How voiceovers can change the face of video marketing

As video marketing becomes prevalent in modern consumer decision-making, entrepreneurs, advertisers, public figures, and businesses are seeking strategies to improve the efficacy of video campaigns. And while various elements can help to make marketing videos more persuasive, such as clever editing techniques or engaging visuals, one particularly impactful factor stands out — the use of voiceover narration.

Narration can be an extremely powerful way to connect with an audience and help them understand the story you're telling. The right voiceover can convey emotion, set the tone, and provide information in a clear, concise way.

At first glance, it may seem that there is no difference between a video that features one narrator and another featuring multiple voices. However, the latest research has shown that the number of voices can significantly and consistently impact how consumers process and respond to marketing messages—even though consumers themselves are not aware of it.
 

In her paper “More Voices Persuade: The Attentional Benefits of Voice Numerosity”, SMU Associate Professor of Marketing Hannah Chang found that incorporating additional voices into a narration can heighten its persuasiveness by drawing attention to the marketing message.

Her findings are supported by large-scale datasets involving crowdfunding product videos and video advertisements and controlled experiments. The findings showed that more voices were associated with improved crowdfunding project outcomes, ad effectiveness, purchase likelihood, and willingness to pay. Associate Professor Chang collected data from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, which often sees entrepreneurs harness the power of videos to pre-sell a product.

Besides examining the impact of the number of voiceovers, the research — supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 Grant — also delved into how the rate of speech can influence the message and compared these design elements to the efficacy of other commonly used techniques for video design such as visual variation and scene cuts.

Here are three key takeaways on how aligning different voices with aspects of one's marketing strategy can prove highly effective at boosting engagement and influencing consumers' decisions in today's digital landscape.
 

1. Amplify the message through the number of narrator voices

Marketing videos rely heavily on persuasive messaging, and it has been established that consumers are more likely to be persuaded by a particular message depending on the number of voices. Associate Prof Chang and her co-authors at Cornell University and INSEAD have termed this principle the “voice numerosity effect”. The persuasive power of a marketing video is enhanced when it employs more narrating voices to narrate a message, particularly when conveying simpler messages, compared to hearing the same voice narrate the exact same message.

In particular, Associate Prof Chang's research has shown that the number of voices can significantly impact how consumers process and respond to marketing messages. For example, in Apple’s video introducing its new AirPods Max, two different narrators describe the unique features of this fitness-focused earbud. In comparison, a video introducing the new Macbook Pro has only one narrator describing all the product’s key features and selling points.

Conversely, the findings demonstrated that for more difficult-to-comprehend product messages, such as those that are delivered quickly or contain a great deal of technical information, having just one narrator is more effective. This makes sense since a complex message requires more focus and attention from the listener.


2. Multiple narrating voices draw attention to the message

In today’s digital landscape, consumer attention is elusive. There are countless channels and available videos, news articles, and podcasts that consumers can attend to, yet we can only attend to one thing at any given moment—brands and companies are competing harder for consumers’ attention than ever before. 

The human voice is a complex and rich stimulus, with the potential to evoke vastly different responses in listeners depending on factors such as the speaker's gender, age, background, and emotional state.

Scientific research has shown that hearing human voices activates specific regions of the brain and causes increased attention to be directed toward the person speaking. Other studies have also shown that simply hearing another person's voice can elicit more processing from our brains than different types of auditory stimuli like music or environmental noises. Given these findings, it is clear that the human voice is an inherently powerful sensory cue that plays a vital role in our psychological response to others' words and actions.

For messages that are simpler to comprehend (presumably, it is easier for consumers to understand how a new wireless headphone works than how a new disruptive technology works), it was found that having multiple narrators can draw attention and improve comprehension and retention.

This likely happens because, in a video with multiple voices in the voiceover narration, the change in the narrator’s voice draws our continued attention and processing of the next piece of a spoken message, which might have been lost otherwise, ensuring the message is fully processed.
 

3. Up the number of narrating voices to influence consumer behaviour and improve marketing outcomes

When it comes to creating persuasive marketing videos, having multiple voices can be more effective to appeal to a wide range of customers. Marketers can ensure that various potential customers feel like they are being spoken to directly. Using multiple voices can make a video more engaging and entertaining, which can help keep viewers engaged until the end. Entrepreneurs, product managers, marketers, and video designers simply cannot improve all the design elements of a video.

As such, the impact of the number of voices on the bottom line should not be ignored. Associate Professor Chang discovered that on Kickstarter, for each additional voice in the video of a crowdfunding project, the average project sees a 39 percent increase in pledged amount, 38 percent more customers backing the project, and a 6.5 percent greater probability that the project is successfully funded.


With the new research on the voice numerosity phenomenon just beginning, there is still much to be learned about how other factors influence this effect. For example, Associate Professor Chang has also discovered that the effect of voice narration in a video can be moderated by speech rate — that is, how quickly a message is delivered in a given voice.

According to her, messages presented by multiple voices at faster speeds tend to have lower project outcomes than those presented by a single voice or numerous voices at slower rates. This finding suggests that cognitive processing may play an essential role in determining the effects of voice numerosity.

In today's digital age, it's more important than ever to use video marketing to connect with your audience. The average person spends 100 minutes a day watching online videos, and over 40 percent of consumers surveyed in “How People Shop with YouTube” say they have purchased products discovered on the online video-sharing platform. Not only are videos a great way to communicate a message, but they can also be very effective in increasing website traffic and boosting conversions.

Thus, besides crowdfunding entrepreneurs, companies in advertising and fast-moving consumer goods industries could benefit from a deeper understanding of voice numerosity, which provides crucial insights into what has otherwise been a largely unexplored area of research.