Smells can pace shoppers. The odor from a dirty restroom, ripe garbage, or even an excessively intense dose of a favorite fragrance will rush the shopper right along toward the exit. On the positive side, 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 consumers generally 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.
Fragrances also can affect shoppers’ quite specific thoughts and behaviors. Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen and Utrecht University, both in the Netherlands, assigned study participants to individually complete a questionnaire. The participant’s answers to the questionnaire were completely irrelevant to the purpose of the study. Filling it out served only to consume time while the participant was either exposed to a faint odor or not. The odor was produced by mixing 45 ml. of a citrus-scented household cleanser into a bucket containing 1.5 liter of lukewarm water.
Upon completing the questionnaire, each participant was instructed to eat a rigged biscuit. This biscuit had been selected because it’s impossible to consume it without it crumbling plentifully. The experimental question: Will the people who had been exposed to the faint fragrance of the cleanser be neater than those who hadn’t? The answer to the experimental question: The cleanser-primed people cleaned up their crumbs more than three times as often, on average, while eating the biscuit.
In another study by the same researchers, people exposed or not exposed to the faint odor of the cleanser were asked to list five activities they planned to do during the rest of the day. Here the cleanser-primed were more than three times as likely, on average, to say they were planning for a cleaning-related activity.
Shoppers in your store exposed to the faint fragrance of a cleanser will, on average, both buy more cleaning products and keep the shopping area neater.
For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers
Click below for more:
Smell Familiar for Purchasing Enhancement
Use Fragrances to Pace Shoppers
Keep It Clean
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