Title: Study - Lively Tunes Boost Sales in Crowded Stores

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

The ambience of stores has become an important success factor for retailers in recent years. One ambient factor that has received considerable research interest is social density—the number of shoppers per store area size. Social density presents retailers with an interesting dilemma: On the one hand, a busy store is desirable from a shop owner’s perspective, as more customers typically lead to higher sales. On the other hand, high social density often results in perceived crowding—shoppers’ subjective experience of limited personal space and control (Stokols, 1972), which is known to have negative psychological effects on customers in utilitarian settings (for a review, see Mehta, 2013). Consequently, retailers will be interested in ways to mitigate negative effects of high social density.  Consequently, and following repeated calls for research, we investigate whether the negative effect of crowding on retail outcomes can be compensated by additional, supplementary store ambience factors. Existing conceptualizations of crowding suggest that perceived crowding and associated negative downstream effects can be reduced by an arousal misattribution mechanism (“attribution model of crowding”, e.g., Worchel & Teddie, 1976; Worchel & Yohai, 1979).  

Specifically, when individuals that are aroused by violations of their personal space are exposed to additional cues that are plausible causes for arousal, they tend to misattribute at least some of the crowding-induced arousal to these additional cues (Worchel & Brown, 1984; Worchel & Yohai, 1979). This misattribution results in a reinterpretation of the original, crowding-induced arousal and thus a reduction of perceived crowding. In a store setting, such a reduction of perceived crowding should alleviate the negative effects of high density on spending. Thus, we propose that music tempo (i.e., the speed of a detectable pulse in music; Bruner, 1990) will moderate the impact of social density on spending, such that fast (i.e., arousing) music alleviates the negative effects of high social density. In order to test whether the tempo of in-store music moderates the influence of social density on sales, we conducted a large-scale field experiment in which we manipulated in-store music (slow, fast, no music) and measured social density. Shopping baskets from over 40,000 customers were analyzed. The results confirm the hypothesized moderating influence of music tempo on the effect of social density on spending. When social density was low to medium, instore music tempo did not impact the effect of social density on shopping basket value. However, when density was high, fast in-store music had a strong positive effect on basket value. Thus, consistent with an arousal misattribution account, (3) fast music is able to mitigate the negative effect of high density on individual shopping basket value.  

While the field experiment reported in the current study did not directly probe the proposed misattribution process, the observed pattern of results enables us to rule out several alternative explanations: 

For instance, the data are inconsistent with (1) conventional wisdom claiming that slow music should be more effective in crowded stores due to its calming effects, (2) a schema incongruity account positing that moderately incongruent combinations of ambient factors (e.g., high crowding-induced arousal and low music-induced arousal) should lead to the most favorable outcomes (Eroglu, Machleit, & Chebat, 2005), and (3) an arousal congruency account that would predict that matching density and music tempo in terms of their arousal value increases customers’ perception of the overall shopping environment (Mattila & Wirtz, 2001) 

As alternative explanations cannot account for the significant positive effects of fast music at high levels of social density, and the null effects of non-arousing music, arousal misattribution thus seems to be the most plausible and parsimonious explanation for our findings. Customers likely attributed the arousal experienced due to violations of their personal space to the arousing music, which reduced their subjective feeling of crowding and alleviated the associated negative downstream consequences (e.g., reduced approach and exploration behavior, shopping duration, and spending). Our results advance the literature on social density and retail crowding by (1) analyzing objective data rather than customer selfreports, (2) confirming an inverted-u-shaped effect of social density on sales, and (3) identifying ambient factors that mitigate negative effects of high density. We contribute to the literature on in-store music by describing, for the first time, shopping conditions under which fast music is more effective than slow music (cf. Knöferle, Spangenberg, Herrmann, & Landwehr, 2012; Milliman, 1982). Our results also have clear implications for management practice, as they show that music is a useful tool to counter the negative effects of high social density.