Music and lyrics in commercials: a cross-cultural comparison between commercials run in the Dominican Republic and in the United States.

Introduction

Relatively few studies in advertising have had music as the central focus. Bruner (1990) noted that as of 1990 fewer than 20 studies in marketing had concentrated on music. None of those studies examined the role of lyrics. Most of the work on music in advertising has pertained to

either the effects of certain structural elements of music such as texture (Van Stone 1960), pitch (Scherer and Oshinsky 1977), and tempo (Holbrook and Anand 1990; Wedin 1972) or the global effects of music on behavior (e.g., Gorn 1982) or on affective responses (e.g., Park and Young 1986; Stout and Leckenby 1988).

An inherent but infrequently stated assumption of studies on the "effects" of music in advertising is that such "effects" are universal and thus occur equally across time, situations, and individuals. A second implicit assumption is that the effects of music can be studied adequately in isolation from other elements of commercials such as lyrics and video. That somewhat reductionist perspective is at odds with the rich literature on music from such music theorists as Iser (1978) and Meyer (1956, 1967) and from consumer behavior theorists such as Scott (1990), who argue that music, like language, has the potential to invoke complex, culture-dependent symbolic schemata. Researchers drawing from the classical conditioning or affective response perspective have seen no need to study the use of music and lyrics in advertising for different cultural contexts because presumably any cross-cultural differences would be insignificant. However, research showing that music and lyrics are used differently in different cultures would call into question the usefulness of a research tradition of manipulating certain structural elements of music and assuming that the effects are global and universal.

We empirically examine the use of music and lyrics in commercials run in the United States and compare it with the use of music and lyrics in commercials run in the Dominican Republic (D.R.). First, we briefly review present theoretical perspectives on the role of music in advertising and address the need to conceptualize music as a culturally situated variable. Second, we discuss the structure of Dominican TV media, the influence of U.S. media culture in the Dominican Republic, and Dominican TV programming and commercials. We then develop a set of propositions about cross-cultural differences in the extensiveness of music and lyrics in commercials, the style of commercial music used, and the product meanings conveyed in lyrics. The propositions are tested in a content analysis of commercials sampled from two different cultures (the D.R. and the U.S.) with different language systems (Spanish and English). Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the study of music in advertising.