Use Fragrances to Pace Shoppers

Want to increase the length of customers’ visits to your store so that they have more time to browse around at all the products you carry? Or would you prefer that your shoppers move more quickly through their trip in order to free up parking spaces and staff time for newly arriving customers? Either way or somewhere in-between, colors, music, and even fragrances can set the shopper’s speed.

      Calming colors such as blue slow down the shopper, while bright colors like red increase the pace. The tempo of background music in the store—slow to fast—influences how slow or fast shoppers move. And researchers at Drake University in Iowa and Washington State University report that fragrances in a store distort the customer’s sense of time. People shopping in scented surroundings find that time passes more slowly. The result is that they’re more likely to stay longer in the store. When research subjects shopped in a no-scent environment, time tended to drag. If not able to check themselves against a clock, these shoppers estimated the time spent shopping as being much longer than it actually was.

      Not all smells make consumers want to hang around longer. And strong doses of even pleasant odors can quickly become unpleasant. But when the fragrance is appealing, the people linger.

      The most powerful pacing effects from fragrance come if there’s compatibility among the sensory signals. For example, researchers at The Pennsylvania State University and University of Singapore found that when scent and music cued the same sort of pacing, impulse buying went up and customers reported higher satisfaction with their shopping experience. This was true both when the store wanted customers to stay longer (lavender scent and slow tempo music) and when the store wanted customers to move briskly (grapefruit scent and fast tempo music).