Music makes the people.
Looking Outside Music.
Do you ever find yourself tapping your foot, swaying, or nodding you head to a rhythm before you realize you’re doing it? That’s very human of you. If we are one thing in the consumer goods space it is interested in understanding people. But perhaps we are not quite curious enough.
When we talk about understanding our consumers, those humans we create new products for, the people we want to act on something when seeing our ads, those eyeballs we’re trying to grab in the shop with our display signage, we do a lot of research. It can be qualitative observations through conversations with them, asking them why they retrospectively act the way they do. It can be quantitative asking them to choose A or B to figure out their preference. It can be behavioral, observing how they unpack a toothpaste, or neurological looking at their brain’s response to our ads. It often is actually reading about, hearing, watching their opinions – how they respond to something, what gives them motivation, how they express themselves – through their social presence.
We balance the hard data we’ve had on them in the past, with our current day observations of them, and sometimes project their future desires through trends. And ultimately when we create business plans, we create for the masses, with them in mind - buying, eating, sharing whatever it is our business financials are supporting. This is what we do in the business of consumer goods.
Often we like to say we are consumer obsessed, or led by a desire to better understand humans. But we observe them only within the parameters that appear to us. We look only for the parts of their lives that are relevant to our categories. We simplify them so we can understand them, based on what they buy, how they do their shopping, how they open a break a chocolate bar and how they post online about it. Very rarely do we spend time exploring areas that are not directly related to our neat, segmented area of interest.
At the moment we spend a lot of time (and money) researching what communities they want to be part of, and within those how they express their individuality and how they come together communally. This is perhaps one of the most interesting types of research we’re doing to more deeply understanding them (alongside neurological testing) because of the changing ways that people can and do form communities and can and do express their individuality, driven by social media and virtual tribal behavior.
But even then we tend to research within the parameters that are directly connected to our categories. Think about it, you’re researching a community of young kids who get together to discuss gaming. ‘So what kind of products do they snack on when they are gaming?’ Almost immediately we want to link it back to our industry. When do we explore the cultural depths of areas that are less overtly connected to our category? Hardly ever. Even though they certainly can tell us a lot about why human beings are the way they are.
What about music?
In a recent episode of Looking Outside, I spoke with Adam Conley, the Insights Director for Mars Wrigley about exactly that; music’s influence on human beings and how that’s connected to researching human behavior. Adam is one of those rare marketers who wants to connect the dots for himself, who doesn’t automatically try to look for how to ‘use’ the information. (Or worse, only look at the bits of information he thinks are useful.) It was wonderful discussing music with Adam because as a music lover, he understands the impact it can have on our lives.
Think about what type of music you grew up listening to as a kid. Those songs are likely intrinsically linked to your childhood, maybe of those safe and comforting moments with your parents. Move forward into a time of change growing up, you might remember when you were first exposed to a new type of music and that genre is forever linked for you with change. Maybe even disruption and destruction of who you were before. In your teens you look to those musical styles that you can associate yourself with, as you figure out who you are and who you are not. What you refuse to listen to is as important as what you sing your heart out to. I remember being at high school events where pop songs would play and rolling my eyes, like I was too good to dance along to that mainstream nonsense. Those years were so formative and necessary to pull you into the fringes, the niche parts of life where you could find something (or someone, an artist) that could be just ‘yours’. And then of course if they became popular you’d either feel reaffirmed that you know how to discover gems before others do, or perhaps you are just like everyone else. Now that you’re grown, you have your ‘go to’ styles and genres of music, your favorite artists, and you can get complacent. You are comfortable with what you think identifies you. But you’re never too old to listen to new music, even if it is created by and for kids. For that matter you’re never too old to listen to old music either, or too young. In my teens I fell in love with jazz, swing and everything to do with 1930’s and ‘40s. I knew all Ella Fitzgerald songs by heart as well as I knew Salt-N-Pepa.
One of the most striking things that Adam and I discuss on the show is the impact other people have on your own discovery of music, and therefore how you create your own diverse array of exposure to styles. When someone you like, or want to be like, exposes you to foreign music, it makes you more willing to step outside your comfort zone.
Vividly I remember being in Istanbul on my honeymoon. We stayed in a little hotel in the center of town where the room was tiny. In between venturing out to look at museums, mosques and rugs to buy, we relaxed in that room watching Turkish TV. There was a music channel playing with Turkish pop songs and one of them was Hadise with Yaz Günü, a very pop-y summery song where Hadise frolics on the beach with a handsome chap. At first I thought it looked and sounded really silly. But my husband laughed and said I would end up loving it, reminding me to stay open minded. A month later I had built an entire playlist of Turkish music that I still listen to.
Turkish music, like every other type of music, has a physiological and psychological effect on us. Amazingly –
It is processed throughout the brain. Listening to music, playing and writing music engages nearly every area of the brain.
It influences how we experience breadth of emotions, in fact it can alter our emotions.
It can change your ability to perceive time.
It evokes memories and creates memories.
It can heal us psychologically; music therapy is a form of self care.
It can heal us physically - from boosting our immune system to assisting in repairing brain damage.
Hadise & her hunky chap in Yaz Günü
But you know one other thing it does is makes you think. In that Turkish hotel room, what I found surprising was the fact that this was acceptable in Turkish culture. Here I was covered practically head to toe, in very hot weather, to show respect for their modest culture while Hadise was on TV in a bikini and short shorts. My husband and I were careful not to show too much affection in public, while Hadise rolls around on the sand, literally, with her topless friend. I was careful to cover my tattoos, while Hadise’s accent arm tattoos were on display. Maybe I didn’t really know what was acceptable or not in Turkey? How much did I really understand Turkish people?
Then I did a little search and found out that Hadise Açıkgöz is actually half Turkish half Belgian, which explains her very western-European look. At the time anyway, back in 2015, there was criticism that Hadise was influencing their culture with her western look and in particular with her very toned down accent. I remember at the time reading an opinion that “she’s not really singing in Turkish”. So I listened to more Turkish music to see if I could hear the different pronunciations. And it’s very audible. Compare her with someone like Gülşen, Gökselor, Gökhan Türkmen you can hear the difference. Mind you the fact that these are all pop-y, mainstream and glamourized artists wasn’t lost on me, so the music scene didn’t appear much different to the modern one we’re exposed to in the US, Australia or even South Korea.
My exploration into Turkish music, as shallow as it may be, was a toe in a water I was previously just looking at. It got me curious. Curious enough to think about what I was seeing first hand vs what the average Turkish girl was seeing online. Curious about what was a stereotype and what was true. What was tradition and what was commonplace. That is one of the other beautiful things about music – you can close your eyes and just take in the sounds, or you can research the how, the what behind the song and learn.
Music stimulates parts of our brain, it engages our physical body, it can alter our moods. It is even said that music is at the center of what it means to be human. That’s an interesting claim considering that we often talk about humans as being visual creatures without perhaps exploring how other senses influence what we ‘see’. But it’s perhaps most interesting because of how little we consider, research or leverage music in the consumer good space.
Music is just one area. What else are we not exploring in our research to better understand people? And in our quest to tie every answer neatly around a question, what depth of reflection and introspection are we missing out on; both for the people we serve, and for ourselves?
Sources
https://our.auburn.edu/aujus/physiological-and-psychological-effects-of-music/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3741536/
https://sharedvision.org/2019/06/13/an-introduction-to-how-music-affects-your-brain/
5 reasons Adam Conley pays attention to music:
1 | Music we connected with early can remain our center point of gravity.
I actually have some friends that have a philosophy that the center point of your gravity goes back to when you were discovering music for the first time by yourself or you had the choice of the world as your oyster. You're in your early teens, into your late teens. I get my own choice of music and people. That's the stuff that you're going to always love. You're always going to go back to that, revisit it and say, this is still so much about what defines me.
2 | Finding your rebellion through alternative musical preferences.
There is a rebelliousness. Let me tell you about where I've come from in the lyrics and what I've been up against, and what I'm still a little bit not OK with. And to your point about defining yourself through your music. Who am I? I wanna be a little bit more rebellious even though I'm like the suburban kid but how do I? How do I represent some of that rebellion that I hear in this music where they have this alternative perspective.
3 | Like music, human insights is about connecting with people.
To me just as beautiful as the output of music is the process. To bring this back to insights. How do we really get into the underbelly of what drives human behavior? There's different human behavior for different types of individuals based on where they come from, based on what they find important. How do we infuse that together and relate back to those different groups of people or relate to a specific group of people? That's the way music works. Who am I speaking to and what am I speaking about? Sometimes a musician will put something out and be shocked - you hear this all the time - by how it impacts an audience of people that doesn't look or feel like who they thought it would be. Because it's not them. They influenced a wide audience that has nothing to do with who they are, what they're about, where they came from. It just touches people differently because they feel something in it that they can connect to.
4 | When you allow yourself to get uncomfortable, you have room to be blown away by something unexpected.
One of the best things that ever came to me in my progression of listening to music was to stop trying to put myself into a bucket of, ‘I'm a guy that listens to this type of music’. When I was growing up, it was, ‘OK, like I can't listen to hip hop because I like punk music’. And I also played basketball and that's highly influenced by hip-hop and it's like, ‘Well. Why not?’ Right? So then you expand into that and then you just have to continue to expand and expand and learn from all these different things. And just like everything in life, the more you let yourself be uncomfortable because it's not your go-to logical choice of the things that you're already aware of. The more you're open to the idea of being blown away by something that you never expected to have heard or be blown away by.
5 | Music expands and evolves, just like people can and do.
It's so much bigger than that, so there's so much to unwrap. Just like human behavior where it's a multivariant thing that is brought to you by so many different people and influences that it's hard to dissect, don't define it. Because music is best when it doesn't have a definition. You don't want to put it in the box. Evolution is what makes music beautiful. Just like human behavior, don't put people into a box.
Listen to the episode with Adam Conley:
