Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [68]
Thus, Dr. Calvert was able to conclude that consumers’ attention is increased when they hear a signature tune while seeing a highly recognizable image or logo and, what’s more, consumers better recall what they’re seeing and hearing when the tune and logo are simultaneous than when their eyes and ears are working alone. In other words, when a branded theme tune and a well-known logo are paired together, we both prefer the brand and remember it better.
At least this was the case for most of our image–sound combinations, the London images and Jerusalem, as well as the British Airways images and the “Flower Duet.” (As for Microsoft, our volunteers found the sight of the brand less positive than its signature sound, but when we presented the Microsoft logo and the Microsoft melody jointly to our subjects, preferences did go up slightly.)
In sum, the fMRI results revealed that three out of four of our brands did well when sound and vision were combined in a congruent way. Our volunteers were emotionally engaged, and there was also evidence of long-term memory encoding. One brand, however, fell catastrophically short.
Nokia. The most familiar, ubiquitous ring tone on Planet Earth had flunked the sound test. Sure, our subjects rated the images of Nokia phones favorably—and why not; they’re great phones—but the fMRI results showed that there was an across-the-board, negative emotive response to Nokia’s famous ring. So much so, in fact, that just hearing the sound actually suppressed the generally enthusiastic feelings our volunteers’ brains showed for the sight of Nokia’s phones alone. And the subjects’ own ratings further confirmed this result—after hearing the ring, subjects indicated a greater preference for the unrelated benchmark images than for the images of the Nokia phones.
In short, Nokia’s ring tone was killing the brand.
But why? To shed further light on this question, Dr. Calvert peered inside our subjects’ ventrolateral prefrontal cortices—part of the brain’s circuits that processes information about emotion. And intriguingly, what she found was that the sound of the Nokia phone transformed the sight of the phone into a negative somatic marker—in other words, the ring evoked powerful negative associations that completely turned the subjects off from the brand.
This finding stayed with me for a long time. I puzzled over it. The problem with Nokia’s ring tone, I realized, was that people had grown to fear, resent, and even hate it. Their brains connected that overfamiliar sound with intrusion, disruption, and feelings of annoyance. They connected it not with the lovelorn vagaries of Love Actually but with a romantic dinner or tropical vacation shattered by a phone call from a boss or a movie or a yoga class ruined by the ill-timed ring of an unsilenced phone. In short, for many, Nokia’s default ring tone had come to hold all the lyrical charm of a nervous breakdown.
So how do you tell one of the most successful cell phone manufacturers in the world that their pride and glory was dampening, if not outright sinking, the popularity of its brand?14 It felt a bit like informing John Lennon that the Beatles were fantastic, but Paul had to go. Nokia officials were genuinely shocked when I told them—but after their surprise had worn off, they accepted the findings of our fMRI experiment with aplomb. Time will tell if they do anything with our results.
So what is the future of sensory branding? Pretend it’s the year 2030. We’re at the same crossroads of the world, Times Square. But instead of billboards and flashing letters, we crane our necks only to see…nothing. No twenty-foot-high models. No flashing neon. At the same time, the sidewalk is awash with smells and sounds. A whiff