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Monday, January 5, 2009
Just how gullible are wine drinkers, anyway?
I was browsing through my Sunday paper yesterday (1-4-09) when a few sentences in a Parade magazine article entitled “How Subliminal Advertising Works” stopped me in my tracks:
Music also can direct us to certain products. For example, it can determine what kind of wine we pick up from the shelves. In one experiment over a two-week period, British researchers played either accordion-heavy French music or a German brass band over the speakers of the wine section inside a large supermarket. On French music days, 77% of consumers bought French wine, whereas on German music days, the vast majority of consumers picked up a German selection. Intriguingly, only one out of the 44 customers who agreed to answer a few questions at the checkout counter mentioned the music as among the reasons they bought the wine they did.
Are we really that stupid? Or is it just … you know … the British who would fall for such a ploy? I don’t equate oom-pah music with German wine, and when I hear an accordion, hell, I still think of Lawrence Welk, not French wine. But how would an Americanized version of such a study be devised? A Dayton wine shop would sell more Ohio wines if they continuously piped in the Buckeye fight song? “California Dreamin’ ‘” would make wines from that state fly off the shelves?
The research cited in Parade apparently dates to 1999 and appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology under the headline “The influence of in-store music on wine selections”. I couldn’t find a no-cost, full-text version of the research article on the web, but perhaps I just didn’t look hard enough.
Still, I find these shoppers’ purchasing decisions hard to believe, don’t you? Are we wine consumers that gullible?
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