Seth Ketron, marketing professor at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business, recently spoke with WCCO-TV’s Kirsten Mitchell about what makes jingles so effective as a marketing strategy.
From the story:
The first known radio jingle debuted on WCCO Radio in 1926, advertising General Mills’ Wheaties cereal.
“The way that we store music in our brains is a lot different from text, numbers, things like that. It goes a lot longer into our past and we remember music a lot longer than just a string of words,” said Seth Ketron, assistant marketing professor at the University of St. Thomas. “We tend to pay attention to what we call peripheral cues. And so those are things like jingles, the attractiveness of a spokesmodel or just the sheer number of arguments they make. People will pay more attention to that stuff than they will the core message of the argument.”
The most effective jingles are short, catchy, repetitive and – most importantly – memorable.