RETAIL
Evidence shows that the use of scent can have a significant and direct impact on retail business profitability. In fact, ambient scent has the strongest impact in enhancing consumer behavior - significantly greater than the other senses.
Ambient scenting is an effective tool to engage customers, extend a brand or product’s reach, solidify a brand’s attributes, and create a pleasant environment where customers feel comfortable, energized and inspired.
Fragrance and other sensory scenting retail tools will increase the time your customers spend in the retail store and will prompt a positive change in purchase behavior and spending.
Common Uses of Sent in Retailing & its Benefits
-
Scenting Benefits include - Increase browsing time, improved brand recognition, increase sales.
-
Consumers evaluate scented products as being of higher quality.
-
75% of our emotions are generated by what we smell.
-
Scented environments stimulate sales and repeat business.
-
Scent enables customers to recall a brand and better communicate the brand’s attributes.
-
A scented space is inviting; it attracts customers and encourages them to stay longer.
-
Scent evokes pleasurable memories and reduces stress.
-
Scent can create positive associations with an event or experience.
-
Some scents are meant to conceal a less pleasant odor, but they also make you lower your guard and buy more.
-
Scent can create different moods. It can relax customers, invigorate guests, improve employee productivity!
Case Studies
-
Scented areas are perceived as higher-end and more luxurious. A Nike study showed scent affected desirability of shoes in 84% of subjects, with subjects willing to pay 10-20% more in scented environments.
-
When a national furniture retailer wanted to move more product, the U.S.-based company did something fairly unconventional—it pumped fragrance into its stores rather than just pumping more money into TV ads. While the line between correlation and definitive causation can be difficult to draw, the chain was bullish about the sales uptick it experienced during its scenting pilot program. So much so that it rolled out ambient scenting systems in 100 stores last year. (Furniture World Magazine Nov/Dec 2014).
-
Dr. Eric Spangenberg, a researcher at WSU, found that a group of 100 people on average spent 20 percent more money and bought more items while shopping in the presence of a simple scent versus no scent at all.
-
In another real-world scent marketing experiment, the smell of fresh-brewed coffee at a gas station increased coffee sales by 300%.
-
Studies have shown that a scented environment leads to consumers staying longer, and spending more. A study of Las Vegas slot players showed they spent 45% more in a scented environment than those in an unscented one.
-
“Smell has a greater impact on purchasing than everything else combined,” says Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment & Research Foundation in Chicago. “If something smells good, the product is perceived as good.” One theory, according to Hirsch, is that smells are linked with emotions. "The portion of the brain that controls smell is located in the limbic lobe, the center part of the brain that also controls emotions," he explains. "The quickest way to change emotions is with smell."
