A replication of the Gorn study (19

A replication of the Gorn study (1982) by Kellaris and Cox (1989) failed to reproduce the positive effect of liked versus disliked music after controlling for musical structural elements and possible demand effects. Their results question the effect of single exposures that merely vary background music’s appeal. They called for research on the influence of music’s structural elements on cognitive and affective responses (such as mood) toward the ad and the product.
The key basic research relating musical elements to emotional responses was reported by Hevner (1935), who presented subjects with identical pieces, controlling for all elements but major and minor modes. She concluded that all of the historically affirmed characteristics of the two modes, perceived as happy and sad, respectively, were confirmed in her study. In later research, she also reported associations between musical elements, such as fast tempo, loud dynamics, lively and varied rhythm, and high register with perceptions of the music as happy, merry, graceful, and playful. Musical elements such as slower tempo, quiet dynamics, unvaried rhythm, and low register were reported to be sad, dreamy, and sentimental (Hevner, 1935, 1936). She noted that although mode is never the sole factor that determines the way music is perceived, it is the most stable, generally understood, and influential of any of the elements in expressing the affective mood of music.
Additional studies of musical structural elements’ effects on emotional responses are summarized in Bruner (1990) and North et al. (1999). Additional musical effects on mood and consumer behavior are found in studies such as Dube et al. (1995), who varied the musical background of a videosimulated bank and produced effects on pleasure and arousal and corresponding effects on desires to affiliate with bank employees. Higher affiliation was associated with musically induced pleasure and arousal.
Alpert and Alpert (1990) replicated and extended Hevner’s findings, concluding that equally liked but unfamiliar music produced emotional responses predictable from analysis of its structural profile of musical elements. These mood states were associated with influence on purchase intention towards greeting cards viewed with the varying background music. Rather than generalize main effects from their study (sad music was ‘‘better’’), they suggested that future research may be productively directed at the interactions among music type, card type, and situation. They speculated that happy music may ‘‘help’’ happy cards when purchased for joyous occasions; sad music may help sad cards more than happy ones for sad situations such as funerals.
The present study replicates and extends this work and tests their hypotheses about the role of musical structure on moods and consumer behavior under situational variation. For comparison, we also use unfamiliar music and simulated greeting card advertisements, but we vary the purpose of the greeting card by varying the occasion for which it is to be bought.