A study had found out that the reason products appear larger have something to do with sound perception. The result of the study was reported to conclude that low pitched voice of narrators or music could make products appear larger and serves as a marketing strategy.
According to Georgia Tech, the paper "Sounds Big: The Effects of Acoustic Pitch on Product Perceptions" was conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt University. The study then found out that doing marketing ads along with narrator having low pitched voices or music makes the product marketed appear larger.
Michael Lowe, study lead author and assistant professor of marketing at Scheller College of Business stated that marketers still doesn’t have a grasp of how sounds affect product perception. He then sampled as many managers select sounds or music just according to their intuition not considering the huge difference that it could make in marketing the product.
The research team then showed other study's evidence that what they discovered applies to marketing food or any product. “There is meaning in sound that transcends language,” the researchers explained in their published paper in the Journal of Marketing Research. “Structural differences in the sound of a spokesperson’s voice or a piece of background music can influence a consumer’s perception of product attributes through cross-modal inference.”
It was also reported that the other study conducted an experiment on the link of sounds and perception of size. The team allowed people to listen to a radio ad with the narrator's voice altered to a high and low pitch. The participants were then asked whether which of the two ads sound as if the product that they were marketing is large. The result was concluded to be the lower-pitch voiced ad per Phys.
The same goes for a study that conducted a TV commercial for a laptop along with an altered music sound background. In which, participants also answered that the laptop marketed along with a low pitched sound makes them perceive the laptop to be larger than the high pitched version.
The team then mentioned that small differences in sound pitches could make a huge difference in a human’s perception. Hence, the researchers concluded that they hope that their findings may help in future ad strategies regarding sound symbolisms and sensory marketing.
