Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [67]
When Nokia phones first hit the market, the company’s default tune became instantly popular, largely because it was the first melody people recognized when they were starting to buy mobile phones (in case you are wondering, the simple ditty is based on Gran Vals, composed by Francisco Terrega in the nineteenth century). Since then, the tone has taken on an almost viral quality. In fact, if you go onto YouTube, you can observe complete strangers playing the Nokia melody on the piano, the guitar, or on a clavier. If you’re into hip-hop, there’s even a gangsta’ Nokia remix. One Web site claims that the impact of the Nokia melody is so great that there’ve been reports of songbirds chirping it over the skies of London.13
All this exposure, one would think, could only spell good news for the brand. But I wasn’t so sure. I’d begun to notice that when my Nokia phone rang during the day (when I’ve forgotten to shut it off), I’d get an uncomfortable yikes feeling. My nerves would go on edge. I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Even though the Nokia tune is one of the most successfully branded tunes of our time, something told me there was something off-key going on.
I decided to use the brain-scan study to find out what. So Dr. Calvert and I set out to determine whether a signature sound—like the Nokia ring—makes a brand more or less attractive. The latter scenario of this question intrigued me, too. Are there occasions when a sound can completely derail how buyers perceive a brand? As it turned out, the results of this second study on the power of the senses were even more shocking than the first.
We conducted our study across four different product categories: phones, software, airlines, and various images of London. Then we chose, for each category, associated sounds: the Nokia mobile phone ring, British Airways’s “Flower Duet” (which is lifted from Leo Delibes’s opera Lakmé), Microsoft’s start-up and sign-off signature sound; as well as William Blake’s lordly hymn, Jerusalem (with its lyrics about walking “upon England’s mountain green”). Then we showed our volunteers ten separate images per brand, ranging from a British airways jet idling on a tarmac to a computer with Windows’s signature colored banners, to a Nokia mobile phone. As a benchmark, we also showed them images unrelated to the signature sounds.
Next, it was time to roll out the tunes. For our generic, benchmark brands, we serenaded our volunteers with melodies ranging from random ring tones to an extract from Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.
Dr. Calvert and I once again took seats in the crowded control room as the study got under way. First, we presented individual brands in separate, ten-minute-long segments, or “runs,” during which subjects were first presented with the sounds alone, followed by the pictures alone, followed by the images and the sounds simultaneously. Dr. Calvert repeated this sequence five times in a row—asking participants to signal their preferences for the images, sounds, or image–sound combinations (again on a scale of one to nine) using their button boxes as we scanned their brains to test their levels of emotional engagement and their memory encoding for what they had seen and heard.
Our results revealed that, just as with the image–smell combinations in the first experiment, when sounds and images were presented simultaneously, they were perceived more favorably—and left more of an impression—than that sound or image when presented alone. In most cases, when