INSIGHT
WHY MUSIC
MARKETING?
KARRI WINN
12.12.23
Music Regenerates.
Earthsongs marketing call to action is a call to feel. Inspiring regeneration in the hearts and minds of billions of people is a big lift. Transforming human consciousness at a global scale requires more than science and data, newsletters, petitions, and awesome technology.
The regeneration movement needs a soundtrack.
The transformational power of music is well-documented. Music is so effective at motivating people, seducing attention, and swaying emotion that it has been co-opted by global industry to manipulate perception of products and services in the pursuit of profit. The science of music in advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry.
The problem is the solution.
In the same way music can be used to capture attention and primal instincts, regenerative brands can put their message to music to nourish human consciousness growing systemic well-being and vitality.
Earthsongs designs music media to evoke life vitalizing emotions and meaningfully engage popular culture in a regenerative metamorphosis.
Music In Advertising
Music is advertising gained commercial momentum across the 20th century. In 1929, General Mill's used an ad jingle for Wheaties cereal, which was enormously successful. The company made a fortune and the music in advertising industry was born.
In 1971, Coca Cola produced a novel TV commercial, “The Real Thing, Coca Cola What the World Needs Today”. This was a breakthrough moment in music advertising. Coca Cola's Hilltop Ad perfectly synthesized music and meaning to sell a product. More importantly, the ad connected the idea of Coca Cola to the aspirational feelings of world peace. This ad achieved quintessential brand positioning.
Today, although brands have replaced jingles largely with pop music, music in advertising is an entrenched feature in global marketing. Music is used ubiquitously in advertising because it is enormously effective at alluring people’s attention and shaping their perception. Music seduces and puts a spell on people!
Advertisers use music to hijack people's attention in order to sell largely meaningless stuff representing an economic system destroying nature. Mainstream advertising is part of the industrial system degenerating people and planet. Global commercial brands use music in a way that amounts to a kind of modern piracy; commercials are designed specifically to manipulate people for profit and in the process, they deteriorate society by degenerating individual health and well-being. Moreover, the global supply chains behind these products despoil nature.
Inspired People = Inspired Choices
Music Can Regenerate Advertising
The permaculture design mantra says that the problem is the solution. Regenerative advertising can cultivate human flourishing and transform toxic commerce into sacred economics. Music is the heart of regenerative advertising because of its power to unite people and inspire meaningful participation in a purposeful global community.
Music Marketing
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Uniquely enhances memorability
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Amplifies and reinforces (brand) identity and messaging
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Focuses emotional energy and drives change
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Makes complex ideas relatable
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Invites attention
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Promotes ideas
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Establishes authority and credibility via musicians
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Makes meaning
Music Makes Meaning.
Regenerative Advertising
Regenerative advertising brings people to life. This happens when people experience feelings and emotions that enliven their sense of vitality. People come alive when their intrinsic fundamental human needs are satisfied. When people can express their creativity and identify, feel belonging, meaningfully participate, develop self-efficacy and potential, people’s sense of aliveness grows and brightens.
Regenerative advertising is not transactional; it is intended as a gift to the recipient. Just like William McDonough’s infamous cherry tree in full blossom, this is regenerative advertising the way Nature intends. The cherry tree doesn’t just make enough blossoms to attract its pollinators, the tree bejewels the landscape with its beauty and brings its gifts generously to all. The tree gives more than it takes. Reciprocity is Nature's gift economy.
Regenerative advertising with music can positively stimulate well-being sensations, e.g., relaxation, beauty, meaning, belonging, and sense of purpose. Advertisers and film soundtrack designers already know the basic psychological effects of music on people, but there isn’t a broad strategy of using music in this way to amplify regeneration.
Music Regenerates Body, Mind, and Spirit
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Stimulates dopamine – the body’s feel good chemical
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Promotes relaxation and reduces harmful stress
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Positively affects the parasympathetic nervous system - the body's down regulating rest and digest system
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Brings people together
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Inspires meaning, identity, and sense of spiritual truth
Music Inspires Conviviality
Regenerative Advertising is a tool for conviviality. This means that the message and medium of the ad design emotionally connects us to place, nature, and each other. It brings us meaning, beauty, and spiritual alignment. Regenerative advertising through music enlivens our bodies with vital agency and empowers us to act for a noble cause. Well-curated music nourishes identity through social connection and purposeful participation.
Regeneration: Music, Message, Design
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Does the message manipulate people for profit or inspire people with beauty and awe? enhance a person’s felt sense of vitality?
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Does the message promote a regenerative solution to fundamental human needs?
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Does the design bring us closer to the natural world?
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Does the message include the more-than-human world?
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Are the message, motivation, and design salutogenic?
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Does the message promote the conditions conducive to life?
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Is the advertising motivation reciprocity with Nature?
Music turns feelings into actions.
Music Is A Call To Feel
A regenerative call to feeling (RCTF) disrupts the advertising normative call to action (CTA). Instead of prompting a person to buy, click, donate, register, find out more, or download now, a RCTF focuses on inspiring feelings. Feelings are the roots of intrinsic motivation, identity, and self-actualization.
A regenerative call to feeling is a heart-centered communication designed to connect with a person emotionally in ways that satisfy fundamental authentic human needs; a RCTF enhances individual well-being and promotes holistic health.
Regenerative advertising prioritizes reciprocity - just like Mother Earth! Giving gifts is the heart of Earth's sacred economics. Regenerative brands and causes grow regenerative futures by investing in systemic well-being and vitality.
Designing regenerative futures begins in the present by regenerating people’s bodies, hearts, and minds. Finding ways to heal loss of connection with the earth, feelings of despair, loneliness, and meaninglessness are essential to creating a world where all life thrives. Finding ways to nurture inner resilience and equanimity is important to ameliorate toxic stress and improve individual and community-wide health. Music is a very powerful personal and social medicine that can amplify well-being in people's bodies, hearts, and minds! Music with video storytelling can build shared visions of the future, pollinate people's thinking with possibilities, and expand our collective sense of what it means to be human and aligned with our living planetary kin.
Music enhances being alive.
Regenerating Kinship Belonging
We want the fancy regenerative technologies to harmonize human living with the natural world. Even more than these know-how solutions, Earthsongs wants to rekindle humanity's kinship with the more-than-human world. Kinship still exists in the world's indigenous cultures. Kinship is not a primitive feeling, it is true wisdom and sophistication of being human and belonging to the world. Feeling a sense of kinship with the more-than-human world is humanity's oldest and most precious intangible inheritance. We say that is true even honoring all extant religions, feeling a sense of belonging, a sense of being an intrinsic part of our planet, is human.
The regeneration movement can’t be just a cool idea and set of design principles, the movement needs to find an emotional and spiritual home inside our hearts.
Care for earth and care for people naturally extends from these feelings. Life-centered feelings and recognition of the interdependent web of life live in the heart of the regeneration movement.
Instead of trying to convince people, Earthsongs approach is emotive; we seek to enliven, uplift, and fill people up with beauty through song and musical experience.
UNITE | CONNECT | ACTIVATE | ENGAGE
ADVERTISING
ETYMOLOGY
The Proto Indo European root, AD (adhi in Sanskrit), means “to, near, at”. The origins root of advertising meant to direct one’s attention, to turn toward, or make aware. Advertising is the process of becoming consciously aware (of something). The commercial sense of the word emerged in the 18c to call attention toward a good for sale.
Mother Earth invented advertising! Flowers, Smells, Texture, Shapes, Bird Songs, Frog Songs, Crickets, Roars, Sound of Rain, Wind, Waves, Acacia Thorns, Gemstones, Sunsets, Moonrises!