Marketing Psychology / 2 posts found
Can music influence what we buy? To find out, I dove into the psychology of music
In the first episode of my Nudge podcast, I interviewed the fantastic psychologist Dr. Adrian North, who conducted one of the seminal studies on the psychology of music. Back in 1997, the researchers stocked an English supermarket with four types of French and German wines, all similarly matched in cost, dryness, and sweetness. For two weeks, the store speakers either played German oom-pah music or French accordion music. North and his colleagues would switch the music daily and measure the effect on sales. Turns out, 83% of wine buyers bought French wine when the accordion music was playing, while 65% […]
The psychological reason brands use the power of association to sell
In the 1890s, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov noticed how dogs began salivating not just when food was placed in front of them, but when they heard the footsteps of the person bringing the food. He ran experiments where he’d ring a bell right before he fed his dogs. After repeating this several times, the dogs started salivating at the sound of the bell alone, no food needed. Pavlov had identified classical conditioning, or learning to associate one stimulus (the bell) with a different stimulus (the food) to produce a conditioned response (salivation). Now, I like to think I’m a little […]