Stores Are Using Music to Make You Spend More

Here’s How

The self-proclaimed wine connoisseur swaggers into the wine shop, his Italian shoes shuffling across the pristine marble floors. The ceilings are vaulted. The displays are large, immaculately clean, and luxuriously appointed with Pinots, Cabernets, and Merlots. The air smells of French perfume. Our wine connoisseur is loving the atmosphere, and he’s ready to drop some serious dough.

But then it hits him. That … that sound. That loud, pulsating, repetitive sound with its unrelenting synthesized beat and auto-tuned shrieking. Is that … The Spice Girls? The man’s unsure, but suddenly the store’s allure is gone. The music has killed the mood. And our wine connoisseur is heading for the exit …

It’s no secret that stores use sights, smells, sounds and other stimuli in combination to produce particular atmospheres. For example, according to researchers, in order to create an upscale atmosphere, “A manager might choose classical music, subdued colors, elegant perfumes, cool temperatures, sparsely displayed merchandise, and low lighting.”

Clearly, my hypothetical wine shop missed the mark with its music selection. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Spice Girls — it’s just that in the given context, the music wasn’t really meshing with the store’s overall image.

The practice of designing store environments in order to project a certain image and induce certain behavior is known as atmospherics, a term coined by business professor Philip Kotler in 1973.

According to Kotler, in addition to helping stores attract and maintain a targeted customer base, atmospherics has the potential to be more important for generating sales than the actual products on the shelves. To quote from his 1973 Journal of Retailing article:

“In some cases, the place, more specifically the atmosphere of the place, is more influential than the product itself in the purchase decision. In some cases, the atmosphere is the primary product.”

For the purposes of this story, we’re going to hone in on one of the sensory details, or stimuli, that retailers use in…