It has been written time and time again from plays to movies that the athlete is the hero and always gets the girl. While the nerd is usually left by the way side or at best the tech savvy sidekick. But the television show “The Big Bang Theory” has set out to change that image. The show is about four buddies that all work at the same university specializing in their own respective fields. In this show they are the quirky, lovable heroes that have manage to woo the loves of their lives. Since the show is one of most popular shows on television right now, this is all probably pretty familiar to you already. What you may not realize is that they have provided us with a very analogous way of looking at in-store music and messaging. In episode 19 of season four the posse is out on a hijinks filled excursion, which leads them to their car breaking down and the matter of fixing it is left at hand. Leonard (the leader) asks his friends, “Something’s wrong, I’m not getting any gas. Anybody know anything about internal combustion engines?” The group all smiles and answers in the affirmative. This leads Leonard to enquire, “Does anybody know how to fix an internal combustion engine?” After a few embarrassing looks are exchanged in the vehicle the gang sadly replies that they do not. This funny situation can be applied to in-store music and messaging, because although you may know about it and understand its application. You may not be as well versed in it to make it work to your full advantage. Such as do you know how often you should play messages to optimize its effect? Are you aware of how to best use the music that plays in the down time? Have you thought of how to use this tool to actually make you money? Well fear not these are some of the things we will be covering in this blog post.
First off is the actual messaging itself. You need to have messages that are effective and spaced apart enough that they do not become white noise. If your current provider does not do scripts for the messages (which if they are worth their weight they will) then you may be left with the task of doing it on your own. The formula is simply intro, message, and direction.
Lastly, I want to speck on the matter of what to do with the time in-between the messaging. This is the time for you to play some music that puts your customers at ease. I will be writing a separate blog post on just this matter alone but I can give you a few pointers to get started. First of all unless you are a biker bar or a nightclub the music should all be G rated and family fun. So sticking to your demographic and playing music that they want to hear is a good first step. The provider of you music should also be able to give you an option of doing a mix between genres. Just one or the other should not be sufficient because it does not give it enough mix that will allow for the customers to want to listen. For instance I like classic rock but if the store I am spending about an hour in plays only classic rock I may eventually tune it out and possibly even miss the messages that they want me to hear. So it is a good idea to have a good mix the compliments one another.
