Kai Hendry / CC
An LSU Marketing Professor finds playing low volume music or ambient sound in restaurants can help influence customers to pick healthier food options.
Professor Courtney Szocs says while low music can help people eat healthily, the inverse is also true, and playing loud music or background noise can help juice the sales of not-so-healthy options.
“If you are McDonalds and your margins are on some of the less healthful items, then it wouldn’t make strategic sense for you to use low volume music,” says Szocs.
Szocs co-authored a paper in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science on the topic.
So why does background music have that much of an impact on purchasing choices? Szocs says it’s because low volume music is soothing.
“When you are more relaxed you have more cognitive resources to think through things and make what may be a more thoughtful decision,” says Szocs.
The study took place in a lab setting, and the results were then replicated in a café and a supermarket, and while the music is self-explanatory, Szocs says they had to get creative with the ambient noise.
“We found a clip and it was ambient noise in a restaurant, so it was just a sound bit that played on loop,” says Szocs.
