Shopping for groceries have been claimed to be the most stressful type of shopping. One factor that can cause stress for parents, is shopping together with their children, as it can be time consuming and a stressful activity. Thus, an experiment within the field of sound marketing, targeting children, has been performed in order to test if parents’ shopping behaviour can be affected. The purpose was to answer the follow­ing research question:

Is it possible to affect parents shopping experience and behaviour by stimulating the children through sound marketing?

A quantitative approach were applied, using data generated from structured observa­tions, focusing on how families behave within a defined area in a grocery hyper­market, located in a suburb to Stockholm.

The findings suggest that sound marketing towards children can be useful to reduce parents’ stress level within grocery store environments. Significant results showed that sound marketing equipment for children, in form of headphones playing shorter stories adapted to the children throughout the store environment, made them more silent and less prone to move around in the store by their own than without the sound marketing equipment. In the same time the parents stress behaviour decreased, which indicates that this kind of sound marketing towards children can become a useful market­ing tool and needs to be further examined in the future.

The results from this study, combined with a multi sensory stimuli research of children, could be examined to create more appealing shopping environments for all customers. Up until now, the affect of marketing tools’, especially sound marketing, impact on children has been less explored than other forms of marketing activities. Additionally, a study resembling the one carried out in this thesis, combined with data of sales, may also be of interest, examining the cause-relations between sound stimuli towards children and parents’ spending’s in a grocery store environment.