27 February 2023 , 16:48
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When heading out shopping, you might think you're impervious to marketing ploys, able to ignore offers that seem too good to be true. You may believe you can waltz in and out of a supermarket with only the items you went in for, but it turns out there might be a few clever tricks that could be impacting your shop that you aren't even aware of.
This is according to a consumer psychologist who has been pulling back the curtain on some of the ways supermarkets 'manipulate' customers.
Dr Cathrine Jansson-Boyd from Anglia Ruskin University has shared some major shopping secrets with The Mirror, including how stores like Tesco and Sainsbury's could be getting you to shop for longer without even realising it.
The expert explained that this is due to the sounds in the store, more specifically, the music they are playing.
Dr Jansson-Boyd has been sharing her top tips (Dr Cathrine Jansson-Boyd)
Supermarkets might play Christmas songs over the festive period - like the Mariah Carey classic (Getty Images)Dr Jansson-Boyd says some supermarkets will play music in store, which in turn makes people think it's "fun to be there" and this can give you a "bit of an adrenaline rush" and make you want to shop for longer.
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And there's a known connection between the length of time spent in a store and the number of items purchased.
This is especially true at Christmas when you might notice festive music playing.
The expert said: "How do we keep [shoppers] lingering for as long as we possibly can? Supermarkets do that with music sometimes, so in a festive season you often get cheerful Christmas music because then people think it's fun to be in there.
"It's hard to make supermarkets fun because of their very nature, so by making it fun, customers get a bit of an adrenaline rush."
This rush gives us a "feelgood factor" which could encourage you to keep on shopping in order to keep the feeling going.
However, Dr Jansson-Boyd admits this isn't the case in all supermarkets as music is a tricky thing to get right.
Supermarkets use artificial baked bread scents (Bloomberg via Getty Images)"Music isn't common in all stores anymore because it's hard to get the pace right for all customers," she says. "If it's too fast they might walk too fast as we tend to subconsciously walk at the pace of the music in stores. And again, if it's too slow people might drag their feet and it will be unbearable.
"You often have to find some middle-paced music that doesn't really represent anything so it doesn't distract from the products.
"Where I live I've noticed it's very clear, Waitrose has an older clientele and older customers tend to get quite annoyed by music so they don't play any, but Sainsbury's and Tesco have more of a family sort of focus and do sometimes play music."
As well as using sounds, supermarkets may also use certain aromas to encourage you to buy more, pumping out artificial scents into the store, such as the smell of fresh bread around the bakery.
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The latter is the most "traditional trick of all", Dr. Jannson-Boyd says, going on to add how it evokes a feeling of nostalgia for many of us.
"It's so often an artificial scent because it doesn't smell in the bakery as often the bread is pre-manufactured but they still pump out a smell of fresh bread, as shoppers have childhood associations with the smell.
"It's homely, it's nice and it's fresh. You want to believe that everything in the store is made from scratch and is amazing, but of course, it isn't. However, we sniff it and we're quite easily duped, we buy into it and we think it's all very fresh."
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