Online Sensory Marketing: The Crossmodal Effect of Background Music and the Look and Feel of a Webshop on Consumer Reactions

When consumers shop online, it is primarily their visual sense that is being triggered. With technology under development to also provide an experience in the olfactory, taste, and haptic sense, this paper investigates the added value of background music in the online store environment. In particular, a study is conducted with three conditions: a no music condition, a condition with music which is crossmodally incongruent with the online store environment, and a condition with music crossmodally congruent with the online store environment. Crossmodal congruency refers to the crossmodal correspondences (i.e., the tendency of one sensory attribute to be associated with an attribute in another sense) that are shared between the music and the online store environment. Although both musical pieces used were considered as pleasant, consumer reactions were not more positive when compared to the no music condition. Interestingly, the value of the money spent in the no music condition was significantly higher than in both musical conditions. The incongruent music condition, however, did lead to significantly lower consumer reactions for the other variables measured (i.e., pleasure, arousal, and store environment evaluation) when compared to the no music and congruent music condition.