we just can’t say why a product was plucked among the choices in front of us. Does your brand make customers feel secure, elated or young again?

We can learn so much from people who are deeply engaged with our brand because they can reveal something about the emotional pitch that our brand has for them.

The Music of a Brand

I remember some one-on-one interviews I conducted about 20 years ago with some teenage consumers who were frequent purchasers of the iconic American snack called Slim Jims. At the time, I was responsible for the brand's marketing.

I expected to hear that they liked the taste, the snap, the flavor or something more practical. What they revealed to me was that this product was an antidote for their boredom. It was like an escape hatch to help them get away from parents, school and authority. Slim Jims helped them escape their boredom. What they heard was the sound of escape in various musical tracks.

Of course, our marketing was all about irreverence and that was the message we told in everything we did. We never talked about taste or value. We certainly never spoke about price or great promotional deals. That stuff was all "blah blah blah" to these kids.

Instead, we tapped into the emotional lever that unleashed a flood of feelings. Each and every touch point had to accentuate the irreverent attitude. We found a theme with a sound track for their lives. Our brand was a big part of that freedom. We sang the song of irreverence and our product harmonized those feelings.

What music is your brand making for your consumers to hear?

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