Scents in The Marketplace

When it comes to retail stores, companies and researchers have been aware that two big factors affect purchasing – lighting and music. But recent studies have suggested there’s a third subconscious way of affecting shoppers moods – the smell or scent dispensed through out your store. To explain this, we must look at how the human body processes information, which can be divided into two parts the subconscious and conscious mind. In the conscious state, you’re actively thinking about something and are fully aware of your decisions, such as deciding on what fragrance you would like to buy for your store. The subconscious part of your mind is all the little things your body processes constantly without you even knowing it.

Its been known that the subconscious mind processes the soft lighting or music playing in the background and influences the customers’ feelings, causing them to stay longer or leave earlier. With this knowledge, is it so hard to believe that the smell of a store can affect your customers subconsciously? According to studies done at the Washington State University, the answer to this question is scent most definitely affects purchasing behavior. The question then becomes, what are the best scents to entice customers to buy more. Could it be a complex, but desirable scent, or is it a more basic smell that is simple to process? Perhaps these smells are just distracting the customer from their purchasing decisions and causing a loss in sales. Washington State’s experiments found that the correct choice to be simple smells that are easy to process.

During their study, they observed the buying habits of 400 customers. A third of the customers went into a store with no scent, a third experienced a desirable scent through out the store, of orange-basil mixed with green tea, and the last group was exposed to a simple orange scent while shopping throughout the store. On average, the customers exposed to the simple orange scent spent 20% more compared to the other two groups. The reason behind this, is customers desire a stimulation to start the buying process, hence the use of the simple smell. A complicated scent will overwhelm and burden the buyers’ ability to consciously process the products which they are attempting to buy, causing them to buy less.

Even though we may think the most elegant scents are best for our stores, often, it’s the simpler ones that are better for our customers, thus, best for our business.