Jingles and sonic branding

Like a good neighbor, Folgers is there.

“Don’t sing your selling message. Selling is serious business.” – David Ogilvy

🎶 “Chicken parm, you taste so good.” 🎶 – Peyton Manning

Think back to when you were little. What songs do you remember?

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” “The Wheels on the Bus.” “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Simple, fun, unforgettable melodies and imaginative lyrics that evoke rich emotions. 

Maybe you sing these songs to your kids every night before bed. Maybe you haven’t heard them in decades. But you know them. You remember who sang them to you. And if someone handed you a toddler, you could keep them entertained … at least for a while. 

As marketers, we are in the memory business. One of our big, important jobs is to encode your brand in the minds of consumers. So when they have a need, want or desire related to your category, they think of you first. 

We build memories with emotional storytelling built around category entry points. We build memories with humor, human interaction and distinctive brand assets like characters and logos. 

Nothing builds memories quite like a song. 

How many of these do you remember? 

• “Nationwide is on your side.”
• “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toy’s R Us kid.”
• “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”
• “Gimme a break. Gimme a break. Break me off a piece of that KitKat bar.”
• “I’m stuck on Band-Aid brand, ‘cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me.” 
• “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.”
• “I want my baby back, baby back, baby back. I want my baby back, baby back, baby back. Chili’s baby back ribs. Barbecue sauce.” 
• “What would you dooooo for a Klondike Bar?”
• “Every kiss begins with Kay.” 

Some are complete songs. Some are slogans set to music. Two were written by Barry Manilow. Regardless, you know them. You remember them even though it may have been decades since you’ve thought of them. 

Why do jingles have such incredible sticking power? Possibly because music engages more areas of the brain. 

According to “Cognitive Crescendo: How Music Shapes the Brain’s Structure and Function” by Corneliu Toader, Calin Petru Tataru, Ioan-Alexandru Florian, et al. of the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, “Engaging with music is among the most cognitively demanding tasks a human can undergo.”

That’s good. Active attention and emotional engagement are what you want. 

Research shows that music activates both the auditory cortex (the sound-processing part of the brain) and several of the brain’s emotional centers. Also, melody is processed by one area of the brain, while language (the lyrics) is processed in another. 

The researchers say, “Music and memory share an intimate bond. Often, a song can trigger a cascade of vivid memories, while melodies and lyrics, even from years past, can be effortlessly recalled. Such connections correlate with activations in areas like the hippocampus, pivotal in memory storage and retrieval.”

In other words, music engages emotion and memory more effectively than text and images alone. Your audience has a much better chance of remembering your brand if you sing it to them. 

In other, other words … sing your selling message. 

As a slogan, “Nationwide is on your side” is good. It rhymes, which is nice. But when Brad Paisley sings it, there’s emotional depth, longing, warmth, comfort. All of those emotions and feelings connect to the brand. 

“Every kiss begins with Kay” is a fantastic slogan. It has alliteration, a lovely bit of wordplay, emotional resonance, a category entry point and the name of the brand. Sung, it’s even more memorable and powerful.

We think you need a jingle. Or at least a musical slogan. Why? 

Because everyone is everywhere and sort of half paying attention to multiple screens. A jingle can help you cut through the noise. 

In Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Jenni Romaniuk writes, “Audio assets can extend the reach of the brand in multi-mode media such as television, so people not giving visual attention to the advertisement can still notice the brand.”

Also, they’re wildly effective. Ads featuring any kind of sonic branding cue are 8.53x more likely to build positive brand recognition and brand memories. Fluent devices like characters and mascots are only slightly less effective. 

And according to Kantar, when ads include a jingle or a musical slogan, branding increases by 25 points, with a 19-point increase in effectiveness, a 10-point increase in engagement and a 6-point increase in understanding. 

And in a fragmented media landscape, a quick-hitting, sticky brand song or melodic tagline is more likely to land with your target audience … with fewer exposures.

But the most incredible thing about jingles? Almost no one is using them.

Even the use of slogans has dropped from 74% in 2014 to 52% in 2022. Of those 52% …

85% are text on screen, 73% are spoken, 40% include the brand name, and a mere 5% are sung. 

Oglivy was half right. Selling is a serious business. Most brands are leaving a serious competitive advantage on the sidelines. Don’t be most brands. 

We’ll see you next time!