A box of chocolates weighs 500 grams. The hotel is only a 400 meter walk away from the center. The mansion is over 6,000-square-foot big. From weight to size or distance; customers are constantly exposed to quantitative information in their decision making.

However, as it turns out, our brain is awful at processing this quantitative information. We prefer information to be more discrete and sparking the imagination, say a box of 10 chocolates, a hotel that’s only a 5-minute walk away from the center, or a mansion of 10 bedrooms…

This finding applies to other quantitative information as well and has intriguing implications for nudging consumer behavior both for marketeers as well as public policy makers.

What is your budget? What is your bid? How much would you like to donate?

These questions have become quite commonplace online; customers are asked to choose what they would like to pay, rather than are provided with a pre-set value. For instance, eBay allows customers to bid on listed items, whereas charity website Doctors Without Borders allows donors to enter a chosen donation amount.

Customers are prompted to indicate their chosen value either via an open-ended text box or a slider scale. With the recent boost in popularity of online transactions via mobile phones, organizations have increasingly turned to the use of slider scales rather than text boxes to register monetary values.

But how has this switch to sliders affected customers’ payments? Do payment responses differ for text boxes and slider scales? As it turns out; yes, they certainly do!

Advertisers and researchers have long known of the effect that ambient music has in guiding a customer’s subconscious. New studies suggest that this effect also includes music volume, and that a simple turn of the volume button may significantly affect sales. That probably sounds like music to any managers’ ears!

So what volume should you adopt to boost your sales?

Let’s take a look at one of the latest findings on music volume and their implications for your food venture.