How background music affects our interactions.

Chang and Kim’s findings will be particularly interesting to you if you’ve spent a lot of time during lockdowns watching movies.  They report that “Films in general, and background music in particular, have the capacity to create positive emotional responses with consumers. While the study centres on social enterprises, as prosocial marketing becomes increasingly important to mainstream companies, the implications of our findings can be more broadly relevant to the latter, especially those that communicate via a film. Through two experiments, this study tests whether the valence (inspiring vs. sad) of the background music in a corporate social responsibility film influences viewers’ perceived para-social interaction, their attitudes toward the diversity protagonist, and their attitudes toward the social enterprise brand.

We find that inspiring music leads to increased para-social interaction levels of its subcomponents of empathy, closeness, and elevation. In contrast, no such effect arises when sad music is used. Instead, the only para-social interaction subcomponent that is promoted is consumer feelings of pity.”

Dae Chang and Qurie Kim.  2022.  “A Study on the Effects of Background Film Music Valence on Para-Social Interaction and Consumer Attitudes Toward Social Enterprises.”  Journal of Business Research, vol. 142, pp. 165-175, https://soi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.12.050