Research Ex #1

Milliman, R. (1982). Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket lkdvnlkiShoppers. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86-91. doi:10.2307/1251706

 

This article about music and the effects it has on shopper behavior at the supermarket was written by Ronal Milliman and published to the Journal of Marketing. This article attempts to review the current literature on the subject and disclose the results of their own study on how music affects shopping behavior in the store. Using the research question of How does background music affect in-store shopping behavior, the type of data needed to answer this research question would be Acts/Behaviors/Events, Reports of Acts/Behaviors/Events, Personal/Psychological Traits, and organizational data. Milliman used detached observation to use gather the data, and a type of latin square experimental design with controls was used to examine the effects of 3 treatment variations (no music, slow tempo music, and fast tempo music) on supermarket customers’ behavior (Milliman). Usually things like behavior relating to music are generally accepted assumptions that background music does have an affect on behavior, but now having this article as actual evidence from real research helps me move forward with my own research project. That I am not just shooting in the dark hoping that changing the music tempos would make a difference. This research being published in a marketing journal rather than a behavioral studies journal was really interesting to me, but now after reviewing it I see why. This information now becomes quite resourceful to businesses trying to increase sales with in-store consumers. Now with this knowledge of music tempo having a causal effect on in-store traffic flow and sales volume, businesses can use this information to increase their sales and to take this variable into account if their sales are low.

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