Abstract
The mood and atmosphere of a service setting are essential factors in the way customers evaluate their shopping experience in a retail store environment. Scholars have shown that background music has a strong effect on consumer behavior. Retailers design novel environments in which appropriate music can elevate the shopping experience. While previous findings highlight the effects of background music on consumer behavior, the extent to which recognition of store atmosphere varies with genre of background music in sales spaces is unknown. We conducted an eye tracking experiment to evaluate the effect of background music on the perceived atmosphere of a service setting. We used a 2 (music genre: jazz song with slow tempo vs. dance song with fast tempo) × 1 (visual stimuli: image of coffee shop) within-subject design to test the effect of music genre on visual perception of a physical environment. Results show that the fixation values during the slow tempo music were at least two times higher than the fixation values during the fast tempo music and that the blink values during the fast tempo music were at least two times higher than the blink values during the slow tempo music. Notably, initial and maximum concentration differed by music type. Our findings also indicate that differences in scan paths and locations between the slow tempo music and the fast tempo music changed over time. However, average fixation values were not significantly different between the two music types.
Highlights
Scholars have shown that background music has a strong effect on consumer behavior (Bitner, 1992; North et al, 1999; Chebat et al, 2001; Alpert et al, 2005)
While previous findings highlight the effects of background music on consumer behavior, the extent to which recognition of store atmosphere varies with background music type in sales spaces is unknown
We used each genre with beat per minute (BPM) to create background music for the experiment (Music 1: jazz song with 88 BMP vs. Music 2: dance song with 137 BMP)
Summary
Music can have diverse effects on consumer behaviors, including emotion (Bitner, 1992; Tansik and Routhieaux, 1999; Eroglu et al, 2005; North et al, 2016), purchasing (North et al, 1999; Alpert et al, 2005), brand attitude and loyalty (Chebat et al, 2001; Grewal et al, 2003), subjective time recognition and time of stay in a store (Holbrook and Anand, 1990), and other behavioral variables (Turley and Milliman, 2000). Consumers automatically accepted the spaces given to them based on the products they chose to purchase. People have come to consider emotional experience clues (e.g., store atmosphere) to which they are exposed when selecting products. Demoulin (2011) found several spatial environmental elements closely related to atmosphere: view, lighting, noise, music, scent, and temperature. Background music is another element of atmospheric impact (Milliman, 1986; Duncan Herrington, 1996). Lusensky (2010) found that background music was the most important element in the experience of a space, and Kim (2016) found that consumers were often exposed to background music, second in frequency only to visual stimuli. Visual memory tends to last 1–2 s, whereas auditory memory tends to last 4–5 s, suggesting that humans remember auditory stimuli better than visual stimuli (Finney et al, 2001)
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