Buying Customer Loyalty for a Song

How music can be used to enhance your store, restaurant or hotel brand, engage customers and keep them coming back.

Music as a brand enhancer is well known and widely understood. A well-crafted playlist can literally build a company’s brand. Who could imagine the Hard Rock Café without its high-energy sound, or the W Hotel without its ultra-hip tracks permeating the lobby? And, with the right approach, music has the power to go beyond boosting brand image and have a direct impact on the behavior of customers.

Music can be engineered to positively influence retail behavior. For example, research has shown close to 80% of consumers shop longer when exposed to new or unfamiliar music than those exposed to music they already know¹. What’s more, consumers who shopped longer while grooving to new sounds perceived their shopping time to be less than it actually was². This fact alone makes a great case for turning your attention back to your music strategy.

Further, surveys also show that there is a direct link between an effective in-store music strategy and store revenues, with 79% of consumers saying that music encourages them to spend more³.

Not Just Any Music.

With the link between music and positive shopping outcomes well established, one might be tempted to cue up the Billboard Top 100 as soon as possible. But that would be a mistake. Careful consideration to the genre, flow, and volume levels can be the difference between loyal customers and empty stores.

As we have already seen, shoppers respond more positively to unfamiliar music within a genre they like than to music they already know. In addition, the right music tempo and pitch have been shown to positively affect shopper behavior, with high-pitched music being perceived as "happier," for example⁴ – a nice state of mind for your customers.

Conversely, background music incompatible with the preferences of an audience can have significant negative effects on how a marketing message is perceived and whether it drives an actionable response⁵. Retailers, hoteliers, and restaurant owners must create positive emotional environments by carefully “designing” their in-store musical landscape, with care given to understanding customers’ tastes.

Introducing consumers to new music they’re apt to like portrays your brand as current and says you know your customers. This “halo effect” then extends beyond the retail atmosphere you’ve created and onto your products and services themselves.

The Sounds of Your Brand

Here at Intava we work with brands that want to differentiate themselves, and build a more loyal and engaged consumer base using interactive music systems. Moving beyond simple background music, interactive music gives consumers the opportunity to control and learn more about what they’re hearing in places like restaurants, apparel stores and hotel lobbies.

Brands wanting to make effective use of music, whether interactive or background music, should strive for:

1. Authenticity – A brand must be itself. Music choices need to be in step with the way consumers view a brand, so the musical environment does not seem forced.
2. Appeal – The brand must know its customers and their tastes. Music is polarizing, so you should avoid music that is incompatible with your audience.
3. Compatibility – The music must be in sync with the consumer environment in which it’s played. Heavy metal in a day spa does not work.
4. Relevance – All music is a reference point on a larger cultural map. Brands should strive to make sure their music is culturally relevant to the ideas, places, activities and media their customers care about.

All Together

Done right, adding a music program to a retail environment can create a powerful effect greater than the sum of its parts. Lighting, fixtures, aroma, and music— customers may not consciously perceive any one of these elements, but taken together, an entire emotion can be created, and that emotion can make customers buy. Now that’s a tune we all want to sing.