In-store music and wine sales
disinterest. Over the surveyed 6 hour period, 11 bottles of Italian wine were bought out of 39 total- meaning there was a consequential 268% increase in Italian wine sales in the presence of Italian music as Italian wine now occupied 28% of the total share of wine bought in the shop. A hypothesis test at 1% significance level revealed that this result rendered sufficient evidence (since 0.0005<0.01) to accept the alternative hypothesis and conclude that the increase in proportion in Italian wine bought was caused by priming and not changes in consumer behaviour. However, as seen previously in the French portion of the experiment the comparison between the data collected and the previous store records had limitations. First, the day of the week the data was collected on was a Sunday, which is one of the shop’s busiest days, and can thus cause skews in the data whereas the store records were taken as averages of the whole week. Therefore it can be considered sub-optimal to compare data taken on a Sunday to data taken as a average over the whole week. Furthermore, the lack of a greater number of trials has a significant impact on the reliability of the result achieved. However, unlike the French portion of the data, the result may have been limited by the music played as according to the survey: only 32 out of 40 participants could successfully identify the music as Italian, and so the response needed to cause consumers to buy Italian wine was possibly hindered in a few cases by customers not knowing the origin of the music that they were hearing. In conclusion, while the results achieved in this experiment are encouraging in illustrating the positive correlation between playing music from a specific country and increasing sales of wine from that country, the extent to which this result can be considered valid is limited by some design flaws which may have skewed results in both a positive and negative way. However, on balance, I believe that the results achieved throughout this experiment confirm the assertion that McKendrick, Hargreaves and North’s 1999 experiment results have indeed stood the test of time and priming continues to be a tool that retail businesses can use to encourage the sale of their goods, even in the case of goods that tend to underperform like Italian wine as we saw in my experiment. This experiment nonetheless demonstrates an important aspect of nudge theory: that business owners can stand to gain significant profit by integrating nudges into their business model rather than selling new products. Using techniques like priming by using music can allow the irrational, overstimulated consumer with too much choice to make the decisions that benefit both consumer and business owner, leaving society a more economically developed environment for all. However, although the consumer and business owner stands to gain, it is important to question whether the implementation of nudges benefits governments. Cass and Sunstein’s quote emphas izing that nudges provide ‘better governance’ may be true to some extent but, on balance, it cannot build long-term habits within society in the way that laws can. As a result, nudges may be more effective in smaller scale settings like my experiment where there is less to lose from a social welfare standpoint.
Bibliography
Lab, T. D. (n.d.). Nudges . Retrieved from https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/nudges North, A., McKendrick, J., & Hargreaves, D. (1999). The influence of in-store music on wine selection. The journal of applied psychology , 4. Tripadvisor. (n.d.). Vinomondo . Retrieved August 2023, from https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g186437-d6977929-Reviews-Vinomondo- Conwy_Conwy_County_North_Wales_Wales.html
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