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Music and information in commercials: Their effects with an elderly sample

Authors:
Gerald Gorn at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Gerald Gorn
Marvin Goldberg at Pennsylvania State University
Marvin Goldberg
Amitava Chattopadhyay at INSEAD, Singapore
Amitava Chattopadhyay
  • INSEAD, Singapore
David Litvack
David Litvack
David Litvack
  • This person is not on ResearchGate, or hasn't claimed this research yet.
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Abstract

A number of recent empiri-cal investigations (Cole and Gaeth, 1990; Cole and Houston, 1987; Davis and French, 1989; Gaeth and Heath, 1987; Milliman and Erffmeyer, 1990) as well as an insightful lit-erature review (Roedder-John and Cole, 1986) provide evi-dence of a growing interest in the consumer behavior of the elderly. This interest appears well-warranted, given that the elderly are heavy users of mass media; that they rely on sources such as television and newspa-pers for information to aid in purchase decisions; and that there are significant differences between young adults and the elderly in their ability to process information (Phillips and Stern-thal, 1977). From a practical per-spective as well, the growing elderly segment is worth consid-ering. With over 25 million peo-ple in the United States, the over-65 group constitutes more than 11 percent of the popula-tion and is growing at a more rapid rate than the general pop-ulation. The elderly segment ac-counts for over $60 billion in an-nual consumer spending in the United States (Lumpkin and Hite, 1988). As Zaltman, Perloff, and Valle (1980) note, traditional consumer communication efforts may not be effective for the elderly. In this study we use an experimen-tal paradigm to compare the po-tential effectiveness of three types of advertising strategies on older viewers: (1) an informa-tion-oriented appeal that pre-sented explicit product benefits; (2) a music-oriented appeal that presented little in the way of explicit product benefits; and (3) an appeal that stressed both ex-plicit product benefits and mu-sic. We investigate their effects on various levels of the commu-nication hierarchy including choice behavior, a dependent variable often ignored in labora-tory studies of advertising ef-fects.
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...  Soothing because human beings' ears in this century are beseiged by sounds (radio magneto video... etc.)." (22)  "Preferably soothing music, so that it does not distract me during my visit. I prefer to stay focused when looking at products". ...
... From a biological perspective, it has been suggested that processing abilities decrease with age. Music, as an additional element, could clutter and disrupt message-processing (Gorn & Goldberg, 1991). At another sociological level, optimal sensitivity decreases with age. ...
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... Moreover, in Dubé and Morin's study, the effect of servicescape attitudes on store evaluations was observed only among subgroups of participants. Studies on advertising further suggest that music may sometimes divert attention from the advertised product (e.g., Fraser and Bradford 2013;Gorn et al. 1991;Guido et al. 2016;Oakes and North 2006). Indeed, whereas some previous studies demonstrated positive effects of liked music on product and brand attitudes (MacInnis and Park 1991; Redker and Gibson 2009), others failed to find similar effects (Alpert and Alpert 1990;Vermeulen and Beukeboom 2016). ...
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... Since consumers can be described by socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioral criteria (Steffenhagen 1994, Kapferer 2008, for each of these three groups of predictors the coherences with the recall of audio logos was tested. Gorn et al. (1991) found a positive effect on attitude at people of a higher age, especially when factual information and music are being used. Looking at the elderly sample the influence of the factual information dominated the scene over the musical stimuli. ...
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... When music is used in audiovisual advertisements, that is, when accompanying a video, it has proven to be more effective than verbal cues by a greater recall of visual imagery such as action (Stewart, 1998). In their research on the effect of music on visual memory, Gorn, Goldberg, Chattopadhyay and Litvack (1991) found that the use of music, versus the same stimulus but without music, was more effective in producing higher levels of recall. ...
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