Hold messages have a bad rep in some quarters. When you listen to the worst examples of music on hold, you can see why.
Sound quality. Music choice. Voice choice. All of these things can make or break an on-hold experience. But something that’s sometimes overlooked is the script. And more specifically, clichés.
In this post, we’re looking at how an overused phrase with good intentions can actually have the wrong effect. 
PH Audio features in this week’s Print Week Magazine. Christian Peacock, sales and marketing director at Blackburns of Bolton, tells Print Week’s Deputy Features Editor Philip Chadwick about how OHM is an important marketing tool for the print industry.
The psychology of torture identifies repetition as a method of afflicting suffering. Let’s not go into the details because we’re heading on to a downer, but suffice it to say, repetition is not endearing. We’ll call it audioboarding. Most people are familiar with this particular method of audioboarding, a favourite on car journeys worldwide:
“Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet?”
Annoying isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Sorry. The repetition of the above question reflects the passenger’s desire to be distracted from the monotony of the journey, rather than the need to know exactly what time they’ll reach their destination.
At PH Audio we’re in the business of making music and voiceovers that fit a company’s image and brand. Sounding right for callers is critical and has lasting effects. I found an interesting piece of writing on ‘creative synaesthesia’ which brings me nicely onto this post: creatively, how does a company develop an on-hold marketing production or create an audio brand that fits with their branding?
Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. For example, you might see colours when you hear a particular sound.
But ‘artificial synaesthesia’, as it’s coined in the article I’ve linked to above, can help businesses to understand how consumers perceive brands. By artificially recreating and understanding how people take meaning from a particular word or sound, it’s then easier to create the most effective combinations of voiceovers, content, style and music. Ultimately, you want to be able to positively reinforce brand values in the mind of the consumer.
Companies spend a lot on symbols. On symbols that people associate with their name.
It’s kind of reductive, but in the simplest terms, advertising is about making an effective symbol that carries a full brand message. That’s why the Nike ‘Swoosh’ logo equals athletics. Equals running. Equals gold medals. Equals you running faster.
Advertising is about making a large concept into a picture. Reducing sentences and paragraphs into lines and squiggles.
It’s been about that for hundreds of years. About graphic identities carrying brands.
Now, of course, we’re producing much more than logos. We’ve got the internet, for one – we’ve got the viral videos and the microsites; the discussions across social media and becoming a company’s fan on Facebook. Now, businesses are creating fully branded ‘user experiences’.
But in the last century, we also got ways to produce better sounds, and faster. We have studios and microphones. And as this medium has grown and gone digital, so too have the agencies (we’re one!) who specialise almost exclusively in audio branding – not graphic-based branding. And on commercial radio, telly, the internet, businesses are using these agencies to compete for the most memorable sound.
I’ve recently been spending time out in the field watching our Business Development Team sign up new clients – it’s truly fascinating, and I’m sure psychologists would have a field day in such an environment.
Watching how they interact, how they exchange information, and how our potential clients respond to their presentations, will never get boring. So with this post I’m sharing my personal observations, and questioning the notion: can a product really sell itself? Or indeed, are F2F meetings intrinsic to the sale and the building of successful supplier-client relationships?
It’s 2010, which means it’s officially The Future. We’re all using jetpacks to get to work, using teleporters to go on city breaks, talking to family with our watches, that kind of thing.
Well, sort of. Google and Apple taking over the world besides, we’re not quite as advanced as our forefathers imagined. It’s easy to laugh at old science fiction stories, movies and games now we’re here, but some of them really did think we’d be in flying cars by now. Even Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most nerdy celebrated science fiction writers in the world, thought we’d be playing with gas monsters on Jupiter by next year.
So, in the spirit of predicting the future (and because it’s trendy to talk about the next decade), we thought we’d gather ideas about the way On-Hold Marketing might change and develop. Click ‘read more’ to see what we came up with.
The New Year is a time for change, a time when we revaluate who we are and what we do. But wait — before you think, ‘Here we go, more spiel about how we should go on a diet or give up smoking’, we’re actually talking about how making small changes to the way you approach marketing could really help your business flourish in 2010.
We’re a patient bunch, us Brits. Along with fax machines, umbrellas and radar, we invented queuing.
We queue at Alton Towers. Queue at the post office. Queue for pints. Queue for burgers after too many pints. We’d queue for sleeping if somebody said it was the right and proper thing to do.
Waiting politely is a nationwide sport. To the rest of the world, we’re a country of hooligans, stag-doers, beer-drinkers and queue-ers. To rest of the world, we’re either battering each other, voicing baddies in Bond films, or standing quietly in a line.
But, according to new research by TalkTalk, there’s a problem with that stereotype.
As a country, we’re fast losing patience.
In the same way we now watch Blu-ray over Betamax, and listen to MP3s instead of cassettes, the technology for on-hold messaging has advanced greatly in the last ten years.
At PH Audio we’ve used a number of methods to deliver music on hold, and our use of audio technology is something we’re always looking to improve and develop. So, from CD players that jumped and warped, to digital playback with a lot of flexibility, in this post you’ll find our own rough audio technology timeline.