Music With the Message in Mind
This chapter traces advances in the knowledge and understanding of how background music influences consumers’ learning and memory of brand and message elements in ads. Early empirical research in marketing focused on comparison of ad brand and message recall from ads with and without music, documenting the consistent distraction posed by background music. Research comparing multiple music backgrounds followed, linking greater distraction with lack of background fit with brand and message. Based on psychologists’ working memory models, studies revealed that background music distracts but also potentially serves as a cue to later recall of brand and message elements. Work in neuropsychology revealed automatic, preattentive brain responses to surprising changes in background music, which led researchers in marketing to quantify the increased distraction by backgrounds with more surprises from structural changes in the music. Building upon the contributions of Meyers’s (1956) seminal work, recent research unveiled differences in distraction and capacity to cue later brand and message recall between backgrounds evoking connotative or private images. The chapter concludes with directions for future research to further expand the knowledge and understanding of how music impacts advertising effectiveness.