Pavlov Revisited: Does Sound Sell?

[Ken_Caudill]

Post withdrawn by author.

[The Copy Nazi]

Originally Posted by Ken_Caudill

While ardently avoiding editing an ebook, I discovered this article:

Neural Advertising: How What We Hear Affects Us - Yahoo! News

Will associating your product with a pleasant sound lead to more sales?

I'm not talking about some glaring audio or video that demands the visitor's attention, but something brief and subtle that plays when someone enters your site.

Perhaps someone with huge traffic to one of their sites might want to test this idea.

At the very least, I don't think it will hurt.

Interesting idea. I know when I was making radio spots that SFX of a ticking clock/an alarm/a whisper cut through the rest of the stuff on air. I can see a whisper working quite well with a salespage or site. Or even an email. GetResponse emailed today to say they're adding audio to email. So I've just done a newsletter where I whisper "Hello, Frank Kern here ....not really...just wanted to see if you were paying attention..."

[Daniel Scott]

I know supermarkets spend a lot of cash figuring out what tunes to play to make people buy... so I can see the appeal.

After all... selling is emotion-based... and music can change emotions.

Sound-wise... I can definitely see the power in this... especially for sales letters which use video.

Thanks Ken... plenty of food for thought here.

-Dan

[travlinguy]

"Will associating your product with a pleasant sound lead to more sales?"

Maybe. There's a concept in NLP called anchoring. It's simple. A practitioner might be working with someone who's depressed. In an attempt to get that person from a non-resourceful state (depression) to a more productive frame of mind the practitioner might ask the individual to go back in time to an experience where he was extremely happy.

He'd facilitate the experience through verbal coaching all the while monitoring the person's physiology for smiles and other signs of peak happiness. And when that person was at what appeared to be the peak of the experience the coach would set an anchor. That might be a verbal cue, a special word, or something physical like a light pinch on the arm or a tug on his earlobe. Then, when the person wanted to have access to that joyful state in the future, he'd fire off the anchor.

This is just one of hundreds or thousands of examples of how anchors work. All of us have anchors for both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. There is a certain cheap Avon perfume that when I get a whiff I feel panic. That's because someone was wearing that scent on my very first day of school so long ago where my mom took me to school and left me there. Man, I was nervous. It was all so new and I felt abandoned. And now just the scent of that perfume can put me back in that weird state.

So getting to the topic at hand, sound could sell. The trick would be to identify a universal sound that puts people in a certain mood. I think there would be different ‘universal’ sounds for different customers and situations. A man might soften up hearing the cooing voice of a sexy female.

The trick would be to first identify the 'state' a person most often finds himself in just before clicking on the buy now button and then figure out what emotion was present at that moment. That state might be described as eager anticipation. Then you’d try to identify what sound (or visual stimulus) might help trigger that emotion. This might not be as hard as it seems.

[pickthat apple]

I am not sure...also, it depends if goes on forever or for a little stretch of time

[valerie]

Sound plays an important role in all things.
That's why the hearing impaired other senses increase.

Online it is not like sitting in a doctors office or asylum for the insane....altho some times I think the latter may hold true.

We all know that calming sounds can help people sleep, feel less agitated, less pressure, less anxiety.

We also know the sounds in infomercials that give us that rush rush tendency to grab the phone and order.

Online, I would say it is not so different.

However, in the online network marketing community, I would say many of us are already aware of these psychological ploys. When it gets down to pulling out the credit card, not so sure the sound is going to be the deciding factor.

I can tell you that I don't like sound and I don't like videos in marketing websites. I am totally sick of them and as a norm, click them off. I am probably in a small minority but I just hate them, hate hate hate. lol I do think training videos are very useful if done correctly..you know to guide someone on what to do next, what steps to take...but all these videos out there with some dude or gal sitting behind their desk giving their expert coaching advice, arms waving, nostrils flaring......makes me want to barf!

[Raydal]

Now I have to add a baby's giggle soundtrack to all my website and see what happen to
the sales.

-Ray Edwards

[MissTerraK]

Originally Posted by Raydal

Now I have to add a baby's giggle soundtrack to all my website and see what happen to
the sales.

-Ray Edwards

Let me know how that works for!

MissTerraK