Retail Music and the Emotional Wheel

Music can evoke subjective feelings that fall anywhere across the emotional spectrum. The Plutchik Wheel of Emotions visually represents this continuum and it's a focusing tool that we use at Audio Relevance. It's virtually impossible for a piece of music to not evoke an emotional response in a listener. This is important, because your customer's emotions will influence when and if they head to checkout. The wrong music can trigger an opposing action tendency at point of sale. Song associations are made deep in the limbic system of the brain. This area is one of our earliest to evolve, governing basic impulses like our survival instinct. Most pieces of music won't produce a profound emotional reaction (like fight or flight) in a customer. But songs are always emotional triggers, and uncovering whether they evoke positive, neutral or negative reactions requires research. This isn't the kind of information that a store employee (even one with wide music knowledge) will possess. Music research is specialized, and the best data sets are proprietary with a limited shelf life. Most retail audio providers don't have experience implementing research and even fewer have conducted it.  Audio Relevance implements an audio strategy to optimize customer emotions during store visits.

There are more than a dozen factors that weigh into the inclusion, exclusion, or categorization of a song on the Audio Relevance platform. Screening your music is crucial because the choices are empirically correct or incorrect and they will directly impact your store's brand and profitability. It's also true that a song that tests well and works with one set of customers might be a poor contextual choice for another set. Songs can also register different notes with different people on the emotion wheel, there is no one size fits all solution. That's why we've created different channels to match the different customers you serve (depending on store location and time of day or season). By layering the Wheel of Emotions over customer music research, we construct stylized music and entertainment channels that are targeted to please your specific customers. Our HighFrequency platform for cannabis dispensaries offers channels cultivated to appeal to different subsets of precisely this customer segment. The Hybrid channel skews Female, 21 to 39, with music and content that overlaps specific outer petals of the Plutchik Wheel of Emotions: Interest, Serenity and Acceptance. By tilting to this valence, the station supports a powerful audio strategy by projecting a consistent personality and feel to support product advertising and store branding. Takeaway: Manager curated music playlists for retail have the potential to negatively impact sales through the cumulative effect of unintended emotional triggers. Retail audio strategy is a deliberate process that utilizes many variables to produce a focused effect. Audio Relevance uses proprietary, demographically segmented music research overlayed with elements of the Plutchik Emotional Wheel to create, maintain and freshen partner audio channels. 

-Adam Fendrich