When It Comes to Size, Sound Matters in Ads

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When It Comes to Size, Sound Matters in Ads


Study shows lower pitched sounds lead audiences to believe products are larger




By
Josh Brown | April 13, 2017
• Atlanta, GA








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Big sandwich





Lower pitches in voices or music in advertisements lead consumers to infer a larger product size, according to a new study by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt University.

Sound is a fundamental element of nearly all marketing communications, from commercials to spokespeople and sales associates, but Michael Lowe, assistant professor of marketing at Scheller College of Business and Kelly Haws, associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, indicated that marketers don’t have a firm grasp on what it communicates to customers.

“Research to date suggests that managers too often select music and spokespeople by intuition, with limited understanding regarding how these elements might affect actual product perceptions,” Lowe and Haws wrote in their new paper for The Journal of Marketing Research. “Some degree of importance, then, should be given to understanding what is actually being communicated about the product at a sensory level.”

In their paper, titled “Sounds Big: The Effects of Acoustic Pitch on Product Perceptions,” the coauthors show in six different studies how the effects of acoustic pitch on consumer beliefs depend on “cross-modal correspondence,” defined as the compatibility of stimuli perceived by one sense, such as sound, with a sensory experience in another, like sight.

One study found that acoustic pitch differences in voice affects perceptions of size. Participants listened to a radio advertisement for a new sandwich at a fictitious sandwich chain where a spokesperson’s voice was digitally altered to be higher or lower. Participants who heard the ad featuring the lower-pitched voice believed the sandwich was significantly larger than those who heard the higher-pitched version.

The same trend was ...

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