Sounds expensive? The effect of voice pitch on price perception

Abstract

Voice pitch has been researched widely in the field of psychology, still the impact of voice pitch in audio commercial context has rarely been studied in the field of marketing with the aim to understand how voice pitch can affect product perception. Former research in various fields have established that the level of voice pitch can affect the perception of size, dominance and power. We wish to establish if voice pitch can also affect product attribute perception in a commercial setting, with the focus on price perception. Our findings show that voice pitch affects subjects to perceive the price of a product as higher when exposed to an audio advertisement spoken with a lower voice pitch. Contrary to our hypothesis, the effect of voice pitch does not seem to be dependent on the order in which the questions regarding the product attributes are asked. In other words, no order effects between voice pitch and product attributes were found. Furthermore, the effect of voice pitch does not seem to be moderated by order effects, other product attributes or salience of the focal variable. The findings support the previous research stating that a lower voice pitch is associated with power, dominance, success, larger size and social status. KEYWORDS: sensory marketing, vocal cues, pitch, price, quality, dominance, power, social status, size, salience, priming, audio advertisement.