Hooked on a Feeling: The Effect of Music Tempo on Attitudes and the Mediating Role of Consumers' Affective Responses

With today’s high degree of advertising clutter, marketers are greatly focused on evoking emotion or creating hedonic experiences for consumers in order to improve practice (Tadena, 2014). These strategies either minimize or maximize the effort needed to process a message and can influence consumers’ decisions by impacting how they feel (e.g., their affective responses). Among the multiple resources that range from visual aesthetics to humor, few can match the impact of music on consumer feelings (Dunbar, 1990). Prior studies have proposed multiple mechanisms to explain how music influences consumers; however, few have connected two related streams of research—tempo’s influence on consumers’ affective responses, and affective responses’ influence on consumers’ attitudes. We do so in an effort to extend what we know about music in marketing practice. Clearly, music influences affective responses (Kellaris and Kent, 1993, Thompson et al., 2001), and empirical evidence demonstrates that affective responses influence attitudes (Schwarz, 2011, Schwarz and Clore, 1983). However, there is disagreement regarding how one particular property of music impacts consumers’ affective responses (Husain, Thompson and Schellenberg, 2002, Kellaris and Kent, 1993, MacInnis and Park, 1991). Moreover, research on music tempo is particularly interesting to marketing because tempo is one of the relatively easier elements of music for marketers to control. Tempo can be counted and compared in beats per minute (bpm), compared to more complicated elements, such as the mode, texture or timber of music. Accordingly, this research builds upon studies, which assert that tempo is an integral element of music to assess. By addressing tempos’ modular nature and applying an affect-as-information approach, we enhance current understanding of how music, through affective responses, influences consumers’ attitudes. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Kristin Stewart, Hyeseung Elizabeth Koh (July 2017). "Hooked on a Feeling: The Effect of Music Tempo on Attitudes and the Mediating Role of Consumers' Affective Responses". Journal of Consumer Behaviour. 16(6), which has been published in final form at  https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1665. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.