Date: 17/11/08
According to a recent survey by Consumer Research Company Customer Perceptions Ltd. Over 80% of Piped, Background and Store Music serves to satisfy the taste of the staff and is actually disliked by the majority of customers
Over 300 customers and 100 staff were surveyed across 30 outlets across the island of Ireland in October. The outlets ranged from fast food outlets to middle class restaurants and top hotels, from fashion boutiques to department stores, auto accessories shops, mobile phone retailers, small and larger supermarkets and stationers & newsagents.
Customer Perceptions has experience of compiling over 80,000 mystery shopping reports for its clients over the past 12 years but as company director, Emma Harte explains “we never looked at this specific subject before until one day recently in our canteen all our team agreed that music in stores was often too loud or otherwise inappropriate for the target customer of the store in question”
The Survey Shows:
• 82% of outlet staff selected the music and the volume.
• 63% of cases management or any formal policy play no role in the music selection
• 88% of staff “liked the music played in their place of employment” (other than at Christmas time)
However
• 55% of the customers surveyed said that they often find music levels “much too loud”.
• 49% of customers thought the music was “inappropriate for that specific store”
• 28% of customers said that the piped music or radio was the cause of them leaving a store quickly or avoiding it altogether.
• 22% thought the music/radio in the background played a significant role in the atmosphere and image created by the outlet.
• 22% thought the music / radio in the background played “a significant role in the atmosphere and image created by the outlet”
• 22% of customers said they never noticed the music/ radio one way or the other.