Think about the last time you walked into a store and lingered longer than you planned. Maybe the lighting was flattering, or the space smelled pleasant. But there’s a good chance something you barely noticed was working on you: the music playing overhead. Retailers have long suspected that a well-chosen soundtrack keeps customers around and brings them back, but the exact chain of events between a catchy playlist and a loyal shopper has been harder to pin down.
A study published in the European Journal of Marketing set out to trace that chain. The researchers wanted to understand not just whether in-store music influences behavior, but how it does so, and whether other sensory elements like scent and crowd size change the effect.
The question behind the music
Karim Errajaa of ICN Business School and the Université de Lorraine, along with Patrick De Pelsmacker of the University of Antwerp and Christophe Rethore of ICN Business School, noticed a pattern in earlier research. Many studies had shown that store music affects things like how long people stay, how much they spend, and how they feel. But most of that work focused on immediate reactions and on emotional responses such as pleasure or excitement.
The authors were interested in a different set of links. They wanted to know whether music shapes longer-term intentions, specifically whether a shopper plans to return and whether they would recommend the store to others. They also wanted to focus on what they call cognitive responses, meaning how customers mentally judge and evaluate a space, rather than just how it makes them feel in the moment.
Their proposed sequence works like this. When shoppers perceive the music positively, it improves their overall sense of the store’s atmosphere. That improved sense of atmosphere then raises their satisfaction with the visit. And that satisfaction, in turn, makes them more likely to come back and to recommend the place. In research terms this is called a serial pathway, meaning one step leads to the next in order.
The team added two more elements to test. They asked whether ambient scent, the general fragrance filling a store rather than a smell coming from a specific product, might strengthen music’s effect. They asked the same about perceived crowding, meaning how busy or populated a store feels to a customer, regardless of the actual head count.
Studying two very different stores
Rather than build an artificial setup in a laboratory, the researchers collected data inside two real stores in France, each belonging to a well-known brand. One was an Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store, known for loud, high-energy pop and dance music, a strong woody signature fragrance, and a lively crowd. The other was an Apple store, with mid-volume contemporary music, a fresh scent, and its own busy, energetic feel.
These two settings shared a young target audience but operated in different sectors, fashion versus technology, which let the team see whether their findings held up across distinct environments. Rather than control the music, scent, and crowd themselves, the researchers observed these elements as the stores naturally managed them. They argue this approach makes the results more representative of a genuine shopping experience.
Using tablets, they surveyed customers at the end of their visits, gathering responses from 948 shoppers in total, 477 at Abercrombie & Fitch and 471 at Apple. Surveys were spread across weekdays and hours to capture a realistic range of conditions. Participants rated their perceptions of the music, atmosphere, scent, and crowd, along with their satisfaction and their intentions to revisit and recommend, using seven-point scales. The data was analyzed with a statistical tool called PROCESS, which is designed to test these kinds of step-by-step relationships.
The authors are upfront that their sample skews young and was gathered through convenience sampling, meaning shoppers who happened to be available. They caution that the findings should be applied to young, brand-engaged shoppers of stores like these, not to the general population.
What the analysis revealed
The central pathway held up in both stores. A positive perception of the music was linked to a better perception of the store atmosphere. That better atmosphere was linked to higher satisfaction. And higher satisfaction was linked to stronger intentions to return and to recommend. The pattern appeared consistently at both Abercrombie & Fitch and Apple, which the researchers interpret as a sign that this indirect route from music to loyalty is reasonably stable across different retail contexts.
One detail worth noting: for revisit intention, music had no direct effect on its own. Its influence traveled entirely through atmosphere and satisfaction. For recommendation intention, music showed both a direct link and the indirect one working in the same positive direction.
The results for scent were more mixed, and this is where the two stores diverged. At Abercrombie & Fitch, scent and music each contributed positively to atmosphere on their own, but scent did not strengthen music’s effect. The two simply added up. At Apple, however, a positive scent perception did amplify the influence of music. When shoppers perceived the Apple store’s scent more favorably, music’s effect on atmosphere, and on the intentions that followed, grew stronger.
The authors suggest this gap may come down to context. Ambient scents can be masked by competing odors, may be too faint to consciously register, or may fade from attention quickly. In a clothing store filled with fragrance samples and the smell of new garments, they reason, an ambient scent may struggle to stand out enough to reinforce the music.
As for crowding, the results were similar across both stores, and they did not match the researchers’ expectation. Perceived crowding did contribute positively to atmosphere on its own, but it did not strengthen music’s effect on revisit or recommendation intentions. The authors had thought a busy store, read as a sign of popularity, might boost music’s power, but the data did not support that.
One finding on crowding runs against a common assumption. Crowding is often treated as unpleasant, something that stresses shoppers. Here, in these energetic, image-driven stores, feeling that a store was busy tended to improve perceptions of the atmosphere rather than harm them. The researchers interpret this as crowding acting as a kind of positive social signal, communicating liveliness and desirability, at least in aspirational retail settings and when the measure captures how many people are present rather than feelings of discomfort.
What it means for retailers
For store operators, the study offers a few practical observations. The authors argue that music deserves to be treated as a strategic tool rather than background filler, and that it should be chosen to fit a brand’s identity, products, and other sensory cues. They point to how Abercrombie & Fitch pairs its energetic image with loud pop and dance tracks while Apple opts for mid-volume contemporary music.
Because recommendations from satisfied customers can be a low-cost driver of growth, the authors suggest retailers monitor how customers respond to their soundscapes, perhaps through surveys, and train staff to understand music’s role in shaping the store experience. They also note that scent may reinforce music in some settings, as it appeared to at Apple, making a coordinated sensory approach worth considering.
The researchers are careful about the limits of their work. They studied only positively perceived sensory cues, in two French stores, with a young customer base, and they measured some outcomes with single survey items. They call for future studies in different cultures, age groups, and store types, and for experiments that manipulate music and scent directly to isolate their effects. For now, the study offers evidence that the playlist overhead may be doing more quiet work than shoppers realize.
