Faced with tougher and tougher online competition, traditional retailers are scrambling to find ways to exploit the advantages of realworld sales that e-commerce vendors can’t easily duplicate, such as taste and feel – and smell. Strong scents brighten attitudes and open wallets, and a recent study shows that the right scent at the right intensity can increase sales by nearly a third

El Haji, A. (Anouar)

Leenders, M.A.A.M. (Mark)

Smidts, A. (Ale)

Erasmus University Digital Repository

3rd Quarter 2016   |   17www.rsm.nl/discovery Background music, lighting and inte-rior decoration are all well-established tools retailers use to put consumers in the mood to buy, but scent is further out on the sensory frontier. Businesses have always used scent to influence customers – think of bakeries – but in recent years, the science has become much more advanced. The Mirage Casino in Las Vegas, the Magna Plaza shopping mall in Amsterdam, and most of the theme parks in Orlando, Florida, use scent to attract custom-ers. Consultancies have even sprung up that offer advice on the best scents for particular businesses to use. However, academic researchers know relatively little yet about the dy-namics of scent as a strategic market-ing tool beyond a fairly broad under-standing that, unsurprisingly, a neutral to pleasant scent can have a positive effect on the customer’s mood or trig-ger memories.As scholars interested in market-ing management, consumer behav-iour, and innovation, we thought this gap between business practice and research smelled like a rare opportu-nity. Academics and retailers alike have many questions about the use of scent, and only a limited number of studies have considered the specifics of how scent affects consumers. Most researchers have found that a pleasant scent leads to better eval-uations of the store and its merchan-dise, and increases the amount of money spent. People exposed to a pleasant scent also tend to underes-timate the time they spent in a store. One researcher even observed more smiles on consumers after their ex-posure to a citrus scent in a sporting goods emporium.  Scent intensityBut no one had worked out much on the impact of scent intensity on con-sumer behaviour. To find out, we found a supermarket in the Netherlands, part of a major chain, that was willing to allow us to conduct a real-world ex-periment on the relationship between scent intensity, customer mood, and sales.  First we needed to find the right scent. When it comes to ambient or “background” scents, scholars have found that congruence seems to be important when the goal is to encour-age a positive mood. By congruence, they mean that the scent must blend in with the surroundings. Not every scent is good for every situation: a scent that brings people out on a dance floor may be different than the one that keeps them in the grocery aisle. Consumers will notice non-congruent or mis-matched scents, but generally not in a way that the retailer will like: a non-congruent scent may start them think-ing about the weird smell itself and such thoughts may reduce the auto-matic emotional impact.We asked scent experts for a rec-ommendation of a scent that people would find pleasing in the context of a supermarket. They suggested that melon would be the best of all pos-Using scent to lift customers’ moodsBy Mark Leenders, Ale Smidts and Anouar El HajiFaced with tougher and tougher online competition, traditional re-tailers are scrambling to find ways to exploit the advantages of real-world sales that e-commerce vendors can’t easily duplicate, such as taste and feel – and smell. Strong scents brighten attitudes and open wallets, and a recent study shows that the right scent at the right intensity can increase sales by nearly a third.“Not every scent is good for every situation: a scent that brings people out on a dance floor may be different than the one that keeps them in the grocery aisle.”riods of high-intensity scent diffusion also had more positive things to say about the store and its products than those who visited during mid-intensity or low-intensity periods.Perceptions of timeInterestingly, we also confirmed prior studies that suggested that scent af-fects consumers’ perception of time: at the highest intensity level, shoppers of-ten underestimated their time in the store, while at the lowest level they overestimated the length of their visit. Shoppers spent 30 per cent more time in the store when the scent was strong compared to shoppers in a no-scent period. They also thought they had spent less time. At the high end, they actually spent 14.18 minutes in the store, but their visit felt shorter (13.99 minutes). With no scent, they spent an average of 11.15 minutes in the store but felt they had spent longer (12.13 minutes).Broken down by demographics, the results of our study were more mixed. Although men tend to have a weaker sense of smell than women, we found no significant difference in their responses from those of the av-erage. Nor did we notice an age effect, although the ability to smell declines over age 50, but this was probably because we did not have many older shoppers in the sample.Improved moodsThe only sub-group that did have a stronger response than average was shoppers in a hurry. Marketers have long known that hurried shoppers tend sible scents for our purposes. Melon smells are universally liked, they told us, and melon scent has the additional virtue of being safe, easily synthesised, and inexpensive.  Our goal was to find out whether the intensity of a scent affects consum-er behaviour. Most earlier studies on ambient sent have compared the im-pact of scent and no-scent treatments, and on the whole, most found scent had a positive impact on customers’ moods and likelihood of purchase. Not much was known about scent intensi-ty, however, except an intuitive under-standing that there can be too much of a good thing, even when the scent is pleasant. Using electrostatic aroma diffusers, we infused a melon scent at three dif-ferent intensity levels on three differ-ent sets of Tuesdays and Wednesdays (the days with the most even foot traf-fic), and then measured the differenc-es in shoppers’ moods, behaviour, and general opinions of the store.For each intensity level, a total of 100 customers were observed and studied. In order to assess the actual time spent in the store, observers reg-istered the arrival time of each poten-tial respondent. When the observed respondent arrived at the checkout counter queue, the end time of the trip was registered. Upon leaving the shop, these customers were intercepted and asked to participate in a study evaluat-ing the supermarket by completing a four-question survey at a location near-by, but out of sight of customers enter-ing the store. Before the interception, there was no interference with the cus-tomers’ regular shopping trip.  We found that for the whole sample of 300+ respondents, the stronger the intensity of the melon scent, the more they purchased.  At the highest intensity level, 43 per cent reported that they had made an unintended purchase, compared to 33 per cent and 30 per cent at the medium and low thresholds. Overall, revenue from the high-intensity scent shoppers increased almost 14 per cent compared to the gross from the base-line group, but the medium intensity had only a two per cent impact on con-sumer spending. Shoppers during pe-Management KnowledgeRSM DISCOVERYUsing scent to lift customers’ moods (continued)By Mark Leenders, Ale Smidts and Anouar El Haji“Shoppers spent 30 per cent more time in the store when the scent was strong compared to shoppers in a no-scent period. They also thought they had spent less time.”18   |   3rd Quarter 20163rd Quarter 2016   |   19www.rsm.nl/discovery to be in a worse mood than shoppers with time on their hands, but before this study no one had established that a strong pleasant smell could lead to a dramatic improvement in busy con-sumers’ moods. For less hurried shoppers, who were presumably in a better mood when they walked through the front door, scent improved their mood only slight-ly. Interestingly, however, a strong pleasant scent still affected their be-haviour, causing them to linger in the store somewhat longer than shoppers who visited on low-scent days, suggest-ing that scent still affects people who are already in good humour.Our most important conclusion is that the intensity of the scent matters. We found that store evaluations and behaviour changed substantially only when the scent reached the high-in-tensity level. Evidently, the scent needs to be relatively strong to reach a large number of shoppers. The fact that we conducted the experiment in a super-market may also have affected the scent intensity needed to produce the effects desired by retailers, as our mel-on scent had to contend with a cornu-copia of smells. Scent can be a powerful tool for re-tailers, but it is still imperfectly under-stood. Our study, however, suggests that the right scent at the right level of intensity represents a rare oppor-tunity for brick and mortar stores to create a unique form of emotional market differentiation. This article draws its inspiration from the paper Ambient Scent as a Mood Inducer in Supermarkets: The Role of Scent Intensity and Time-Pressure of Shoppers, written by Mark A.A.M. Leenders, Ale Smidts and Anouar El Haji. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, available online 17 June 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2016.05.007Mark Leenders is Professor of Marketing and Deputy Head of School (Research & Innovation), Graduate School of Business & Law, RMIT University.   EMAIL   mark.leenders@rmit.edu.auAle Smidts is Professor of Marketing Research and Chair of the Department of Marketing Management, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.   EMAIL   asmidts@rsm.nl Anouar El Haji is a graduate student, Department of Strategy & Marketing, Amsterdam Business School.   EMAIL   a.elhaji@uva.nl

Using scent to lift customers' moods

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Using scent to lift customers' moods

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