Fast as you can – September 2024
In the spring of 2024, within the EU project Music 360, our team from the Marketing department at the School of Business and Economics from the Vrije Universiteit has been studying the value of music in retail environments, by collaborating in field experiments with a large national retailer and the project partners such as music rights organizations in the Netherlands BUMA and SENA.
Retailers use music to create an atmosphere that attracts customers, keeps them interested and happy in store, and creates an experience that fits with the products or services that the retailer has to offer. Over the years there has been already quite some research looking into the effect of music, as there are many aspects of music you can investigate. How fast is the music? How loud? What genre? Instruments, vocals or instrumental, tonality? But also, how well does the music fit with the customer base, with the products that are sold? Does it suit the time of the day, the mood of the customer? All these questions have been studied, but there are of course countless other questions that can be raised!
One of the aspects that seems a bit overlooked so far, is the effect of background music on employees in shops. This is interesting, because customers might come in in the shop, do their shopping and leave again after a limited amount of time, but employees are exposed to the background music during the entire day. So, although the music might have been focused at the customer, the employee is the person that is exposed the most. As we know from research in the services industry, the employee is very important in creating happy and loyal customers, who feel loyal to the service provider. In addition, the fierce competition for qualified employees makes it important to keep employees happy on the job: what good are additional customers if there is no-one there to help them? To fill this gap, we conducted a field study that looked both at the way employees react to the music (does it make them more happy, energetic?), and at the effect it had on sales and related measures.
To make our approach more generalizable, we focused on two aspects of background music. The first one was tempo: what tempo would be more suited for employees: faster or slower? And how does this influence sales? In addition – and this is a relatively new variable – we studied what happened when we gave employees a voice in the choice of music and gave them the opportunity to choose (together with their colleagues) between playlists that would be played during the opening hours.
We ran the experiment in a retail chain that has more than 100 stores in the Netherlands, where we divided the shops in different groups: we created a group with slow music, and a group with fast music. Within these groups we made subgroups that were asked to make their own choice from a couple of playlists, and with another group we did not give the choice, but randomly assigned them to a playlist. That way we could see the effect of tempo on the employees, and the effect of freedom of choice. Next to that we measured the difference in turnover and customer satisfaction on the level of the shops; we compared the achievements of the shop with the same period in the year before and checked if it improved or not. That way we could also check if there was an interaction between the effect on employees and the effect on the customers.
From our experiments we found that giving employees a say in the choice of music did help to make them feel more positive: they felt they had more agency over their work environment. What we also found was that the faster music condition helped in creating a good mood. It also created a better conversion: more customers bought something when they entered the shop. Also member sales participation went up.
We are looking forward to digging even deeper into this subject and see whether we can shed some more light on the effect of background music on employees and the effect on customers. Keep you posted!
Music360 