subject: How Music Affects Your Buying Habits [print this page] You're off to the supermarket and decide to stop by some shelves offering French and German wine. You make up your mind to buy a bottle of the French wine.
While checking out, you're asked why you picked the wine. You respond "The label looked great", or "I liked the price". Then you're asked if you noticed the French accordion music that was playing when you took that bottle off the shelf. You say that you did. Did it affect your choice of wine today? No, of course not, you answer.
That's funny because on the days that French music is played nearly 80% of shoppers chose the French wine. On the days that German music the Opposite happens. In other words, this study found that if you bought some wine from their shelves you were 3 or 4 times more likely to choose a wine that matched the music than the wine that didn't match the music.
Guess what these wine-buyers responded when asked at the checkout if the music influenced their choice. Only 1 out of 44 customers said that the music was the reason they bought the wine. That's 2%! The influence of the music was Huge but the customers Didn't Notice or Believe that it was affecting them. It only took a matter of minutes or seconds for music to get into these people's brains in a powerful way.
Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine. Here's another study to chew on. Most of us go out to eat at least once a week. Do you know which music makes you spend more when you're at a restaurant? In this study, a British restaurant played pop music, classical music and no music over the course of 18 evenings.
