There is no doubt that music changes the way we feel, and the way that we look at things. The beautiful girl on the tube looks 10 times more beautiful with Tarrus Riley – She’s Royal in your ears. So what effect does music in advertising have on consumers’ moods, attitudes, and behaviours?

My role as a New Business Manager has taught me a great deal about how we are marketed to. From research, to strategy, through to delivery of marketing campaigns, and more importantly the depths to which brands will go to tap into our emotions.

Over the past 5 years I have seen a growing interest in “emotional advertising” with recent trends in brands looking at things like behavioural economics at the research stage, which includes looking at the emotional factors in the consumer’s buying decisions.

Music has long been a huge factor in guiding emotional decisions in advertising, and these days it’s almost impossible to turn on the TV and not witness the marriage of music and commerce.

There have been many studies and theories on the emotional effect music has on our purchasing decisions, but perhaps one of the most popular papers on the the effects of music in advertising was Gerald J. Gorn’s experiment (Gorn, 1982). He paired a light blue or a beige coloured pen (neutral stimulus) with both well-liked and disliked music (unconditioned stimulus). 79% of the subjects chose the pen with music they liked – a conditioned reaction.

Music also enhances the recall for a product, even if the emotion evoked by the advert is hatred. Take Go Compare for example, it drives me insane but the brand is burned into my brain whether I like it or not.

Equally, a massive number of car advertisements we now see are 90% music. An inspiring piece of music is sometimes all it takes to stimulate us to feel something toward a car and associate it with a better way of life. An American advert for Honda Odyssey I came across does just that, and although I don’t have a driving license nor in fact any kids to need a people carrier, I can see how this ad would evoke a positive emotion with parents wanting life to be this serene when driving their kids about.

The emotional stimulus aside, products advertised are identified much quicker with a certain piece of music. In some cases it’s the music alone that makes the brand identifiable. Take Bach’s Air on a G String for example… Cigar?

As a Business Development Manager, my role is to get marketing agencies in front of the people who will potentially do business with them.　

There are lots of reasons why a Marketing Director will dedicate an hour of his time to finding out what an agency that he’s never heard of before can do for him.

One of the key differentiating factors between the many “sales calls” that will be rejected as a “waste of time”, and the rare “interesting call with an agency worth meeting with”, is the ability of the person who is calling to have an intelligent conversation – i.e. a conversation that focuses on something that is relevant, that makes good business sense, and that is with someone you enjoy talking to.

There’s no big secret:　

• be clear about why you are calling and what you want to get out of the conversation
• be curious
• ask relevant questions (get the prospect to open-up and focus on relevant issues)
• have a genuine interest in the person you are talking to
• listen
• listen
• listen
• resist the urge to tell the prospect everything about what you do and why you are the best thing since sliced bread
• listen
• listen
• listen
• make sure you understand what the prospect is telling you
• let him know you can help
• ask for the meeting!

Although you don’t need to be an “expert” in everything you are talking about (other people are there to sort out any technical details after all), it’s important to know what’s happening in the market/sector that you are targeting, understand the issues that prospects are faced with and be able to demonstrate how your client can help with their priorities.

Which is why it takes a special breed of people to make the kind of calls that will stand out.

Nobody wants to receive a call which is scripted and goes over a list of services offered; that’s just “another bloody cold call”!

Any agency that wants to seriously stand out and win new business needs sales people who can think on their feet and can engage prospects in an intelligent fashion and on a personal level.

Winning new business is not rocket science; it’s hard work, but it can often be fun and interesting if you have the right attitude!

Blair Enns, a Canadian business development consultant and author, will be talking at the final Designers Breakfast of 2011 on Thursday November 24th.

Entitled ‘Add value, don’t give away your thinking for free’ it will focus on how to reclaim the high ground in client relationships and abandon free pitching.

The series this year has delivered some hard-hitting truths and insights into business development and client relationships from a design agency perspective – if you missed any of them, they will be available online from January 2012.