I hope you’ll stick around (insert classical music)

Hello, thank you for coming back. I have a lot to tell you!

This week I spent the majority of time researching sensory marketing and especially auditory marketing. Through my internship at Duke with Dr. Gavan Fitzsimons, I was offered access to unpublished data from the last couple of years that outlined sensory marketing.

Music and Auditory

To start off, I learned about music and especially tempo. Studies done at Duke found that tempo greatly affects human’s perception of time. Slower music often makes humans feel like time is moving much slower whereas fast-paced music makes individuals feel like time is sped up. This information can be useful for stores that want their customers to be in the store for longer with the hopes that increased time in the store will cause customers to purchase more. This is a study I want to try on my own as well. I plan on randomly selecting a few students from each grade level and asking them to try and raise their hand when one minute has passed and then repeat the experiment with both high and low tempo music and see if the independent variables alter the results. A modern technology website (https://www.promotion.tech/blog/how-music-affects-shopping-behaviors) talked about the American Psychological Association, stating “that music was the key sensory factor in making impulse purchases. They (APA) discovered that shoppers who made a purchase they hadn’t planned on making spent $32.89 more on average when music was playing than impulse shoppers who were not exposed to music” (Mark Pavlish). I further learned about a Duke study regarding Christmas music. In the study, Duke proffessors wanted to test the effect that religious Christmas music versus non-religious Christmas music had on charitable giving. Here are some pictures of their study and the results:

I also learned about auditory marketing. For example, many sport car companies, including BMW, actually mike and amp the car’s engine sound through the car speakers to give the car that classic “sporty” sound that customers desire.

Touch

I then began to research touch in marketing and continued to come across Harlow’s monkey experiment (1958) which I learned about earlier this year in AP Psychology (see image below). In the experiment, the researchers found that the monkeys considerably preferred the “mother” monkey’s touch to the other fake monkey’s nutrients.

Smell

I then proceeded to learn about how smell can be incorporated into marketing. Duke’s data wrote about an experiment with Cinnabon stating, “‘[t]he bakeries are intentionally located in malls or airports, not outside, so smells can linger. Over time, the company has recognized that aroma is a huge part of its formula,’ Ms. Cole says. Putting ovens in the back of stores at a test location ‘significantly’ lowered sales, she says. Cinnamon rolls are baked at least every 30 minutes. Some store operators heat additional sheets of brown sugar and cinnamon to keep the aroma in the air, she says.” – Duke Psychology. The Duke study also looked at another household brand, Dunkin Donuts, and its marketing strategies. In one ploy, Dunkin would release coffee fragrance on a train when the Dunkin jingle was playing and they found that doing so increased Dunkin sales at train station locations by 13%. This shows how smell can be utilized to encourage (nudge) people to purchase but more importantly demonstrates how the best marketing techniques stimulate multiple different senses. It is important for companies to not just appeal to any one sense, rather, multiple of them combined.

Sight

The last sense that I investigated was sight. Of course, we all know that what we see plays a big role in what we buy but the part that I found more interesting was how products can sometimes be too nice to consume. Check out this conclusion from the Duke study:

All of this research on sensory marketing got me thinking about our modern world and especially technology. Many of us shop online without feeling, smelling, hearing, seeing, or tasting the product before purchasing. Many Americans choose ease of buying over the amount of work that is required to go to a retail store and see the product first hand. Richard Thaler agrees with this sentiment; he argues that people will choose whatever requires the least amount of work. This can be seen in a study he talks about in Nudge. Thaler talks about a study in a school cafeteria that wanted to incentivize healthy eating. They found that by placing the healthier food upfront and unhealthier food in a less convenient location people would be much more likely to choose the healthier food. I guess we are just all lazy. Anyway, all of these thoughts ultimately prompted me to question whether sensory marketing is becoming more or less important in society today and better yet, how powerful it would be for a product to be both easy to buy online and also sensory-stimulating when appearing on the website. Also, the extent to which sensory marketing affects humans consciously versus subconsciously and how I can encourage my community to be more informed consumers.

I concluded this week’s research by thinking about possible studies that I could run at Durham Academy. I concluded that in the month of February it would be worthwhile to run a bunch of small studies to just practice the process of running an experiment. I plan on requesting to run a study at the school store or at a club bake sale where I will utilize different types of music in various ways to see if they enhance sales. With the help of Mrs. Frasher and Mr. Biersach, I have also been thinking of ways that I can encourage people to do good in my community even if they aren’t related to music. Thus, I have thought about putting small basketball hoops on top of the school’s recycling bins and compost bins in the bathroom. I know from my experience, I always try to shoot my trash into the bin and am wondering if putting a hoop on top of the bins will encourage my school to compost and recycle without forcing anyone to do it.

Ultimately, there are a lot of contemporary issues going on in the world right now and at the end of the project, I want to utilize what I’ve researched to make a big change in my community. As of now, I am either thinking about nudging people to get vaccinated and wear masks or trying to see if I can offer music in testing environments at school because I believe that music has the ability to calm people down and maybe even allow them to perform better. Of course, I would need to test this hypothesis first and have talked about running studies with fake tests in Mrs. Frasher’s AP Psychology classes.

I look forward to sharing next week’s research endeavors with you. As of now, I plan on reading some theses that were researched by Davidson undergraduates Shelby Graff, David Martin, and Douglas Macintosh as well as continuing to read more music-specific articles! I hope you’ll stick around (insert classical music).