Our Hidden Side

Looking through back editions of Soundings (we are now almost half-way through our second year!), it’s interesting to see some of the topics we have covered; from brands to banks, from shouting to silence, from experiences in-store to those on the internet. Nonetheless there has been one slight omission. We seem somehow to have missed out on the fact that although Sound Strategies is still a communications consultancy, its ‘music’ arm still operates very much at the delivery end, and in some unusual guises

Michael Spencer has been in Spain working with one its symphony orchestras, looking at how it can be better positioned within its community, particularly through its education and outreach work, while Andrew Peggie has been in Rotterdam managing the creative content of some unlikely sound masses: a gamelan from Suriname, a group of female drummers from the Cape Verde Islands and an Antilles-style marching band – plus 150 trombones

Both of these projects have at their core an intention to re-sensitise people to the infinite variety of sound by bringing music styles into conjunction with new listeners and participants. Re-sensitisation is also at the core of our corporate work, enabling executives and creatives to develop a more fruitful and articulate relationship with audio media.

In our ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier’ sessions (see January '09 Soundings) we introduce delegates to a variety of creative and interpretive tasks using sound, often in conjunction with other media, demonstrating how the emotional, symbolic and referential connections we make with sounds often merge together in complex ways. We then provide linguistic and analytical tools to enable them to perceive and discuss the effects of different soundtracks both in multi-media and in real life.

One might imagine that this might be second nature to musicians, but this is not always the case. In Rotterdam, an international trombone festival, Slide Factory, realised that its international remit should perhaps move outside the rather limited world of trombone playing and connect with other musical styles. Hence Andrew Peggie’s World Tone Journey, which blends the music of trombones (both classical and jazz) with that of Africa, Latin America and Asia. Just as important as the music itself will be the encounters between musicians from diverse backgrounds.

In Spain, the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès (Catalonia) came up with remarkably similar thoughts: how to reach out to a 21st century multi-ethnic community? Michael Spencer will be helping them over the next three years to reach out into the musical roots of Catalonian traditions, tying them into the core work of the orchestra and the cultural, corporate and commercial life of the region.

We pride ourselves on maintaining this sort of hands-on experience and knowledge and we find it gives us a unique perspective on the diverse ways in which people interact with sound

Michael Spencer

Bleeps and Burps

One of the big problems with electronic sounds is that there is no extrinsic musical lexicon or lingua franca associated with them. Acoustic instruments create complex emotional associations by virtue of the instrument itself: the sounds of a piano, electric guitar, trumpet or steel pan are indivisible from their images. The character of the music being played is affected by an individual’s prior associations with the instrument and its players.

Ever since the early days of the theremin and the sine wave generator, composers working with purely electronic sounds have struggled to create equally rich associations in the absence of characterful instruments. Pre-digital instruments have at least had a few successes – the Mini-moog synthesizer and Hammond B3 organ among them. But in these days of virtual digital instruments, when the music tends to emerge from computer speakers, almost no associative qualities are possible. Which is why DJ-based clubs need light shows to help fill in the referential background.

However, there does exist an instinctive language of electronic sounds, albeit rather basic and lacking almost all emotional nuance. We can hear its emerging syntax most strongly in computer games and amusement arcades; but there are signs of emerging meaning also in video media, computer functionality, websites and of course techno dance clubs. The sounds themselves struggle for syntactical meaning and tend to depict crude ‘yes/no’ situations, perhaps denoting pace (usually ‘excitement’ or ‘chill-out’), menace or humour.

However, integral electronic sounds are an increasingly important part of any interactive digital device, be it a fruit machine, wii device or computer. Why? Because of the interactivity itself. Humans are hard-wired to speak to one another. If the relationship is with a machine, then part of that relationship self evidently has to be via sound. We pick up and process audio signals in parallel with visual cues in ways which make the experience more immediate, meaningful and realistic. Sound signals give pace and (ideally) emotional context to the process. This is also the case with audio signals on a computer screen or web page

But electronic devices on the whole function silently. Usually we have no idea what is happening or how long it might take. Speak to mechanical engineers or experienced drivers and they will tell you how important it is to listen to the noises a machine (or car) makes. Indeed, it is often by this means they can detect a potential problem. Their relationship with the machine is as much through sound as through any physical interaction.

Personal computers have available audio signal menus which attempt to replicate in sound some of the processing activities of the computer. But the trouble is there is often a very tenuous link between the sound emitted and the task being performed (or being aborted, more often than not). And because we have to learn to associate a series of bleeps and burps, emitted often apparently at random, with different processes, the psychological effect is more negative than positive. They take us by surprise but are all over before we can answer back.

Viewers of American TV series such as CSI might be amazed and envious at the high level of ‘conversational’ skills the make-believe lab computers have. They seem to carry out audio running commentaries on their processing in ways which far exceed the abilities of any computer I’ve ever used. It is interesting because the sounds are effectively continuous. So in theory the users would learn to understand what is happening by detecting changes in the tones. Computer games and slot machines operate on similar principles.

However, the random tones often used on websites (such as rollover sounds or click-sounds) create negative effects partly because of their sudden and unexpected appearances. They exist without a context. By the time the user has worked out where the sound has come from it is too late to attribute any meaning to it.

With the exception of computer games no-one (to our knowledge) has yet created a website in which the sonic environment is both continuous and interactive – in the same way that the act of driving a car modulates the sound of the engine itself.

When this eventually happens – and doubtless it will – then perhaps a more extended lexicon of electronic sounds will begin to emerge. In the meantime, Sound Strategies will continue to examine the bleeps and burps for emerging meanings – and pass on the results here.

Andrew Peggie

Sound Strategies News

• A small, but significant milestone for Sound Strategies. We recently received notification from the Trademark Authority that 'Sound Strategies' has achieved status as a registered trademark
• We were featured in the February edition of B2B Marketing both online and in hard copy
• February has also seen us extend our work with the agency TBWA and in particular with one of their clients

Talking about music

Most of us have had occasion to discuss, defend or disseminate our personal musical tastes among friends or virtual social networks, but almost without exception we stumble over inadequate vocabulary and fall back on meaningless clichés in striving to translate into words some sense of our emotional attachment to certain sounds. Even the senses of taste and smell appear to have evolved a richer linguistic palette than the world of sound has.

There are plenty who relish the mystique – they inhabit the anorak-ish worlds of concert-goers, blues fans, world music aficionados, jazz buffs and pop groupies – and who employ their semi-technical cryptic phraseology as much for exclusion purposes as for enlightenment. But when it comes to discussing the ordinary, everyday, universal impact of music on people from whichever background, we seem to lack a lexicon capable of doing it justice.

Which is why part of Sound Strategies’ mission is to develop clear, non-technical ways of reflecting on how music works. It is important because only by using universally understood and commonly accepted terminology is it possible to take some distance from the super-personal self-indulgent ramblings we all fall into when trying to answer a question like: ‘why do you like this music?’

Total objectivity would be impossible of course. However, total subjectivity is all-too-common, even in contexts where it should really be prohibited, such as discussions about the function of music in a marketing campaign.

We know this because brand managers and agencies tell us they have difficulty in articulating what they expect from music. So discussion of any kind – let alone objective discussion – rarely features on creative feedback agendas.

Some commentators have called sound the Cinderella of the advertising media. If so, then perhaps Sound Strategies will turn out to be the Fairy Godmother…

Michael Spencer

How music in Japan assists in travel, tourism and bodily functions

In Japan there is a belief that sound can have a great impact on business because of its psychological effect on people. A speculative but plausible explanation might be because the Japanese language contains many imitative and onomatopoeic sounds, often drawn from nature, so they preserve an in-built sensitivity to both the sounds themselves and their symbolic meanings. Left and right brains working in tandem.

Here are four case studies illustrating Japanese sensitivity to the urban sonic environment (certain links are in Japanese). Some were featured on TV Tokyo’s World Business Satellite programme which broadcast a series on the psychological elements affecting business: the psychological economy. For example, how colours and sound can affect the consumer behaviour directly and indirectly.

1) The ‘departure melody’

People the world over recognize the sound of a train whistle just before its departure. In Japan, departing commuter trains use bells to alert people to mind the doors. But some Japanese train companies have noticed that warning bells create additional problems. Instead, they have adopted ‘departure melodies’.

The traditional bells tend to create a sense of panic as people rush to squeeze into the carriage at the last second, just before the doors close, creating knock-on delays for the following trains. (London Underground travellers will recognise the problem.)

The new ‘doors closing’ tunes are true melodies with musical phrasing and development. As such, they operate less on a Pavlovian level and more on a cognitive and affective level. The idea is to regulate the pace of movement in order to eliminate log-jams of people rushing for the doors. Here is an example.

Junichi Sugiyama of Business Media Makoto comments that the departure melodies can also be seen as a result of the railway companies’ increasing corporate awareness. Although the priority as alert/warning signals remains, at the same time, they should employ entertaining content to promote a more pleasant travelling experience. Minoru Mukaiya, CEO of Ongakukan Co. Ltd., a train-related music production company, believes that an effective combination of departure melodies, ambient sounds and p.a. announcements can combine to create an almost theatrical experience for travellers – and one which also creates a strong sense of brand awareness. Mukaiya is also the keyboard player in the fusion band Cassiopeia.

Keihan Dentestu, a private railway company in the Kyoto area, West Japan, carefully chose suitable music for each train line with regard to how busy it can be. For the busier lines, they use a piece of music in triple time with a faster pace to encourage movement. Elsewhere, they use medium-paced four-beat melodies which can make people feel more settled.

2) The Kyoto Tower

When the observatory of the Kyoto Tower was renovated in 2006/7, sonic environment specialist, Masafumi Komatsu, was asked to advise on optimizing the aural experience of a visit to the tower. Komatsu states that landscape is a thing to enjoy with not only the eyes but also all other senses.

The first issue that Komatsu addressed was to assure a sense of quietness. He suggested reducing electrical equipment noise by removing unnecessary gaming machines and photo booths. Secondly Komatsu aimed to ameliorate the echo effects caused by people moving around inside the observatory. The floors were covered with fabric that absorbs reverberation and muffles footsteps. Finally Komatsu suggested different types of background music for morning, daytime, and evening – and even for different weather conditions. This is intended to enhance the visitor experience in tune with the changing scenery as viewed from the tower. The locations of playback speakers were also carefully chosen to ensure even sound diffusion.

TV Tokyo reports that Komatsu’s ‘psychological soundscape design’ project was so successful that admission numbers increased by 15%. Hear the before and after mp3s for yourself.

3) Siren Beeps

Japan experiences approximately 1000–
1500 noticeable earthquakes every year. Earthquake damage limitation and warning systems are taken very seriously. An important factor in decreasing the scale of possible damage is how promptly warnings and information can be disseminated.

The Real-time Earthquake Information Consortium reports that ‘three continuous beeps is the best combination [of sounds] as an emergency warning’. Since 2004,it has conducted questionnaire surveys on the issue of siren warning and has published two official research reports in collaboration with a number of academics, engineers and corporate executives.

Its latest report, published in 2005, claims that a ’signature sound’ itself does not have to have a specific meaning but it is more effective in alerting people immediately than a spoken announcement which might be missed or difficult to make. According to the REIC, a ‘sweep tone’ in which the frequency changes rapidly tends to be recognised as the ’emergency sound’. Moreover it is unlikely to be lost amongst other ambient noise because of its varying frequency range. Listen to the sound voted ‘best signature sound in an emergency’ here: http://www.real-time.jp/about/SET3.WAV (You may have to cut/paste the link into your browser.)

4) ‘Oto-hime’

In Japan, public toilet convention dictates a certain modesty around bodily functions. There is an unspoken agreement that women should flush the toilet or make other effective sounds in order to diminish the sounds of the business in hand.

Oto Hime was launched in 1988 by Toto Toilets, one of the biggest toilet retailers in Japan. Following a severe drought in 1978 Toto executives realized that toilet modesty actions among women were using 10-15 litres of water each time.

So they invented their audio ‘flushing-camouflage’ sound effect which automatically plays back water flushing sounds as soon as someone sits down on the toilet. According to one of their assessments, Oto-Hime saved 64 million yen in a year on water consumption across a sample of 43 office buildings.

Researcher: Yukiyo Sugiyama
Editor: Andrew Peggie

Yukiyo Sugiyama trained as a classical pianist in Tokyo. She recently completed a MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths College, London, with a specialisation in 'the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the arts'. She is currently a researcher for Sound Strategies.

Sound Strategies News

January saw the start of Sound Strategies’ 2009 Breaking the Sound Barrier training days. This first one took place at EMI Abbey Road studios in London, with clients of TBWA. The comprehensive (and scarily enjoyable) introduction to the world of music and sound, and how they function, in the historical centre of the sound recording universe, is designed specially for brand managers and creative agencies who would like to know everything there is to know about sound but are too afraid to ask.

Predicting the future

Sudden changes in operating conditions inevitably provoke a flurry of panic/don’t panic/I-told-you-so messages and our in-boxes are already beginning to bulge with advice on how to survive the next economic ice-age. Much of it is urging companies not to pull back on their marketing budgets – if only because everyone else will…

But continuing to pump funds into traditional marketing campaigns will not help either. Why? Because the financial crisis is masking a more profound tectonic shift in the consumer landscape. It concerns the various ways people communicate and the opportunities opening up via the internet. Now that faltering revenues are forcing companies to re-think strategies across the board, this is the perfect time to look more deeply at the nature of the market and to test more effective ways of engaging.

How? Sound Strategies’ survival advice is simple: start listening. The future is in sound.

It is finally starting to move up the design agenda to match the levels of expertise which text and graphics have offered for many years.

There are, however, plenty of theories, strategies and principles, most of which aim to maximise the advantage of the link to the brand in question: the need for a good emotional and lifestyle ‘fit’, for a long-term relationship, for reciprocal PR, etc.

But the barrow-boy mentality dies hard. Traditional marketing behaviour is so geared towards shouting messages into the brand maelstrom that is the current advertising environment, that it has almost entirely lost the ability to make any meaningful connections with the people who might eventually be customers. The definition of ‘communication’ has defaulted to: ‘how efficiently can we get our message across to the largest number of people in the smallest possible time?’ Propaganda, to all intents and purposes.

Communication is a two-way process, requiring not just a combination of information dissemination and emotional enticement, but an ability to engage with and respond to messages coming in the other direction. Mass markets have developed around the mass media model of a small number of senders broadcasting pre-packaged information to a large number of recipients. The impact of feedback (apart from sales/viewing figures), let alone dialogue, is minimal. But internet access is changing the mass media landscape profoundly. The communications hierarchy is flattening out; people want dialogue not sales pitches. Establishing a personal identity though consumer brands can no longer be just a passive sell-buy transaction.

And that’s where listening comes in. Image and text are well suited to sending carefully crafted messages, but are hopeless for generating real-time dialogue. The web is opening up more and more audio routes which enable, one-to-one communication and instant feedback. Marketing which does not adapt to the democratisation of the mass media is going to become increasingly ineffective. It is not just a question of producing more ‘artistic’ or sophisticated videos and commercials, but of re-thinking some basic assumptions about the marketing process.

The seeds are already there of course: in initiatives such as viral marketing and in virtual communities like Second Life. But on the whole, businesses appear to be going into hibernation mode. Recent statistics from the UK Institute of Directors indicate that a quarter of companies do not prepare for future opportunities and risks. Only a third of the 600 business owners interviewed felt that the UK had a forward-thinking culture and 26 per cent admitted losing revenue and profit due to a lack of analysis about future scenarios.

Listening goes hand in hand with those other current buzz-words, ‘innovation’ and ‘networking’ – key elements in surviving the slump, according to many commentators. Listening is primarily a process of being constantly aware, of picking up the myriad signals from the marketplace and tuning into the dynamics of change.

Well-tuned listening tells you not what you want to know but what you need to know. Listening picks up not just the facts and figures but the mood, tone and zeitgeist. At both corporate and individual level, we seem to be lacking an ability to hear and understand. Active, intelligent listening is what good communication is really all about. Which is why at Sound Strategies we emphasise the ‘strategies’ part as much as the ‘sound’ part.

Michael Spencer

Should brand-music tie-ins have an ethical dimension?

Wally Olins would doubtless agree. His presentation at the Google Seminar, The Future of Branding in Zurich last October, outlined five key attitude changes bringing new influences to the brand universe. One is the nature of communication in digital spaces (see above). Another is the sense of time and place which a brand can convey.

Olins was discussing the issues at corporate/global levels, but what about the personal level? One of the reasons music is recognised universally as an important branding element is because of its ability to forge direct emotional links with individuals, reinforcing memories and associations and promoting emotional security and well-being.

The physiological effects of listening to music are also well-known. John Harlow, writing recently in The Sunday Times:

So we now know exactly what effects certain musical styles will have! Excellent news for advertising executives…maybe!

Of course they are not the only people to take an interest in the manipulative potential of music. Political parties have a long history of appropriating certain songs to underline their message, especially during election campaigns. And if there are so many benefits to music, it follows that there must be some pretty bad effects also. It hasn’t taken the military long to discover them.

More from John Harlow in The Sunday Times:

The final phrase might be
enough to strike if not fear, perhaps some concern, into the hearts of brand managers. What if the carefully chosen music track or recording artist for a brand tie-in were to create the aural equivalent to passive smoking? We can make some assumptions about what kinds of music certain demographics are likely find attractive, but tend to ignore the corollary: if a piece of music has a strong positive effect on some people, it is likely to have an equally strong negative effect on others.

This would not matter if the music in question was heard only by the target audience, but mass media advertising cannot make such distinctions. Of course one solution is to use music so bland and inoffensive that it is unlikely to seriously upset anyone, but that rather defeats the object of a brand-music tie-in, which is to align with a song or artist with an already strong cultural impact: ‘iconic’ figures, ‘classic’ tracks.

Of course, no one piece of music is ever going to please everyone all of the time, and avoiding disliked music will always be fruitless exercise. But that is not where the ethical dilemma exists. It centres not on disliked music, but on loved music.

We become strongly attached to certain music; we often refer to it as ‘my music’, as if it were a personal possession. We are protective of it, often objecting to different (‘wrong’) interpretations; we try to control the contexts in which we choose to listen to it in order to maximise its emotional impact.

So imagine if we discover a loved tune – perhaps just a bleeding chunk of it – tacked onto a commercial for a chocolate bar or shower gel. Imagine if the piquant memories and associations wrapped up in that tune are forever usurped by a crass association with an everyday grooming product. Imagine the strength of will needed to avoid putting a boot through the television screen. And imagine the negative effect on the perception of the said product…

Andrew Peggie

Sound Strategies News

• Sound Strategies delivers a special Digital Innovation Seminar at the Ogilvy Group headquarters in January.
• And in February we travel to Liverpool where the University of Liverpool Management School has invited us to present a seminar on the topic of ‘sound as an integrated positioning tool’.

• Sound Strategies News – Michael Spencer in Kingston and Amsterdam … Unilever brand sonic profiling.

Shotgun weddings

Are the increasing number of alliances between musical artists and brands unholy or made in heaven? It is unlikely that anyone knows for sure. Marriage is an appropriate analogy and no-one yet, in the history of civilisation, has ever come up with a fool-proof formula for guaranteeing marital success (or indeed for predicting failure). The music-to-brand business has its fair share of match-makers also, but aspiring partners on both sides should approach with a healthy degree of scepticism.

For one thing, there are almost no statistics linking increased sales directly to a music-brand relationship, though a recent issue of Billboard.biz reports that Nivea sales in the USA were set to increase by over 10%, apparently as a result of the brand’s link-up with Island Def Jam artists. The report does not analyse to what extent the increase might be due to the specific music links or due to the overall effect of the marketing campaign. Perhaps any old music would have done the job just as well.

Most discussions of the precise advantages of music-brand linking tend to lapse into touchy-feely language and vague talk about important qualitative factors. Commentators on both sides of the divide seem unable or unwilling admit to a serious logical distortion: it does not follow from the rather obvious fact of music as a ‘good thing’ which engages people emotionally, that this feel-good effect will inevitably transfer to anything else associated with the music; nor does it predict any kind of direct correspondence between a music-brand tie-in and increased sales.

Not only has no-one yet proved the case, but the metrics capable of divining any kind of proof have not yet been developed.

There are, however, plenty of theories, strategies and principles, most of which aim to maximise the advantage of the link to the brand in question: the need for a good emotional and lifestyle ‘fit’, for a long-term relationship, for reciprocal PR, etc.

A smaller number of voices are trumpeting the advantages to emerging artists. A recent MediaWeek report quotes Tag Records producer Jermaine Dupri lauding a promotional deal with his new associates, Procter & Gamble: "I've never seen someone wanting to devote this much money to breaking new artistes," he said. "Nobody in the music business has the marketing budget that I have". Though it’s possible he’s never heard of Ludwig II of Bavaria and his ‘sponsorship’ of Wagner’s operas.

Because of course there’s nothing new under the sun. The story of music history across the globe is a story of composers and performers latching onto rich and influential sponsors in order to achieve both security and fame. Four centuries ago it was the church, then the aristocracy, then the state, then publishers and record companies. What self-respecting musician would not be motivated by exactly the same circumstances to look to the obvious 21st century sources: high profile retail brands. It seems that the tail is wagging the dog…

Musicians have ten centuries’ experience of insinuating themselves into benefits of the most advantageous financial support. There is no reason to suppose the 21st century will be any different. And they will always find ways to subvert their patrons’ agendas, whether cultural, economic or political. So, caveat emptor, any agencies or brands seeking to manipulate the creative power of music. As a brand manager in Japan recently commented during a Sound Strategies presentation: ‘I have just realised we are not selling our brand, we are selling Jennifer Lopez’.

Michael Spencer

The elephant in the room

When creative people get together to make a new piece of music or theatre or video, the process usually follows one of two routes. Either meaning and message are refined out of a pre-existing subject or the meaning and message of the piece grow out of the artists’ manipulation of their materials. In both cases, it is frequently the case that no-one is really sure of the real intention of the piece until it is finished. Most creative artists (in whatever medium) would agree that an important part of their work is to look for meaning, and to give meaning to the materials they use.

The artistry involved in creating advertising for a brand or product can be considerable (and the budget will often be far in excess of what an independent artist could expect to receive as a commission). But there is an important, usually unspoken, difference: the meaning and the message are always predefined, often by people other than the artists who subsequently get to work on the project. The product exists, as does its target ‘audience’; its sensory DNA has already been mapped out.

The job of text, image and music is not to explore and synthesise new expressive content but to represent a predetermined agenda. Usually within a predetermined process which often requires the artists to work in series rather than in collaboration. Working in series is a sort of ‘pass the parcel process’ requiring minimal communication between links in the chain. The potential for misinterpretation is high. So the artists tend to play safe and opt for low-risk, unoriginal solutions which stay well within the restricted aesthetic boundaries necessary for mass appeal.

Imagine if these same artists were allowed to be part of the research and development stage of the product, when they could play with and evolve all the expressive factors which will eventually become the brand DNA. And imagine if, by embarking on such a process, an intended chocolate bar becomes a tube of toothpaste instead…

Andrew Peggie

What does Christmas sound like on the web?

UK high street stores are already in full Christmas mode. Be prepared for a rash of nervous breakdowns amongst sales staff after having been exposed to six weeks’ unrelenting playback of Jingle Bells and Winter Wonderland. (The US army employs similar methods as a torture technique.)

Avoiding seasonal marketing is well-nigh impossible on the high street, but do retailers subject their website visitors to the same onslaught? We paid fleeting visits to several of the UK’s best-known retail sites in search of a festive atmosphere, and have to report a disturbing – or gratifying, depending on your point of view – lack of sleigh bells, laughing Santas, snowmen and carol singers.

Large food-based retailers such as Tesco and Morrisons on the whole treat their web pages as an extension of the garish print publicity that gets pushed through letterboxes every other week. Silent pages with minimal animation or interactivity, crammed with cut and paste images of their current product bargains.

Most have set up a dedicated Christmas page, however. Asda, for example, uses glaring primary colours to frame a selection of gift ideas for ‘him’, ‘her’ and ‘kids’. Then it pushes you straight to Asda Direct to encourage a quick sale. No sound or animation, but the visuals shout loud enough.

Morrisons has a landing page invitation to view the current seasonal TV commercial featuring huskies pulling a shopping trolley across frozen wastes. The backing track succumbs to seasonal temptation only in the final few seconds when a burst of bells and sparkly percussion give the game away. There are also dedicated Christmas pages containing gems such as how to be a good host.

Waitrose is rather more ambitious, with a special Christmas home-page built around a tree with twinkling decorations. It also offers seasonal advice in the more ambitious format of ‘masterclass’ videos. How to prepare a Christmas turkey, for example. A good idea spoilt by the rather dated approach, with an anonymous voice reading from a recipe book and anonymous hands manipulating a dead bird. But Waitrose at least offers an attractive combination of information, gift suggestions, interactive games and multi-media clips. They obviously think of shopping in a much wider experiential context.

A dramatic contrast to their rival grocers, Sainsbury’s, whose special Christmas page features a rather desultory Jamie Oliver offering brief recipe tips (downloadable as pdfs) surrounded by links to online buying opportunities. Even Sainsbury’s abandons its distinctive brand colours for a predictable garish red-green Christmas backdrop.

The Tesco site offers a similar package of gift suggestions, recipes and family activities, but creates an unnecessary hurdle by requiring a sign-in or sign-up before access is allowed. They also provide a little count-down calendar which would be even better if it had the facility for individuals to add their own entries. No sound or animation, and the ubiquitous red-green Christmas tree décor becomes ever more tedious…

Only with the John Lewis Partnership do we experience something of a personal touch, after acres of faux-familiarity and forced-jollity. They offer an entire sub-site of well-organised and comprehensive Christmas planning and buying information not over-larded with seasonal colours. But the best bits are to be found in the JLP online magazine where you can find an endearing toy demonstration video (there’s a link from the landing page) and also everything you need to know about decorating a Christmas tree. Worth spending time with.

Andrew Peggie

Sound Strategies News

• Videos of Michael Spencer’s presentations at the Brainjuicer Oktoberfest Innovation Conferences in Amsterdam and Kingston-upon-Thames (UK) are now available:

• Sound Strategies recently delivered a theoretical underpinning document to Unilever to serve as a starting-point for the sonic profiling of one of their main brands.

Innovation and taking part

Sound Strategies was on the conference circuit last week, appearing at two thought-provoking events promoted by the market research organisation BrainJuicer. Two impressions remain: strategically mediated sound is still a very new concept, and the learning process can be very powerful when people actively participate.

The conferences were hosted by Unilever (Kingston, UK) and Philips International (Amsterdam) and the topic was ‘Innovation’. In addition to our own contribution, speakers included Mark Earls, author of the latest marketing sensation  Herd: the hidden truth about who we are, Andrew Gaule from H-I Networks who talked about Open Innovation, and the CEO of Brainjuicer, John Kearon, who presented an overview of his ESOMAR paper about the paradoxical role failure plays in success. Fascinating contributions too from the respective hosts.  Unilever fielded B.V. Pradeep (VP Consumer & Market Insight) who introduced their method of insight building, and Jaroslav Cyr talked about the new opportunities presented by Google and Facebook for market research. For Philips, Emile Aarts (Head, New Media Systems & Applications, Philips Research) outlined an extraordinarily wide ranging list of research projects stretching from stress reduction technologies for hospital patients to electronic tattoos.

Emile also reminded us of the role Philips played in the creation of multi-media experiences, starting with the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. This radical piece of architecture with its mathematically calculated hyperbolic paraboloid shapes, and equally challenging images and soundscapes was designed by the architect Le Corbusier, his assistant (and composer) Iannis Xenakis and the composer Edgard Varèse. Varèse’s extraordinary Poème Electronique, devised for the Pavilion and one of the world’s first pieces of music created using purely electronic sound sources, still leaves audiences today mystified as to its intention – as was shown by the reaction of the conference delegates in Amsterdam.

Here was a team of true innovators at work, all of whom made unique contributions to their individual fields of expertise. Varèse’s, impact on the development of electronic music has a very long tail indeed, which can be traced right through to current popular music cultures. DJ-ing, beatboxing, mashing, sampling – all have their origins in the work of this pioneer. The thumbprint of Varèse is even more predominant in the sound adventures of contemporary artists such as Scanner. Despite its pedigree, however, the general perception of Poème Electronique is that this fifty year-old work is just too challenging, new and experimental.

In its defence one might suggest that personal listening habits are often less adventurous than they could be. Moreover, at the conference the sounds were not being heard in their intended architectural setting, integrated with images and diffused through specially designed spaces.

The issue is not unique to the Phillips Pavilion of course. Service-scape design also seeks to present an integrated visitor experience. Recent research has pointed to the importance of regarding the different elements of a  service-scape as an organic whole. In line with Gestalt theory, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We have written about this in previous issues of Soundings , in relation to the use of multimedia on the web, and it served also as the core of our presentation at the conferences.

We left the delegates with a question and two challenges.

The question: If they used audio in any form at all – podcast, streamed video, navigation, ambient – how did their process of selecting it compare with the processes they used for creating a visual presence?

Leading to the challenges:

And hence to the second point that stood out in our conference experience: the power of participative learning. There is something awe-inspiring about the way in which the light goes on in people’s minds when they are given the opportunity to engage, in a practical sense, with the concepts which have just been propounded. All the more so when dealing with matters of sound, an element with which we have such an intimate and yet social connection.

It brings to mind the old maxim about suffering from Eunuch Syndrome.  You can read about it, you can talk about it, but you can’t actually… well you understand where this is going. This is why we go all the way in our presentations.

When Woody Allen said ‘90% of success is showing up,’ the rest has to be about getting involved.

Contact Sound Strategies to find out more about how we get people involved.

Michael Spencer

Fast food music.

TV commercials are short and getting shorter. For there to be any chance of getting the message across via music, commercial directors and composers have to rely increasingly on what music psychologists refer to as iconic perception. This is where stimuli inherent in the structure and processes of the music itself may signify and even induce certain basic emotions. Iconic perception in music is interesting because it appears to connect deep musical structure with physiological states such increased heart rate. In other words, there are some aspects of music, unrelated to style, genre, culture or context, which have built-in affective and possibly even arousal qualities.

In fact most children already know this.

Give them the chance to play with sounds and they will instinctively manipulate these very properties: a speeding up rhythm followed by a crash-bang; meandering low sounds for monsters; high spectrum sounds to signify fear; a heart-beat… the classic ‘haunted house’ piece. And few people will have difficulty thinking of commercial examples used constantly to evoke fast cars, refreshing skin care, edgy fashion, playful animals, nervous anticipation, domestic bliss, etc.

Some of the scientific groundwork was laid in 1977 by Klaus R. Scherer and James S. Oshinsky in a paper entitled Cue Utilization in Emotion Attribution from Auditory Stimuli in which they correlated ten basic emotions with combinations of specific music elements. Their work relates also to speech where they found that, even with actors feigning certain emotions by reproducing the relevant speech inflections, listeners achieved a high degree of agreement on which emotion was being portrayed.

All this appears to be good news for audio in advertising and the media. Macho energy with an undertone of imminent danger (new face-care technology perhaps)? No problem – just consult the Scherer and Oshinsky table!

Except that there are many other factors – musical, cultural, personal and environmental – which affect our responses to music. And there are roles other than provoking iconic reactions that music can play in the audio-video mix. The former are hard to anticipate and impossible to manage, but the different ways music can work in multi-media are fully within the control of the creators and there is no reason why the specific function of music should not be a part of the creative planning process.

Music almost always works best when it has time to settle into a rhythm and pace. Often its chief asset is its absence – silence. Understandably, the broadcast media seem to fear silence the same way print editors fear blank space on a page of small ads. And the tiny timescales of commercials will always present a creative challenge in this respect. And because iconic arousal works it will continue to be a musical solution of last resort – rather like fast food on the move.

However, the current media environment is changing and we are beginning to see some of the negative effects of its over-use. With more ads per minute all vying for attention, the temptation to resort to instant, no-frills emotion-grabbing is high. But the more these stock musical gestures are used, the less attention people pay. We cannot close our ears to uninvited sounds, so instead we reduce our attention and learn to ignore them. The problem with this is that in doing so, we desensitize ourselves to the very iconic perception elements of music which are meant to be the bedrock of our emotional engagement.

Is it possible that the mechanistic use of iconic arousal is now having a negative effect on product or brand perception through the desensitization caused by associating them with musical clichés undifferentiated by originality, variety or subtlety? Is the drive towards emotional engagement backfiring, as the iconic vocabulary of music in the media becomes ever more emaciated?

Andrew Peggie

Listening to health and beauty

The world of health and beauty products has colonised the web with much enthusiasm. Opportunities for interactive engagement and ‘artistic’ presentations are rarely missed. And the offer of any kind of health or medical advice for free (no matter how superficial) will always appear to add both cognitive and affective value to a site and its brand.

In the real world, music and health have always had strong associations.  So perhaps the internet would be a fruitful environment in which to offer some music-related health benefits. However, evidence so far suggests that brand managers have a long way to go in terms of exploiting the potential combination of music with consumer health products.

Nivea UK has gone several steps further than most with a content-rich site divided into several conceptual areas, each with substantial multi-media options. Though not specifically health related, the Nivea history page out-does everyone else in terms of its information offer. In addition to the ubiquitous timeline, the site offers a choice of four guided tours: TV/cinema commercials, the tin as brand image, advertising posters and innovations. Click on the TV/cinema link and you have access to fifteen Nivea commercials covering every decade from the 1920s onwards. Dozens more print ads and posters are available, with accompanying commentary.

The interest from a web audio viewpoint is how the Nivea colour, font and logo have remained virtually unchanged since 1924 whereas not a single unifying musical element is present, even among the dozens of flash animations available throughout the site network.

A set of Body and Soul videos, for example, aim to induce various healthy habits such as toning, relaxing and keeping fresh with product-related tips, images and anodyne sound track loops. The approach to musical mood setting appears to be to strip out any element that might give the track a hint of originality. Lowest common denominator appeal. Music as anaesthetic.

Colgate Palmolive has a personal care landing page with similar dreamy/dreary synthesizer chords and a tinkly counterpoint typical for such products. Unfortunately the soundscape is more naïve/aimless than calming/relaxing, and quickly leads to a search for the ‘off’ button. A pity, since elsewhere the website shows evidence of an emerging audio awareness. Click on Rest & Reflect and the page loads to the sound of rainforest birds. There follow some short new-age-ish videos combining exotic imagery and sounds with patronising voice-ov
ers enunciating therapeutic instructions rather too clearly – as if the viewer were mentally challenged. The music and images are available separately as downloads, however. And a neat little interactive feature allows the visitor to create a greetings card from a series of separate image, music and text templates.

Colgate Palmolive clearly aims to generate an on-site mood appropriate to its products. Radox, on the other hand, is content simply to offer text instructions on the best ways to relax and keep healthy. Though it runs to some images of typical medicinal herbs, the site is entirely silent. At least it won’t keep you from starting that relaxing bath routine it so meticulously describes.

Andrew Peggie

Sound Strategies News

A Sound Strategies article features in a November issue of B2B Marketing. Check the features columns for a piece on good practice web audio in marketing.

The August edition of Soundings carried an extensive article about music marketing/sharing on the web. The controversy rumbles on, but one organisation in the UK seems determined to find solutions untainted by blatant commercial self-interest and unfazed by de facto illegalities. Music Tank is hosting a series of discussions covering all the issues – technology, legality, marketing and economics – with presentations by music business professionals. The first session (We are here now, entertain us) has already been and gone , but there are three more:

• We have the technology. What’s the solution? (Nov 4, 18.30)
• Coalition of the Billing (Nov 18, 18.30)
• Squaring the circle (Dec 2, 18.30)

The sessions take place at the MCPS-PRS Alliance, Berners Street, London. Full session and booking details from the links, and here. Soundings will carry a short report in due course.

Joining the dots

Sound Strategies’ work takes place in both the real and the virtual environments, and our early investigations seemed to suggest that the two areas had different issues to deal with, requiring separate approaches and specific expertise. As the two following articles in this month’s newsletter imply, however, there is in fact much common ground between reality and virtuality when it comes to thinking aurally.

In fact, the way sound is being used in virtual space is really only a less-evolved version of what happens in real life. And since current modes of dissemination are de facto the same in both, even technical issues, such as those concerning sound quality, noise management and functionality very quickly overlap.

The more we investigate, the more we find we are able to join the dots. So, after a year’s worth of Soundings, perhaps it is time to map out where some of these dot-joining journeys have taken us – and which dots we would like to follow in the coming year.

The emerging ‘super-highway’ dot link is undoubtedly the topic of context. Audio perception; the use of music for persuasive purpose or for leisure; the management of noise; speech and oral communication – all these aspects of the ways that sound functions in everyday life cannot be dissociated from our other perceptive faculties: sight, smell, taste, touch, etc. And it only becomes really interesting (and much more subtle) when we look at perception in totality.

So the ‘strategy’ part of our name is becoming ever more significant when engaging with consultations, even though initial approaches to us are often about a more specific issue.

What we are finding, both in public space aural environments such as retail outlets, transaction foyers, shopping malls and leisure spaces, and online interfaces such as landing pages, marketing sites and product information pages, is that the use of sound (and the management of its unwanted counterparts) is frequently being compromised by a lack of strategic awareness. Marketing and corporate communications executives are on the receiving end of large amounts of research information about the efficacy of specific kinds of music in specific environments with specific demographics, but have no way of knowing how to take strategic decisions about aural communication across an entire corporate platform.

And those are just the people who have achieved a state of conscious incompetence – at least they are aware that there are issues here. Probably a greater proportion of senior managers are still in the primordial state of unconscious incompetence. They are not even aware that managing the audio environment can be critical to business efficiency.

So one of Soundings’ missions in its second year is to maximise the conversion of unconscious incompetents to conscious competents through examining how the aural environment impacts across the full range of business operations, including internal and external communications, public and online interfaces, marketing, media, PR and sales.

Not only that, but we also need to examine sound in relation to the affective and information potential of the other senses. It is not enough just to pipe some undifferentiated background music into a banking foyer for example, if its effect has not been judged against the décor, colour schemes, room acoustics, usage patterns and intrusive noise from the high street.

So don’t expect us just to talk to you about playlists…

Andrew Peggie

Push me, pull you.

Earlier this year there was considerable agreement in the marketing press about the need to make the online experience more enticing than proselytising; in advertising parlance, more ‘pull’ than ‘push’. We made comment about this in the July edition of Campaign and in particular how the web-based audio elements of a brand could be less ‘shouty’. My recent trip to Japan suggests that there may be a case for applying this same principle to real-world retail spaces.

I visited the impressive Omotesando Hills shopping complex; part of a Bond Street/Fifth Avenue area in Tokyo designed by the ex-boxer turned architect Tadao Ando. As one walks down the slow incline of its internal triangular walkway through the eleven floors clad with honeyed stone, one becomes aware of the high quality sound track, both in content and reproduction, issuing through its central void. Sometimes interspersed with more contemporary tracks, again carefully chosen, the specially created ambient sound world augments the shopping experience in a way which encourages people to linger as they drift between the retail outlets that line the walkway.

The retail units sometimes have their individual playback systems but upon entering or exiting, the transition from one audio world to another was seamless. Contrast this with some of the more brutalising sonic environments one comes across on, say, Oxford Street, London.

This is not to say that a journey through the different shopping areas of Tokyo presents such a universally well-graded audio experience. There seems, however, to be a difference in the way the Japanese approach the use of sound, which links to their awareness of nature. Sound is used in the hot summer months to elicit a sense of cooling with the sounds of trickling water and bamboo chimes. There are also resonances with the natural world in the sounds of their traditional instruments, such as the shakuhachi (a bamboo recorder). And silence plays a special role in the spiritual profundity of the Zen rock garden in Ryoan-ji Temple (Kyoto).

The Japanese approach can also accommodate the childlike qualities of the ‘Biiiiigu Biigu Biigu Big …Caamera’ (Bic Camera!) jingle as one enters this immense electronic emporium, as well as a mixture of Bill Evans and Renaissance music flowing from one of the seedy-looking below-ground night clubs.
And despite the Japanese being some of the most prolific mobile phone users on the planet, it is rare to hear one of those oh-so-irritating ring tones in public spaces. Perhaps a reflection of the strong Japanese tradition of respect for other people’s personal space.

Compare such aural sensitivity to giving way to other people in a crowded city with the pushy assertiveness of competitive sound tracks played in the retail spaces of other countries, where constant, high volume techno-beats played over poor quality audio equipment must inevitably negate any positive marketing effects the music playback might have. And judging by the number of people who enter retail spaces in the West with iPods firmly in place, acting as their personal audio barrier, it is surely time to rethink the sound-world of the retail space in much more strategic terms.

Michael Spencer

At home on the web?

In real life it is usually pretty straightforward to distinguish between a bank, a garage or a clothing store, for instance, or indeed between a bedroom, a dining room and a lobby. On the web it is a different matter.
As a frequent web traveller, I often find myself asking: what is the purpose of this site, exactly? And since there are no physical dimensions in cyberspace, one can find oneself instantly transported from a corporate office block to a corner shop, a living room, a shopping mall, a stadium, university, cinema or newsagent. Human nature compels us to think and act differently in each of these environments, and this appears to apply to visitor behaviour on the web as much as it does so in real life.

Web 2.0 interactive and mixed-media developments are greatly increasing both the flexibility and ambiguity of websites, and whereas owners and designers obviously relish the challenges of inventing ever-more-intricate functionality, they seem to be ignoring the more subtle challenges of tone, mood and ‘flow’ which are important contributors to the visitor experience, which both enhance and control their attitudes and behaviours towards the content and functionality.

In sum, there is an artistic dimension to creating a site which is rapidly evolving from a purely visual/textual design issue to a dynamic, ‘performance’ one. And while there is increasing research evidence on the effects of individual elements such as colour and music on consumer behaviour or mood, even defining and describing the overall ‘personality’ of a website presents a level of complexity beyond the capabilities of current scientific investigation, as authors Falk, Sockel and Warren admit in the introduction to their paper on atmospherics in the virtual world in a recent issue of the Journal of Website Promotion:

Retailers have dozens of different characteristics that can be manipulated. These "manipulatable" objects provide the look and feel of the store. However the immensity of the unique combinatorial elements (numbers way beyond the trillions) precludes this process from being directly studied holistically. As a result, an accepted and unifying definitive atmospheric model has not yet been developed. Complicating the issue is that the realm of impact is no longer limited to the physical world. In the dozen plus years since the introduction of commercialism to the internet (1994) the nature of atmospherics has only been limitedly addressed…

In the face of such overwhelming numbers of variables, one way of satisfying the business and marketing worlds’ needs for measurable qualities would be to approach web design with a much stronger focus on the intended nature and function of the site. Is it a coffee shop, archive store, directory or discount warehouse? Clarity of purpose in theory should lead to clarity of function, preferably via well-briefed artist-designers with true multi-media skills (not just graphic artists who happen to like music, for example).

And perhaps we should be looking again at the subtext of internet language. What if the term ‘homepage’ meant exactly that – a virtual living room or reception room? What elements of a corporate ‘home’ should feature on such a webpage? What would a product marketing ‘home’ look and sound like? What impression would you want to give to visitors to your home? What mood would you like to promote? Do you want your guests to stay or depart quickly? Do you offer ‘refreshments’? Instead of treating cyber-visitors as fish to be caught, why not treat them as welcome guests?

Andrew Peggie

The end of the world is nigh…

Most people, whether or not they have any connection with the music production and marketing industries, are aware of controversy surrounding ‘illegal’ file-sharing and cross-platform copying. Few – even within the industry – seem to have any reliable way of analysing what is going on, let alone figuring out what to do about it. So rather than indulge in a summer holiday, Soundings decided instead to try to unravel the complexities of new music marketing models and digital rights management.

At issue is an infrastructural and economic nexus which, as applied to music production, has always been liable to anomalous behaviour, compared to other product marketing. How to create economic value out of music? Should it indeed have any economic value?

Who profits?

There are plenty of music creators across the world for whom profit is not the point. Social, religious, cultural and personal or therapeutic goals are very often uppermost in their minds. However, the music itself often begins to take on a life of its own, and the possibility of exploiting its dissemination becomes more attractive.

Hot on the heels of direct word-of-mouth have followed all manner of communication channels, from paper-based publishing to audio recording and radio/TV broadcasting, all of which have required intermediaries skilled in managing both the technical and marketing aspects of dissemination, and in many cases the performance and interpretation of the music as well. Once the music is loosed from its originator it can of course be used by many different people for many different purposes, including profit-making. At that point, both creators and intermediaries have a legitimate expectation of remuneration.

Copyright law – the legal framework of rights and royalties designed to prevent the exploitation of the creative artists – has evolved in tandem with development of increasingly sophisticated means of dissemination. It is tempting to think of this as a fundamental human right, but there is no absolute moral element in the protection of the fruits of creativity or imagination. In many cultures, the individual creator is not important and music or artwork is considered a collective expression of identity.
The singer or the song?

On the other hand, the combination of mass dissemination and the cult of the individual has spawned some pernicious assumptions.

One is that music is legitimised only by its mass media success – its economic value becomes its only value. But, since music is an infinitely reproducible resource (unlike visual and plastic arts, where value accrues to scarcity and uniqueness) monetary value often transfers to a key personality – creator or performer for example – thanks in the main to royalties emanating from copyright protection.

Another, which follows from the first, is that the dissemination infrastructures – CD production, broadcasting, internet, cinema, press, etc – are the music. Were they not to exist, music itself would apparently not exist. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase: the medium is the music. This is patent nonsense of course, but a large proportion of the arguments currently swirling around the question of legality and rights is based on such an assumption.

What has changed?

We have passed a tipping point in technological development whereby the means to circumvent conventional economic infrastructures has begun to outstrip their control and management capacity – a process which began in the 1960s with the advent of domestic tape recording. Not surprisingly, current discussions have been accompanied by a large measure of squealing and whingeing from corporate and legal functionaries whose careers have hitherto benefited from the status quo.

In a recent UK MusicTank newsletter the veteran rock music manager, Peter Jenner, neatly sums up the current dilemma:

The essential problem is this. Any system must start by competing with both the range and variety and the uncontrolled nature of the FREE option.  The un-licensable UGC (User Generated Content) of You Tube, MySpace etc, the bootleg recordings, the radio shows, the live recordings from festivals and gigs, the content from the non-English speaking world is as valuable as the licensable content from the big four record companies. Music from both out-of-contract artists and the not yet contracted artists is also hard to license if they are not going through one of the big licensors, as is music from the musician-owned and micro labels from all over the world, as are the podcasts, the radio streams and the music blogs.

Do it yourself

We now have easy access to the technological means to assert our creative and cultural values in ways which short-circuit the profit-based business models derived from remotely-controlled high volume dissemination. This is not to say that profit is a bad thing, only that – where music making is concerned – it can never be the sole motivation.

Music creators and listeners instinctively know this. People use music for all sorts of utilitarian reasons, from the profound to the trivial, for public or private consumption. At one end of the utility spectrum we have the ‘art for art’s sake’ creators who strive for originality, profound insight and cultural exclusivity; at the other end are those who are prepared to generate hours of undifferentiated background pap. But whether the end-users are concert audiences or computer gamers, their sense of music as a sort of cultural or spiritual fuel far outweighs any question of its monetary value. Listeners never go in search of the cheapest (nor indeed the most expensive) musical product. Cost is rarely, if ever, a factor in the music choices people make.

Music flows like water

On the contrary, creators and consumers alike think of music as a utility, like water or fuel. The comparison is apt, since most people understand the need to pay for utilities. But they expect the results to be on tap, relatively cheap, universally accessible and unencumbered by the delivery mechanism. Payment, content and delivery are dislocated. The commercial ubiquity of music, via radio, TV, cinema and the web, is part of the reason the consumer mindset assumes that it is universally available.

Music production and marketing organisations, on the other hand, are still thinking of music as a saleable product, often bundled with personalities, fashion and lifestyle goods and services, and channelled through approved retail outlets (whether real or virtual), with price, availability and access all managed to maximise profit.

The cognitive gap could not be more obvious, and it is difficult to imagine any new business models which fail to bridge this gap having any long-term success. Of course, the middle-men are unlikely to become extinct, and there will continue to be a market for premium music offerings, just as there is for bottled water at 1000% mark-ups.

But what needs to change is the economic assumption on which music production and marketing has depended for the last 150 years or so and which has been especially prevalent during the mass cultural explosion since 1950. The implications will affect not just record companies and broadcasters, but also the legal frameworks built around copyright, service agencies which commission or license music for use in marketing and other media, the cultural support agencies (both public and private) which channel funds towards music and – further down the line – the educational institutions which aim to shape or preserve musical aspects of our culture.

The age of the dinosaurs is over

It seems unlikely that change will be managed, let a lone driven, by any of the above. Digital Rights Management (DRM) – the industry attempt to control the usage of new digital platforms – has all but collapsed, and few young people it seems are taking seriously record company attempts to pursue illegal down-loaders and file-sharers. Copyright law is weakest in the world’s largest potential mass culture markets in China and the rest of Asia.

However, alternatives are already emerging via social networking sites and small-scale, localised initiatives which can develop on the web without reference to traditional marketing channels. But the big picture changes could be profound: perhaps we are reaching the end of a dinosaur era where musical superstars were manufactured, managed and marketed by global corporations.

Andrew Peggie

Hermès comes bearing gifts

The eponymous French fashion house exploits its connection to the messenger of the gods in a site of seductive charm, humour and compelling originality. Individual descriptions of the sixty-four separate ‘gifts’ to be discovered on les ailes d’Hermès [the wings of Hermès] site would not reveal the underlying strong artistic concept allied to a clever use of simple website technology. Equally impressive is the way the web artist (‘designer’ is really too prosaic a term) has exploited the full range of audio, video, graphic and textual media. Not, as is often the case, by filing them all away under their own separate headings, but by treating the visitor to a lucky dip of constant surprises. Clicking on any of the sixty-four images gives no hint as to what the presentation will be: a video perhaps or a flash animation; sometimes with a presenter, sometimes with recorded dancers and musicians; perhaps just a sequence of images; often with unexpected sound effects and unusual musical backing.

The result is addictive. Click on the ‘Travel the world of Hermès’ winged figure, then wait for him to plunge into the gift pool. One is compelled to explore every one of the subsequent links to discover what riches are waiting to be revealed. One of the most substantial is a video of a shadow puppet performance, filmed in full-screen close-up, with narration, sound effects and music as for the live performance. The Indian legend related reflects Hermès’ current seasonal South Asian theme. At the other end of the scale, a tiger painting suddenly roars to reveal a Hermès Tigre Royal Silk city bag. In one silent animation a dozen different heads, morphing one into the next, sport the same Hermès hat – a neat inversion of the usual fashion convention of using a single face to model a several different items, and a very clever way of demonstrating the potentially broad demographic appeal of exactly the same piece of headwear.

If there is a moral to Les ailes d’Hermès site, it is that treating strategy and concept as an artistic project rather than a web design exercise can noticeably raise the quality level and impact of a site. Moreover, the artistic approach seems to have been effective in reinforcing the overall brand image without creating either a monothematic straightjacket or blatantly literal connections. What the subtext of the site is saying is that the Hermès brand is underlined by creativity, originality and high quality. Of course, nowhere on the site do key words such as those ever appear. They do not need to spell it out.

If there is a criticism, it is in the leisurely way in which the homepage is loaded, via a silent cartoon animation of a top hatted and winged Hermes landing on the title text and plunging into the gift pool. Without sound, one assumes that the rest of the site will also be silent. Each individual presentation thereafter takes a few seconds to load and the small ‘page loading’ icon is not always immediately visible. A visitor in a hurry might easily think that there is nothing much to see or hear, and move on.

Andrew Peggie

Sound Strategies News

Managing Director Michael Spencer cements his ties with Japan ’s flourishing classical music scene. He is one of four speakers at a special seminar for the Geidankyo, a branch of the Japanese Arts Council specialising in performers. Other speakers are specialists from traditional and contemporary Japanese theatre, examining potential roles for the Arts in education and community settings.

A long-time visitor to Japan , he is also continuing to advise orchestras and concert halls on marketing and developing their cultural remit in the community.

Interesting venues come in many forms of course, but few are likely to be as exclusive as the Imperial Palace in Tokyo where Michael was recently a guest of the Empress, with whom he has the good fortune to play chamber music on occasion.

Is shopping the new theatre?

There is a self-evident logic to the desire of companies to control all aspects of their retail environments. A certain level of predictability is without doubt essential to commercial confidence. Yet, from the point of view of the consumer, an important part of the shopping experience is surely coming across nice surprises. The shopper’s ideal environment is probably a fine balance between familiar surroundings and new or unexpected sensory experiences, certainly as Mary Portas would have us believe in her current BBC TV series, Mary Queen of Shops. Portas’ accompanying book, How to Shop, cleverly signals information to the retail clothing industry whilst ostensibly purporting to be an insider’s guide for the customers themselves. The subtext of Portas’ approach is that shopping is an event, not just a transaction, with close similarities to every form of entertainment ever invented, from the beginning of time, indeed.

Current research into the operation of retail or service environments tends to approach the issue from a functional, rather mechanistic viewpoint, with customers apparently exhibiting almost Pavlovian levels of behaviour predicated on carefully controlled background variables, such as musical style, tempo or volume level. Steve Oakes’ brief survey (below) of music’s impact in retail spaces demonstrates the usefulness of this approach when it comes to describing what happens and why.

But beyond the basic principles, such as ensuring a certain level of congruity across all aspects of the environment, it would be a mistake to treat research results as an immutable formula for retail space management without also ensuring that the essential elements of entertainment and surprise are deployed. Optimisation of the space is not in itself going to maximise sales, just as a fully-equipped theatre and a clutch of star actors will not draw an audience if the play hasn’t been rehearsed.

As always with any kind of presentation, the interest lies not in the endlessly refined and perfected core content, but in the subtle shifts and nuances of delivery made uniquely in response to a specific audience at a specific time.

Background music, along with the face-to-face interventions of the sales team, are the only elements of a retail space capable of contributing this level of interactive variety to the experience. (Displays can change of course, but less frequently and rarely in direct response to customer reaction.)

Music playlists which are undifferentiated and formulaic, no matter how finely tuned to the intended consumer demographic, are always going to be at a disadvantage compared to the situation where the musical ambience can react and respond to changing circumstances throughout the day.

Good sales staff have always been aware of the theatrical aspects of their work, of course, but how many retail space designers approach a project with the aim of creating an entertainment rather than a selling environment? There are challenges which do not exist in conventional theatre, such as the fact that the customer/audience has to be addressed individually as well as en masse; and people do not remain in one place but come and go unpredictably. But treating the retail environment as a quasi theatre might lead to more creative solutions to the customer encouragement/retention issue.

One important aspect of theatre which is often overlooked in retail is the sense of time passing. A good theatre show has clear profile, with build-up, climax, release, drama, comedy, tension, etc. Are there similar moments when buying a pair of shoes? Why not? Can some of them be engineered by means of music, lighting, staff-customer interaction, etc. Certainly.

The overall ‘tempo’ of a public space can influence the behaviour of the users of the space accordingly. Background music is an important – though not the only – element in this.

Michael Spencer
Managing Director

Roll up! Roll up! How music can enliven the retail environment

The influence of the ‘Musicscape’ is acknowledged by managers as a critical element for consumers who are seeking an increasingly multi-sensory experience from their retail encounters.

For music to have maximum effect, however, it needs to complement the other elements of store design. The holistic inter-relationships between the visual, aural, human and indeed olfactory aspects of a retail space exert complex and subtle influences on each other and background music should not be treated in isolation. Responses to an environment depend upon the integration of multi-sensory information gleaned from the design/shape of the space, scents (ambient and specific), decor, lighting, furnishings, as well as interactions between these variables. Research suggests that environmental design will be most effective if all the elements are conveying a consistent message. For example, they might combine to suggest a high quality  experience, or a space attractive to a young age group. This is known as congruity.

The importance of musical congruity is identified in most of the findings from academic studies examining the impact of music in retail environments. Music can be regarded as congruous if:

     – it is relevant to the overall context (see above)
     – it is what visitors to the space might expect to hear.

Cultural congruity between background music from a specific country and the origin of the retail products is a good example. French wine significantly outsold German wine in a store when stereotypical French accordion music was being played, while (in the same store) German wine significantly outsold French wine with Bierkeller music in the background. Possible explanations are less clear, however. The increased sales may have arisen because the music evoked pleasant holiday memories, or simply because it created the impression of a sales promotion.

If marketers wish to create an upmarket atmosphere and sell premium priced products, the music should reflect such upmarket aspirations. Research from 1993 revealed how customers purchased more expensive wines in a retail environment playing background classical rather than pop music because classical music provided a more congruously sophisticated cue, suggesting to customers that only the more expensive brands should be purchased. Congruity between music and other elements of the retail environment is likely to provide similar benefits, according to a 1994 research study which revealed how the matching of classical music with soft lighting (compared to pop music and bright lighting) produced customer expectations of higher service and merchandise quality levels.

We know that shoppers frequently rely upon the vintage of background music to help them navigate their way around a large department store. Youthful consumers instinctively avoid zones playing chart hits from the 1960s, for example. More dramatically, if just one floor of a department store is music-free, research suggests that the unexpected absence of music can create feelings of insecurity, isolation, and threat, often resulting in a visitor’s rapid departure to another area.

Although congruity is important, it is not the only influential musical element. Musical tempo can have significant effects, even if the result appears incongruous. Slow-tempo music relaxes people in queues and reduces their stress levels. It can also slow down the speed at which they push their trolleys around the supermarket, thus leading to increased browsing and impulse purchases. In a full service restaurant, slow tempo music will encourage people to take longer over their meals and spend more money on high margin beverages. In fast-food restaurants, on the other hand, fast-tempo music may encourage more rapid eating, thus leading to quicker table turnover.

Musical volume can also play a part. Research suggests that younger shoppers (aged under 50) spend more in retail environments that play loud music, while shoppers aged 50 and over spend more with quiet background music.

While many of these effects might be rather self-evident, the specific circumstances of individual spaces can often make absolute predictions difficult. Ideally, retail organisation managers would test various background music effects against customer behaviour patterns, to establish an optimum repertoire. More elaborate and specialised marketing research can measure the ways music interacts with other environmental stimuli and thus help create optimum marketing conditions at different points throughout a retail complex.

Steve Oakes

Dr Steve Oakes is a Lecturer in Marketing who teaches postgraduate level quantitative research methods at the University of Liverpool Management School. He has published in Psychology Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, Applied Cognitive Psychology, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Service Industries Journal, Journal of Marketing Management, and the Journal of Services Marketing. His research focuses upon the influence of music in the context of advertising and service environments.

Lack of audio makes hotel websites seem other-worldly

The overall impression of luxury hotels, gleaned from their website presence, is that they are havens of Buddhist levels of silent calm-ness. An impression probably many of them would be happy to endorse, although the reality is likely to be somewhat different.

People become hypersensitive to the sound-world of a hotel because unfamiliar surroundings prompt our aural perception faculty to work overtime. Even quiet or insignificant sounds which would be hardly noticeable at home can drive the guest to distraction in a hotel bedroom.

But should a marketing website reflect this? Clearly a warts and all image would not be appropriate, but there is much to be said for evoking the aural environment of a location in advertising content, and it is certainly technically possible nowadays. The ambient sounds found in hotels are not all intolerable. And very often they contain the special ingredients of warmth, comfort and familiarity which feature so often in branding key word text.

Many websites exploit clever interactive functionality, with user-controlled panning and tracking, which enables the visitor to experience a virtual tour of the hotel’s main features. Of course the foyers, concourses, restaurants, bars and terraces are invariably both empty and silent.

Why not add background audio? Imagine a terrace overlooking the sea, with evocative sea sounds enhancing the image. Or a foyer alive with movement and conversation, and perhaps a music group in the background. Or a cabaret artiste in the cocktail bar. Or party time at the pool side.

The sound-world (and scent-world) of a spa, for instance, is invariably more evocative than the décor, especially to a guest with heightened aural sensitivity. Yet no-one seems to have thought of exploiting that in online advertising.

The USA Peninsula Hotels chain merely hints at possibilities with a series of ‘Concierge Choice’ e-magazines which cleverly mimic the page turning motion of a paper version, complete with page turning noises. But that’s all. The magazines are replete with hi-resolution, expertly photographed images, many of which could be sensitively enhanced with matching sound effects. If sound is used for something as insignificant as page turning impressions, then why not for the marketing elements that really matter?

The Raffles chain takes a similar approach, but has been ambitious enough to add some music backing to its e-book animated tours. Each of the eight locations features a track seemingly intended to reflect the music of the region – or possibly what might be heard in the hotel foyer. The concept is admirable though not always successful in execution, presumably because it may have been difficult to locate well-played authentic music which also reflected the high brand value of the hotel in places like Angkor and Phnom Penh. The tacky track from Beverley Hills has no such excuses, however.

What is clear is that, although many proprietors have good musical intentions, neither hotel, nor brand executives nor creatives possess anything like enough musical expertise and understanding to achieve presentational standards equivalent to the visual elements of their websites.

Yet, it is possible. Standing out – possibly alone – amongst the hotels which have thought seriously about both the quality of their musical image and its strategic use across website, marketing and the hotel itself is Sublime Ailleurs of Marrakech. The site opens with an offer of three, superbly produced original music tracks, with which to accompany the website visit. The music is both contemporary and entirely evocative of North Africa, displaying a quality of invention and recording which easily matches the five-star status of the hotel. It completely complements the brand image. They get other elements right as well. The volume level is finely judged; there is a pop-up window with full musical details and credits. And the tracks are long enough and carefully edited so that it is almost impossible to detect the loop repeating.

If a relatively obscure individual hotel can get its audio marketing elements right, why not some of the world’s biggest players?

In fact about fifty percent of the sites visited used audio of some sort, though in the more familiar formats of video presentations and music backing tracks for flash animations. Prince Resorts operates a small number of luxury hotels and resorts in Hawaii. The group website features each hotel in similar fashion, using photographs, virtual tours and short promotional videos. The visual elements – as always – are of a consistently high quality and carefully constructed to promote a precise ambience and image reflecting the brand values. Then click on the ‘Take a video tour’ link and the heart sinks at the bland, lifeless commentary and a music loop which appears to have been recorded on cassette with a 1970s drum machine backing. Five-star visual impressions with a one-star sound track. One of the reasons for checking out Prince Resorts was because some years ago it issued its own Hawaiian music CD which merited a brief feature in www.successmtgs.com. There is no mention of this on the current sites.

Other hotel chains have also woken up to the branding power of music and created bespoke playlists which guests can buy in CD format or download onto i-pods. The UK chain, Malmaison, sells music CDs as part of its brand offer, but there is no way of sampling the tracks on its website. It does however, somewhat bizarrely, feature the music of one of its staff members and aspiring rap artist. Great exposure for the individual, but hard to make any kind of brand fit between the heavily urban hip hop sounds and the brand image.

Westin Hotels and Resorts features a tasteful but quirky jazz-funk-world music track on its ‘Westin Difference’ page, which continues on clicking each of the virtual brochure pages, but stops abruptly when the link to each topic is opened. There is no obvious route back to the ‘brochure’ page – or the music. Thus a tiny functionality issue obliterates the entire feel-good atmosphere created by an excellent music track. Westin’s Senior Vice President, Sue Brush, has written: ‘There is no sensory element more engaging on an emotional level than music. Through our signature music programming we will create a renewing, relaxing and welcoming atmosphere and a truly memorable experience for our guests’. True – so long as you stop surfing and listen.

Most hotel websites are of course an obvious extension of their print brochures, and very likely designed by the same graphic artists and photographers. Consistency of layout, font, colour and image are all strongly congruous with the brand. The website silence nevertheless evokes a strangely clinical effect, but often that is preferable to the distinctly down-market atmosphere which clouds the sites when music or a voice-over begins.

Andrew Peggie

Sound Strategies News

Sound Strategies features in the latest edition of Campaign contributing to its Digital Viewpoint series with an article about the latest trends in the use of sound on the Web by agencies
We are connected with Anneli Beronius Haake through her research at Sheffield University into the use of music in the workplace. Her work was featured in the Guardian this month; Desk Jockeys.

Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive

Toyota is justifiably proud of its new car engine technology which combines petrol and electrical power sources. It has lumbered itself with a ‘geeky’ name for it, however. And then it has lumbered itself with a bizarre mix of multi-media web pages in an attempt to… Well it’s never quite clear, really.

Audio is an integral part of the presentation on every page, usually driven by flash animation, often with further pop-up pages embedded, each with their own animation. Of the four landing page menu choices, two lead more or less to the same place, but the sub-sites are otherwise unrelated in terms of design, configuration and content.

It is Toyota’s approach to the speaking voice which is most baffling. Commentary is provided by a male or female voice speaking received pronunciation – ‘correct’, accent-less English – rather slowly. Somewhat reminiscent of a 1960s radio ad. The commentaries are accompanied by scrolling text. The effect is to transport the (UK) visitor into a sort of broadcasting time-warp. Moreover, although the pages are available in several languages, the English speaking voices remain. Given the considerable web design budget which must have been agreed, why are the non-English sites not overdubbed appropriately?

Another sub-site (‘Reasons to Choose’) consists of cartoon animations featuring a couple of American-speaking children, obviously spoken by actors, being ‘interviewed’ by a radio commentator. It is difficult to determine whether the caricature figures and stilted delivery is meant to be a deliberately ironic throwback or an attempt at interesting young people in the hybrid synergy drive. It is certainly difficult to remember much about the product from listening to the rambling, inept dialogue.

Much the same could be said of the final sub-site, ‘Many Reasons’, which consists of a series of click-select vox pop comments supporting the Toyota brand.

Audio fidelity is often compromised by the poor quality of the telephone line and many of the unedited contributions come across as rambling and inarticulate. At least we have a variety of languages, however, Toyota deserves

credit for exploring the full range of audio possibilities its Hybrid Synergy Drive sites. A pity, though, that in execution, it seems so often to have missed the target.