Pump up the volume—to lure more customers into purchasing ethical and sustainable products? A new study out of the University of Bath finds that about one-third of consumers say they care about brand ethics, but less than 5 percent of them act on those concerns; similar gaps arise with regard to the number of people who assert that they prefer green consumption versus the number who actually purchase green products.
So how can retailers bridge that gap? Let the music play! But not just any old tunes. They need to use “up-tempo, major-mode music.” Music theorists could provide much more detail about the differences between major and minor mode music, but for our purposes here, it probably is sufficient to understand that major mode music tends to sound happy, whereas minor mode music sounds more contemplative or melancholy. Tempo refers to speed; an up-tempo song is one that is fast.
By including cheerful beats in advertisements, this research suggests that retailers can diminish the gap between what consumers say they want and what they actually buy (often referred to as the “attitude–behavior gap”) by 40 to 50 percent. The study confirms these finding with hypothetical products in two distinct categories—an EcoCar and a reusable coffee mug—for which they showed participants advertisements featuring different music styles, then gauged their purchase intentions. According to the authors, they can “confirm the prediction that positive brand attitudes mediate the relationship between music liking and purchase intention” and that “major mode music strengthens the effect of positive brand attitudes on purchase intention. Additionally, … major mode music with a fast tempo can further strengthen the effect of positive brand attitudes on purchase intention.”
Sounds easy! Maybe too easy. If these findings fail to persuade you completely, you would not be alone. Commentators have challenged the notion, often based on their own shopping experiences, such as when one recounted leaving a store in annoyance mainly because it piped in loud, peppy, fast tempo music. Other questions pertain to the design of the study. For example, consumers representing different age cohorts likely respond very differently to the same song; the tempo and volume that a Gen Z shopper finds exhilarating might be grating and unpleasant to their Gen X parents’ ears.
If the study can be replicated and confirmed though, it offers a compelling and promising tactic to encourage more responsible purchases of consumer products. If instead the findings cannot be confirmed, retailers will need to find another option. Cue the sad trombone.
Discussion Questions:
- Why might fast, happy music make consumers more likely to buy “green” products?
- Based on this summary, are you persuaded by this research? Visit https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EJM-01-2021-0017/full/html?skipTracking=true to access the abstract of the article. Does reading it change your assessment?
- What else can companies do to get customers to move from saying they care about sustainable products to actually buying those products?
Source: Tom Ryan, “Can Up-Tempo Music Move Shoppers to Buy More Green Goods?” Retail Wire, July 8, 2022; “Music Is Key to Converting Consumers’ Good Intentions to Actual Purchases in Ethical and Sustainable Markets,” ScienceDaily, June 29, 2022; Gordon Liu, Morteza Abolhasani, and Haiming Hang, “Disentangling Effects of Subjective and Objective Characteristics of Advertising Music,”, European Journal of Marketing 56, No. 4 (2022), pp. 1153-1183. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-01-2021-0017