Balloon Your Profitability with Music

How in the world can music increase profitability for a retailer these days? The market for selling it is competitive, seeing as there are all those 99¢ personalized music downloads. And even 99¢ is too high for some people when Pandora’s free service will learn the kind of music each of us likes best and then play it anywhere we’ve got Internet.
     Well, there are ways:

• Use music to pace customers. When you play faster music in a store or restaurant, people tend to make their selections and complete their purchases more quickly. According to researchers at Western Kentucky University, when slower music is played as background in a fine dining restaurant, patrons stay longer, but eat about the same amount of food. To make it profitable, you’d want to be sure to serve alcohol, since the researchers also found that slower music leads to more alcohol consumption.
• Play music with lyrics if you want shoppers to select items from habit without much thought. Researchers at Columbia University and Northwestern University find that noticeable music helps head off arguments shoppers might make to themselves about the purchase. On the other hand, if you want a shopper to carefully analyze the purchase decision, either do not have music or use music that is barely noticeable. If you’re wanting customers to try new brands or new products, delete intrusive music.
• Use music to project a store personality. Research findings from psychologists at University of Melbourne indicate that the music should reflect a personality that fits how your target customers want to see themselves.
• Sell music that people can’t get elsewhere. Cracker Barrel, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Target each have arranged to sell house brand special edition CDs.
• Breed earworms. That’s the term University of Cincinnati researchers use to refer to tunes that get stuck in consumers’ brains, repeating involuntarily. When those earworms were bred from melodies heard at your store or in ads for your store, each repetition is a reminder to consider coming back again. Last spring, Holiday Inn featured a song titled “You Always Make Me Smile” in an ad campaign. The song gained popularity on its own, and now there have been well over 800,000 viewings of the music video. Perhaps it helps that the video is documenting 4,000 people setting a record for the world’s largest water balloon fight.

Click below for more:
Use Music to Motivate, Not Disrupt
Play and Sell Store Theme Music