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Business English: Shoppers dance to retailers' tune
It is an unusually warm summer night in London, and the courtyards of the bars and cafes in Soho are packed with people jostling to soak up the last few hours of sun.Not so inside the three-storey Urban Outfitters store on nearby Oxford Street, where a long line of people are waiting to pay for their purchases. In spite of the evening's humidity, they seem patient about waiting as they unconsciously tap their feet in time to the infectious beats of The Bang Gang Deejays filling the store.
Sales remain steady in spite of the heat - which may have something to do with Urban Outfitter's employment of a full-time musical director at the retailer's headquarters in Philadelphia in the US.
Retailers have long known that the right song on the overhead speakers can keep shoppers in a store. Such is the power of music over consumer behaviour, claim the advertising executives, academics, music consultants and market researchers who are all part of a cottage industry springing up around retailers using music to attract and keep clientele.
Increasingly, their focus is on tapping into the subtle brain chemistry underlying music's effects on customers, identifying which artists and songs work best on which audiences.
From a retailer's perspective, the right music sets the tone for promoting certain lifestyles that surround products - and that, they hope, leads to sales. The science of using music as a strategic backdrop for selling is imperfect, but experts and retailers believe they are obtaining fresh insights.
"Does music give commercial interests an unfair advantage over the consumer? Absolutely," says Daniel Levitin, a record producer turned neuroscientist. He heads the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal and is the author of last year's This Is Your Brain on Music .
"Music seems to have this special ability to trigger emotion and release chemicals in the brain that cause humans to bond, although in some cases they may be bonding with a brand or a product," Mr Levitin says.
Selecting music to influence consumer behaviour is a painstaking art. Not only is the science that informs it uncertain; its effects on the bottom line can be hard to quantify. "There has been very little established correlation measured between music and actual sales," says Ruth Simmons, managing director of Soundlounge, a London-based consultancy. "This is still a young science and it is hard to isolate all the effects. What we do have a feel for is how music influences people's thoughts and actions."
No one disputes that the longer a customer remains in a store, the more likely it is that a purchase will be made. But what if shoppers hate the music? A study in 2004 found that music could work against retailers. While 20 per cent of those surveyed said music encouraged them to linger in stores (rising to 27 per cent for those aged 21 to 39), more than 40 per cent reported that "irritating, annoying or offensive music encouraged them to leave the store altogether". The study was conducted by On Hold Marketing Services, based in Louisiana, which provides call-waiting and instore music to more than 8,000 companies.
In a study last year with Entertainment Media Research, a London consultancy, Ms Simmons found that 90 per cent of respondents aged 15 to 49 liked hearing music in commercial environments and 82 per cent actively used music to change their mood.
The section of the brain that processes music, the cerebellum, also happens to govern emotional and physical responses to external stimuli, which scientists think could be the reason for music's power over the listener. But, as one of the oldest, least understood parts of the human brain, it remains largely uncharted territory.
It is not for lack of trying. As far back as the 1930s, a team of British industrial psychologists led by S. Wyatt and J.N. Langdon found that music increased the productivity of assembly line workers.
In 1938, Muzak Corp, founded in 1934, began rolling out its trailblazing "work music" programmes for organisations such as Prudential, Bell Telephone and even the US federal reserve banks. During the second world war, Britain and the US experimented with music in battle, hiring Muzak to help energise troops and military workers.
But even after all the studies, the makings of the perfect music mix remain fluid, as tastes change. That has not kept consultants from hatching their own special formulas, though, for handling the intersection of music and marketing.
Leanne Flask, vice president of music design for Texas-based music consultancy DMX, says the key is to focus on the overall atmosphere a retailer is trying to create, rather than individual songs or artists. "We ask about how they see the brand and we listen to their core values and interpret it musically for retail environments," says Ms Flask, a former concert pianist and opera singer.
DMX creates "signature" mixes from an archive of millions of licensed songs for 300 corporate clients and pipes the music into stores, offices and restaurants. "We put together mixes of 200 to 800 songs and update them remotely every 30 days or so. If there is a nautical theme that month for the store, we will make sure the music reflects that," she says.
"For coffee houses and places looking for more of a chilled-out feel, we have a programme we call Coffee House Rock," Ms Flask says. "I call it folk-forward, but I don't mean Woody Guthrie - I mean Sufjan Stevens."
Meanwhile, brands targeting a narrower demographic, such as Abercrombie & Fitch, the teen-focused clothing retailer, opt for fast beats and dance music, "even though they know it will annoy the parents," Ms Flask says. "They are marketing to the kids."
Despite the allure of getting to listen to music all day, the job is not as easy as you might think, says Ms Simmons. The toughest part is staying constantly abreast of music's various applications and implications in pop culture.
"You have to be very careful," she says. "I recall having a completely different impression of the standard, 'Singing in the Rain' before my musical director reminded me it was used in A Clockwork Orange for the rape scene." Reportedly, it was used because it was the only song that Malcolm McDowell knew all the words to.
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The Financial Times, 30.09.2008
© 2008 The Financial Times,
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