Just let me hear some of that rock ‘n’ roll music . . . any old way you choose it!
By Steve Moran
In order for this article to work right you need to hit play on the video below. Don’t bother watching it. For the purposes of this article the visuals are of ZERO value. If I could figure out a way to legally just embed a music player and skip the video, I would.
Come on do it . . . the music will make you feel good.
It turns out that mental associations are extremely powerful and those associations can really help or hurt the public’s perception of senior living and your marketing efforts.
Today Perceptions . . .
Mostly the public has an incomparably negative perception of senior living. They more or less see it like this:
Independent Living, CCRC, Life Plan Communities (whatever those are), Assisted Living, and Memory Care as being equal to the worst possible image of a nursing home you could ever imagine. Old folks wanting to escape, or drooling on their clothing, or comatose in a bed with tubes going in and out of opposite ends of their body. It is an image that is constantly reinforced by news stories and and television and movie dramas and comedies.
When They Visit
You are playing the music in the background, right?
The good news is that when they visit a senior living community they will see something different that what their imagination tells them to expect. Except that while walking into a senior living community is a “no big deal” every day experience for us, it is still kind of scary because it is unfamiliar.
While it rarely happens anymore, if someone walks in and smells bodily waste immediately, the place has a heightened level of scariness triggering powerful emotions that are not necessarily rational (though in rare cases, maybe even are rational) but are none the less real.
Feel Good Experience
We don’t quite know why it is, but music can have a powerful effect on our emotions — mostly happiness and sadness. More powerful for the sake of this discussion, music from our past is more likely to to evoke positive rather than negative feelings (obviously not 100% of the time for every person). So now the question is how do we take advantage of this phenomena to improve people’s perception of senior living and your community.
The answer is pretty simple . . . Rock ‘n’ Roll playing in your lobby and maybe even in your corridors and other common areas. You will need to experiment and see what works best for you and your residents.
You might also look at how to pipe great scents into your common areas — there are machines, or it could be a cookie baking machine, a popcorn maker or cinnamon in with your coffee.
These little things can make a huge difference in how much visitors like you and how easy or hard your sales effort is.
Rock On!
