How Background Music Can Help Your Store or Restaurant’s Sales

By Rieva Lesonsky

You hear music every day when you’re out shopping or at restaurants. Most of the time, it’s just “background.” But did you ever stop to think about how that background music could be affecting what you do and buy? If you’re a retailer or restaurant owner, you should be.

Consider how teen/young adult clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch sets the mood for its stores with loud, throbbing music that effectively lures its target audience inside (while driving away anyone not in the right demographic). How can you employ some of the same tactics? BusinessInsider recently reported on seven ways background music can help or hurt a business, summarizing findings from a variety of academic sources.

1. Loud music makes shoppers go through a store faster, but doesn’t reduce how much they buy.
2. Slow-tempo music causes shoppers to go through a store more slowly and buy more. It also makes restaurant customers spend more time over their meal, but spend more.
3. Classical music prompted customers to spend more—and buy more expensive items—than Top 40 music did. (This test was conducted at a wine store.)
4. Classical music at a restaurant makes customers spend more than either Top 40 music or no music at all.
5. When does classical music backfire? It can make customers think your store or restaurant is “too expensive” for them or more expensive than it really is.
6. When music is played on-hold, customers are willing to wait longer before they hang up.
7. When people hear music they like, they perceive wait times as shorter than they really are.

Of course, not every test is going to work out the same way in the real world as it did in these experiments. (If it did, every store would be playing loud, slow, classical music.) However, it’s worth experimenting to see what different types of music have on your customers.

If you own a fast-food restaurant or other business where you want customers to move on quickly, try playing faster-paced music or turning up the volume. If you want them to linger, try something slow. Also match the music to your customers—if your target market is seniors, playing rap music while they wait in line to pay for their purchases or hang on-hold isn’t going to endear you to them.

One conclusion all these tips seem to point to: Music is better than no music at all—so make sure you’re taking advantage of the power of music to not only soothe the savage breast, but encourage sales.

Image by Flickr user Kevin Dooley (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Branding, Marketing, sales process, Small Business, small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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