Richard F. Yalch

The Effects of Music in a Retail Setting on Real and Perceived Shopping Times

Abstract This article extends research linking shopping behavior to environmental factors through changes in emotional states. With time fixed or variable during a simulated shopping experiment, shoppers were exposed to music varying by degree of familiarity. Afterward, subjects reported their perceptions of shopping duration, their emotional states, and their merchandise evaluations. Analyses revealed that individuals reported themselves as shopping longer when exposed to familiar music but actually shopped longer when exposed to unfamiliar music. Shorter actual shopping times in the familiar music condition were related to increased arousal. Longer perceived shopping times in the familiar music condition appear related to unmeasured cognitive factors. Although emotional states affected product evaluations, these effects were not directly related to the music manipulations.

Effects of Store Music on Shopping Behavior

Describes an experiment conducted comparing the effects of background and foreground music on clothing store shoppers. Concludes that choosing to play store music solely to satisfy customers′ preferences may not be the optimal approach; instead music should be varied across areas of a store that appeal to different‐aged customers.

The Effect of Numbers on the Route to Persuasion

A recently introduced model of the audience response to persuasive communications is discussed and used to develop hypotheses about the likely effects of a message quantification strategy. The predicted effects are tested in an experiment and the results are discussed in terms of communications and marketing implications.

Online Consumer Psychology : Understanding and Influencing Consumer Behavior in the Virtual World

In recent years, few questions have been of greater interest to consumer researchers, as well as to marketers of consumer products, than the viability of the internet as a platform for commercial transactions. At the heart of this debate is the issue of whether or not the internet provides anything that is substantially new or different from traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) channels. We believe that, indeed, the internet does provide some unique opportunities to marketers in their quest to better understand and ultimately influence their target customers. In particular, retailers on the internet have an unprecedented opportunity to personalize the shopping experience and control the shopping environment. In this chapter we will examine three specific psychological mechanisms that can play a central role in influencing the interaction between shoppers and recommendation agents in electronic marketplaces. PERSONALIZATION AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO INFLUENCE Thanks to Moore’s Law, marketers now have the ability to remember and respond to the tastes and preferences of many individual consumers. Advances in technology, and techniques for database marketing, have created the opportunity for retailers to resurrect business practices over one hundred years old. At that time, the local shop owner was able to develop individual relationships with each of his customers, providing them with personalized service and product recommendations. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (1997) explain it this way: We are facing a paradigm shift of epic proportions – from the industrial era to the Information Age. As a result, we are witnessing a meltdown of the massmarketing paradigm that has governed business competition throughout the twentieth century. The new paradigm is one to one (1:1) – mandated by cheaper and faster data management, interactive media, and increasing capabilities forfor a grant to initiate this research and Theresa Cai and Harshavardhan Gangadharbatla for their invaluable help during the data collection. Consumers learn about products from the experience of interacting with people, objects and the environment. However, an experience is more than simply the passive reception of external sensations or subjective mental interpretations of a situation. Rather, an experience is the result of an ongoing transaction that gains in quality, intensity, meaning, and value integrating both psychological and emotional conditions (Mathur, 1971). These conditions are ultimately accomplished via the generation of thoughts and/or sensations brought together creating the experience (Hirshman, 1984). A product purchase is in many ways not the purchase of a physical good itself but of an experience that the product affords (Pine II and Gilmore, 1998). Thus, the role of consumer learning about a product prior to the purchase is mainly to assess what consumption experience the product can offer and how well it can meet the expectations of the anticipated experience (Hoch and Deighton, 1989). Research has documented that consumers learn about products through indirect experience, such as advertising, and via direct experience, such as product trial it has been speculated that the type of medium may limit the effect of advertising and a more powerful medium for communicating the details and experiences of a product, such as the Internet, could have a stronger impact on consumer learning (Moore and Lutz, 2000). Three-dimensional (3-D), multiuser , online environments constitute a new revolution of interactivity by creating compelling virtual experiences (Waller, 1997). McLuhan and McLuhan(1988) suggest that within any medium there is a connection between the human mind, the technology, and the environment that serves to immerse users. It is the interactive nature of the Internet that immerses consumers and offers the greatest potential to marketers because of the ability to offer user-controlled product interactive experiences (Schlosser and Kanfer, 2001). Since most products are 3-D objects that are experienced with the senses, the use of dynamic 3-D visualization in ecommerce is increasing as companies seek to give users a virtual experience of the product. The implications are that a 3-D virtual product experience is a simulation of a real or physical product experience and can be construed to be located between direct experience and indirect experience within the spectrum of consumer learning. To fully understand the impact of a virtual experience and the use of 3-D product …

Pre-election Interview Effects on Voter Turnout

VOTERS are frequently interviewed before an election to predict and explain the outcome. However, the interviewed sample cannot be considered equivalent to those not interviewed no matter how carefully the sample is selected. The interview experience alters the respondents perceptions and knowledge about the candidates and issues, influencing subsequent behavior. The best that public opinion researchers can do is to be aware of these differences and to adjust for them. This article reports on a study investigating one effect of participation in a pre-election interview, an increase in voter turnout. Prior research on the pre-election interview effect has yielded discrepant findings and explanations. Clausen (1968) compared the turnout in a Survey Research Center (SRC) sample interviewed before and after the 1964 presidential election with that of a Census Bureau sample interviewed only after the election. Since the SRC sample had a reported turnout of 78 percent and the Census Bureau sample had a reported turnout of 72 percent, he concluded that the interview process converted 6 percent from nonvoting to voting by stimulating their election interest. Citing problems with Clausens methodology, such as the nonequivalence of the interview samples and the errors associated with reported turnout, Kraut and McConahay (1973) conducted a true experiment to estimate the turnout enhancement effect. They selected two samples of 52 registered voters and attempted to interview one group before a

The Effect of Experience: A Matter of Salience?

A labeling technique was employed to explore processes underlying the effects of experience. It was found that labeled individuals both behaved and perceived themselves in a manner consistent with their label. However, these effects were mediated by the consistency of the label with the individuals initial self-schema and the availability of other relevant cues. The findings are interpreted in terms of an extended self-perception explanation that incorporates the notion of cue salience.

Consumer Response to Initial Product Trial: A Bayesian Analysis

A Bayesian model was employed to assess consumer responses to the trial of a new product when one situational and two information factors were varied. The results demonstrate a tendency to accept information consistent with ones perceptions about the causes of behavior, and to reject information when it contradicts these attributions.

Qualitative research in action

The life history of a qualitative research project an historical perspective group discussions the dynamics of small groups individual interviews projective tests and enabling techniques for use in market research current developments in qualitative research the analysis and interpretation process its not just what you say, its also the way you present it uses and abuses of qualitative research from a marketing viewpoint.

Consumer Response to Polysemous Brand Slogans

Polysemous brand slogans have multiple meanings that may convey several product attributes. We build on extant research by suggesting that some consumers automatically access multiple meanings of a polysemous brand slogan, whereas others access only a single, immediately available meaning. A novel measure of automatic access to secondary meaning (the Secondary Meaning Access via the Automatic Route Test, or SMAART) is developed to capture this individual difference and show its consequences for consumer responses to polysemous slogans with unfavorable secondary meanings. The automatic-access account is further validated by employing the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz), suggesting that the unconscious impact of polysemous brand slogans can be more influential than intuitively expected. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

A test of the self-perception explanation of the effects of rewards on intrinsic interest

Abstract An experiment was conducted to test the proposition that rewards undermine or enhance intrinsic interest in a task to the extent that individuals interpret their behavior as being motivated by the reward. It was predicted that when subjects were denied the opportunity to develop and confirm this attribution, rewards would not produce an undermining effect, but rather would enhance dispositions and behavior. Subjects were recruited to evaluate a new sugar-free soft drink. Two levels of incentives (reward-no reward), two levels of examination (opportunity-no opportunity), and three levels of outcome (good-neutral-poor) were employed. The results support the prediction that an incentives effect depends on the examination opportunity. In the examination condition, rewarded subjects attributed their behavior more to external factors than did unrewarded subjects, but gave more negative product evaluations only after tasting it. In the no examination condition, there were no differences in the attributions made by rewarded and unrewarded subjects, and rewarded subjects were more positively disposed toward the product both before and after tasting it. These results are explained as a consequence of two properties of rewards, enhancement through reinforcement and undermining through discounting, and of hypothesis-testing processes.