The researchers — Klemens M. Knoeferle of the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo; Vilhelm Camillus Paus, of Saatchi & Saatchi in Oslo; and Alexander Vossen of the University of Siegen, in Germany — conducted a longitudinal experiment to determine whether and to what extent music played a role in influencing shoppers when stores were more or less crowded. The authors noted that customer spending tracked an inverted U-shape as stores became more crowded<\/strong>. They found that when stores weren’t crowded, music had little effect, but as social density increased, music with an up-tempo beat spurred spending<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In “An Upbeat Crowd: Fast In-store Music Alleviates Negative Effects of High Social Density on Customers’ Spending,” appearing in the September issue of\u00a0The Journal of Retailing<\/em>, the authors describe a six-week field experiment in 2014 that tested the interaction between manipulated music tempo and measured social density. The sample included 460 small stores and recorded a total of 43,676 observations about shopping basket value (SBV) and the number of purchased items. Compared with no music, as a store became more crowded, the average SBV was roughly 8 percent greater. The authors also observed that SBV was higher due to shoppers’ buying more items rather than more expensive ones.<\/p>\n Managerial implications were clear: first, the authors say, retail managers should be aware of crowding’s effect on spending patterns<\/strong> and find ways to control it; second, ambient music is a relatively easy tool for retailers to mitigate crowding effects<\/strong>; and third, the authors provide a metric for measuring when social density demands some lively tunes<\/strong>. In addition, when customers are few, retailers might save royalty fees by not playing music, and because fast music in crowded stores motivated customers to buy more low-priced items, managers should prepare for a run on impulse purchases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the\u00a0Journal of Retailing at New York University press release: If a store is crowded, people tend to buy more if the sound system is playing a fast-paced song rather… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[95],"tags":[192,96,67,12,98],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23509"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23509"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23513,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23509\/revisions\/23513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Shopping5.jpg\")
If a store is crowded, people tend to buy more if the sound system is playing a fast-paced song rather than a ballad<\/strong>. That’s what a team of researchers found in a field experiment across a chain of grocery convenience stores in Northern Europe.<\/p>\n