It’s no secret that stores use sights, smells, sounds and other stimuli in combination to produce particular atmospheres. For example, according to researchers, in order to create an upscale atmosphere, “A manager might choose classical music, subdued colors, elegant perfumes, cool temperatures, sparsely displayed merchandise, and low lighting.”

Clearly, my hypothetical wine shop missed the mark with its music selection. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Spice Girls — it’s just that in the given context, the music wasn’t really meshing with the store’s overall image.

The practice of designing store environments in order to project a certain image and induce certain behavior is known as atmospherics, a term coined by business professor Philip Kotler in 1973.

According to Kotler, in addition to helping stores attract and maintain a targeted customer base, atmospherics has the potential to be more important for generating sales than the actual products on the shelves. To quote from his 1973 Journal of Retailing article:

“In some cases, the place, more specifically the atmosphere of the place, is more influential than the product itself in the purchase decision. In some cases, the atmosphere is the primary product.”

For the purposes of this story, we’re going to hone in on one of the sensory details, or stimuli, that retailers use in atmospheric design: sound. Specifically, we’ll explore how stores use different aspects of sound and music to trigger different behaviors — including the elusive “I want to spend more money” behavior.

Volume

There’s a big rule that retailers often don’t understand, which is that music on top of noise is generally just more noise. It’s like putting perfume on a bad smell: You just get a worse smell. — Julian Treasure (via BBC News)

A decade before Kotler coined the term atmospherics, researchers had already begun exploring the potential of using in-store music as a sales tool.

One of the earliest studies — Cain-Smith & Curnow (1966) — looked at the effect that music volume had on supermarket shoppers. Not surprisingly, researchers found that when the music was loud, shoppers tended to spend less time in the store. When the music was softer, shoppers tended to spend more time in the store.

Interestingly, there was no statistically significant difference in the amount of money customers spent in each of those scenarios: Music volume only affected the amount of time people spent in stores, not sales volume. So if you manage a store with limited floorspace, or run a restaurant with limited seating, the strategic use of loud(er) music might help you better manage your customer flow.

Tempo

… tempo is one of the most important determinants of human response to music. The high impact of tempo (i.e., the rate of events in time) may stem from the fact that tempo is applicable not only to music but to a wide range of experiential contexts ... — Knöferle et al (Springer Science+Business Media)

Humans acquire the ability to process tempo, the speed at which music is played, early in life. Before we can belt out Do-Re-Mi, we can clap our hands to a beat. Fast, slow, it doesn’t matter: We seem to have some innate proclivity for processing tempo.

In the 1980s, marketing professor Ronald E. Milliman explored how stores might exploit our connection to tempo in order to influence customer behavior and — ultimately — increase sales.

In his landmark 1982 paper, “Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket Shoppers,” Milliman revealed that the tempo of a store’s background music can influence both the pace of customer traffic flow (i.e., how fast people walk through the store) as well as sales volume.

Here’s the gist:

Fast (uptempo) music makes people move more quickly through a store, and they end up buying less.

Slow (downtempo) music makes people move more slowly through a store, and they end up buying more.

This makes a lot of sense: Slower music leads to slower shoppers, which in turn leads to shoppers having more time to discover and interact with more products. In Milliman’s supermarket study, he found that, on average, sales volume was 38% higher on days when stores played slow background music.

But according to Milliman, “The exact figures are not important.” What is important?