The price of music : how sonic logos influence the willingness to pay

• Autor(a) principal: Bertagnini, Lorenzo
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25530
• topic: Sonic branding; Sonic logo; Emotional response to music; Personal perceptions towards the music; Perceived value; Willingness to pay; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Sonic logos are the acoustic equivalents of visual logos and represent a branch of the sonic branding field. As the effects of music on the listener have been explored extensively in both psychology and marketing, this dissertation applies this knowledge on sonic logos to investigate whether they can be taken advantage of in a new business perspective. This research aims to study the correlation between sonic logos and the perceived value (in terms of willingness to pay) of the brand, focusing on the mediation effect of emotional response to and personal perceptions towards the music in the sonic logo. To accomplish this objective, primary data is collected both qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative part is composed of in-depth interviews and the quantitative part is in form of an online survey, which includes an experimental design: respondents are randomly divided into two groups, each of which is subjected to one version of a sonic logo of a fictitious brand of coffee and is subsequently asked about their WTP, brand perceptions, emotional response to the music, and personal perceptions towards the music. Results show that sonic logos influence WTP, and that this influence is partially mediated by both emotional response to and personal perceptions towards the music in the sonic logo. Specifically, a sonic logo positively affects WTP if its music is perceived as emotional, melancholic, exciting, interesting, elegant, familiar; however, it negatively affects WTP if its music is perceived as depressing, novel, excessively noisy.