Jingle all the way

Nirma!
Washing powder Nirma,
Doodh si safedi Nirma se aaye,
Rangeen kapda bhi khil khil jaye,
Sabki pasand Nirmaaa,
Nirma!

Did you read these lines or hum them? Or did you outright sing them? More importantly (assuming that you have heard it before), will you ever forget this tune? Maybe not. And that's the effect jingles have - for decades, advertisers have leveraged catchy jingles to help the customers recall their brand. However, lately, this reliance on jingles has reduced, and we have started seeing other elements being used in advertisements.

In this piece, we will look at how jingles took the advertising world by storm, why the frequency has now dwindled, and can they make a comeback? But before we begin, here's a fun little quiz featuring some of the most iconic jingles from Indian ads. (Let us know how many you guessed right in the comments!)

How was the trip down the memory lane? Do you feel excited, nostalgic, and somehow still connected to these tunes? The answer is not very surprising. Let us look at some reasons for our love of jingles and what made them so successful.

A brief history of jingles

One of the reasons jingles were so popular back in the day was the limitations of technology. Did you know that up until 1975, only seven Indian cities had television services? Radio, which had been there for decades, was the medium for major broadcasts, and advertisers started leveraging the platform. And how do you make audio ads stand out? Music and catchy lyrics. In fact, Lifebuoy’s ‘Lifebuoy hai jahan tandurusti hai wahan’ jingle was one of the earliest tunes, broadcasted back in 1964. And even when TVs started becoming mainstream, the picture quality and lower production-grade, not to mention black & white screens, just weren’t attractive enough to capture the audience’s interest. Jingles were added to make the ads memorable for a longer duration.

The psychology of music

Why do we love music? Because it helps it connect with what we see in a better way than plain imagery — through arousal and association. Music is also known to have an effect on our moods, and the right kind of music can even affect purchase decisions. It helps increase the memorability of ads; it has a more lasting impact on the audience that can serve as a cue to assist in recalling the brand’s message — what’s a better top of the mind recall than a jingle stuck in your head. Lastly, music, in general, has been a major part of our lives — from movies to TV shows — it is ubiquitous; it makes sense to leverage this connection while marketing your products.

More than a tune

Simply put, a good jingle is more than just a tune. It becomes the brand’s identity, its trademark — something that the competitors can’t copy. You don’t even need a celebrity to endorse it; the jingle speaks (sings) for itself. And if you noticed, jingles are majorly used for low involvement products, where the customer purchases the brand that first comes to her mind, without much external information search. For such purchases, the customer needs to learn about and recall the brand — which can be either done by stimulus generalization where brands copy the existing stimulus like competitor’s packaging or stimulus discrimination where brands create a new stimulus like a jingle. And stimulus discrimination is generally more effective; it is difficult to create one, but if you do it, it helps the customers learn about the brand much easier — and this learning influences their purchase.

So jingles sound like a great way to build brand equity; however, their usage has considerably declined in the past few years. The only catchy jingle I can recall from recent times is ‘Payyytm Karo’, which has a nice Christmassy sound. In fact, the only reason this topic came to my mind was because I saw PharmEasy’s ad where they remixed A.R. Rehman’s ‘Urvashi Urvashi’ and was refreshingly surprised to hear the jingle. So why do we see fewer jingles nowadays?

Is anyone watching this?

With the rise of alternative platforms like YouTube and OTT services, TV has faded into the background. Traditional TV viewing has dropped by 10 hours per week for 18–24-year-olds since 2011. Today, Millennials are watching half the amount of TV than adults 35+. And ads shown online generally have a skip button, which users use more than advertisers would like — over 65% people skip online ads. On average, viewers watch just 7.4 seconds of a 30-second ad before skipping. Moreover, over the years, the world has seen some amazing content in the form of movies and TV shows, which has raised the bar for what is worthy of watching — and that spills over to ads. Viewers now look for much more, and jingles alone don’t meet the expectations. Hence, advertisers aim to tell stories in their ads, which helps them connect with the audience and keep their finger away from the skip button. Storytelling is what viewers want and is driving conversion and ROI today — 92% of consumers want brands to make ads feel like a story; and if people love a brand story, 55% are more likely to buy the product in future, 15% will buy the product immediately. Music has become a part of these stories, not the ad itself.

May I have your attention, please?

In 2000, the average human attention span was 12 seconds. Today is lower than 8 seconds (A goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds). Why? Because goldfishes don’t have smartphones. With the rise of smartphones, the good news for advertisers is that now they have more touchpoints to reach viewers than ever before; but the bad news is that everyone has those touchpoints, and with declining attention span, the struggle to capture it is real. And with social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat, communicating via images has become the norm — more than 95 million photos are uploaded daily on Instagram; and why not? it takes only 13 milliseconds for the human brain to process an image, much faster than text or audio. In this new world, sound has taken a backseat — 85% of videos watched on Facebook are watched with the sound off. Hence, it seems to make sense to prioritize visuals over other senses.

Intent, Nudge, Action!

The purpose of brand recall elements is to act as a cue that can be triggered at the time of purchase to increase the likelihood of the customer buying your product. When you see a black and red bottle in a cooler on a sunny day, you subconsciously recall the happiness it brought to the people in the Coke ad you saw sometime back, and you purchase it. Hence the physical evidence present at the shop is equally important as it triggers the customer into action. Brand colors, celebrities, and even the product itself act as helpful triggers while jingles don’t. Even if you know the jingle by heart, it doesn’t nudge you into action till you see a visual trigger; after all, music is rarely a physical evidence present at the point of sale. Hence even though the jingle helps customers remember the brand, it doesn’t act as a trigger to nudge the intent towards action.

That being said, there is an opportunity for the jingles to make a comeback. With music streaming apps, podcasts, and audiobooks, there is an up and coming ad market that is mostly unexplored right now. When you listen to music or audiobooks, the hearing sense is usually more active than vision; and much like radio back in the day, this provides the option of audio ads. However, the audio ads present today are mostly just the audio version of a video ad that you see on TV or YouTube. If advertisers can make ads that are specifically targeted for audio platforms, they will be able to generate good brand recall; and since jingles are closer to music than anything else, the ad would seem relatively less out of place even if it interrupts the music flow that the user was experiencing.

Let us know your thoughts in the responses. For more interesting campaigns, analysis, and write-ups, follow Nacho Marketing!