The impact of in-store music on wine sales
Charlie Drake-Brockman
A nudge is a form of libertarian paternalism which pushes people to make a specific decision. We often aren’t aware of the nudges that exist all around us: the default delivery options on eCommerce websites, the placement of food items in a cafeteria and even in government with letters sent out by HMRC claiming that ‘9 out of 10 people pay their taxes on time.’ 1 Nudges are designed to improve social welfare by providing an easier path to the most socially optimum good or service without disrupting the consumer ’s freedom to choose. This idea of ‘liberty in choice’ makes it a popul ar option for governments, businesses and consumers as governments have to bear less cost of imposition or regulation of any official measures, businesses can steer consumers towards making the most profit- maximizing decisions and consumers maintain their ability to make their own decisions. This was the idea behind Sunstein and Thaler’s 2008 book ‘Nudge’ where the authors claim they ‘are not for bigger government, but better governance’ , 2 and they argue that nudges can thus contribute to a more democratic and equal society whilst also being beneficial to business owners. My experiment is directly linked to a key aspect of nudge theory, namelu, priming, which emphasizes that consumers can be influenced into decisions by the stimuli around them, in this particular experiment, the music that is played in a wine shop. I took inspiration from a 1999 study titled ‘The influence of in -store music on wine selection’ carried out by Jennifer McKendrick, Adrian North and David Hargreaves. In this two - week experiment, carried out in a supermarket, they tested how French and German wine sales would respond to the playing of French and German music. The results achieved suggested that priming has a significant impact on consumer decisions, as there was a 330% increase in French wine sold on days where French music was played and a 175% increase in German wine sold on days where German music was played. 3 Consequently, through my experiment I wanted to explore whether these results stood the test of time, test the impact of other heuristics and see whether priming could overcome pre- existing consumer biases. I varied the experiment by changing in the location from a supermarket to a wine shop and changing the wine origin of one of the wines from German to Italian, while keeping French wine. I conducted the experiment in the Vinomondo wine shop in Conwy, North Wales which offers a choice of 300 different wines. 4 My experiment followed a similar design to the original with three distinct data points: firstly, data collection when neither French nor Italian music was played alongside previous sales reports and data collected by the shop. This was done to establish a control to compare to when the independent variable (origin of music) was changed. Alongside the previous data collected by the shop which included the average number of bottles of wine bought from each country they sold every day for the past month, I carried out a six-hour long data collection where music was played that did not match any of the wine
1 https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/nudges. 2 Ibid.
3 North, McKendrick, & Hargreaves 1999 at http://bibl.imuz.uw.edu.pl/wp- content/uploads/sites/285/2017/12/North-Hargreaves-McKendrick_1999.pdf. 4 https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g186437-d6977929-Reviews-Vinomondo- Conwy_Conwy_County_North_Wales_Wales.html.
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