When it comes to strategic brand management, how powerful is a good jingle? Open the Yellow Pages to the plumbing section and you’ll likely find a Roto-Rooter ad with its jingle prominently featured in wavy text, surrounded by musical notes:

Roto-Rooter, that’s the name
And away go troubles down the drain!

Admit it, you didn’t just read that jingle, you sang it in your head. And then you probably hummed it aloud. Now, there’s a jingle with staying power. The ditty was first performed in 1954 on WLS Radio in Chicago, by Captain Stubby (one of the voices in the Jolly Green Giant commercials) and his group, the Buccaneers. It recently celebrated its 50th year of continual use. “Over the years, we’ve tried adding more verses and thought about changing it, but we could never find anything else that worked as well,” says Paul Abrams, a Roto-Rooter spokesman.

Lee Weinblatt, founder and chief executive officer of the PreTesting Company in Tenafly, N.J., has tested hundreds of TV commercials that use jingles. He says Roto-Rooter’s brand-building ditty hits home with consumers because it meets the following criteria:

The product name is in the song. The overwhelming majority of failed jingles overlook this key component, Weinblatt points out.

The jingle describes a benefit. All the best jingles do, from Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun to Double your pleasure, double your fun.

The jingle is given time to register with the public. Even the strongest jingle must be played for at least four to five months before it cuts through the marketplace clutter to register in people’s psyches.

The jingle is unique to the brand. You may know that the Bob Seger song “Like a Rock” advertises a truck, but what truck? “A famous song might instantly grab your attention, but unless the song is 100 percent in sync with your message and can eventually be owned by your brand, someone else will take it two months later, and you’re left with nothing,” Weinblatt warns. No one else but Roto-Rooter can ever use its famous tune.

An original jingle can cost $10,000 or more to produce (and famous songs $1 million and up to license). Testing the tune can add another $20,000 to $30,000 for a national rollout. But that’s small potatoes when you consider the selling power of a good jingle. A study in the Journal of Advertising Research found that 62 percent of people recalled seeing an advertisement for a particular product when they were given a verbal cue, as compared with 83 percent after being given a 10-second musical cue.

Max Sutherland, author of Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer, believes that messages delivered by jingles “go straight to our emotional/enter-tainment mind. Because of that, we recall and feel attached to music in a way that we don’t with news items.”

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