Revamping Consumer Behavior Trends: Millennials Versus Gen Z In The Music Advertising Sphere

‘What people listen to is more important for their sense of themselves than what they watch or read’

• Frith (2003: 46)

People hear music all the time around them. By listening to it purposely, going to concerts, and playing it. Besides conscious music listening, it is heard often in the background in grocery stores, elevators, or in the background of advertisements.

For Brands, Music may not be THE driver to get the consumer to buy a product, but buying is majorly driven by emotions, and music gets the consumers in the mindset to consider your product over the competitor brand.

Music in advertising has overall helped a brand in the following ways:

1. Help contribute in building a brand’s image
2. Help keep a brand in TOMA
3. Elevate the experience while interacting with the brand

The bifurcation made by marketers in audience sets into Baby Boomers, Millennials, GenZ etc. is an interesting one - the original purpose being to chalk out the stark differences in consumption behaviour, some areas of interest have shown similarities between these age groups.

Let’s look at the Millennials and GenZ.

Talk about Music, the GenZ folks are quite familiar with the music culture that Millennials grew up with…

If one drew two circles on music likings of the respective audience sets, These two Audience sets would see a huge overlap in terms of similar genre tastes, artists preferences, and of course; ads and jingles.

While the Millennials grew up watching and humming tunes that an Oscar-winning Indian artist made for a mobile network, the GenZs were presented ads with music artists with a snippet of a trending track, which stayed with the audience for some time, if it got viral!

The shift has been purely from the attention span that the audience can afford;

You had growing-up millennials who would give you a minute vs growing-up GenZs who give you 30 seconds.

Today brands and entertainment studios are looking to hook the millennials through nostalgia by reviving the 90’s content in a rebranded avatar, which may have yielded results but is a trend that’s already reaching fatigue (see movie remakes or remixes)

GenZs on the other hand are the first audience base that had access to all eras of music through the internet. Paying handsome sums to artists to get their songs attached to a brand is never a guaranteed success because the GenZs are the champions of authenticity - if they smell the ‘salesy-ness’ in a brand’s attempt to converse with them, they’ll immediately disengage.

So how does a brand ensure that it uses music to guide the emotions of a buyer to keep coming back for repeated business?

Brands need to add purpose to their collaborations in music! As mentioned earlier both Millennials and GenZs are living in the era of social media- where content is democratised - they enjoy and share content with which they resonate - be it a high-investment collaboration with an artist or a guy singing in the local train.

While the best way to ensure music is allied in the optimum way of the marketing mix is to have original brand-owned music pieces; the next best way is to create an ecosystem where brands partner with entities across the spectrum that inspire the audience to share and engage with the purpose of the collaboration in the first place- because we live in an era where information is easy to acquire and the audience values authenticity across all spectrums.