Spice Up Store Sales

Introduce a cinnamon fragrance and the drive to make purchases wafts through the air. That’s the conclusion from a set of studies in retail stores by Stevens Institute of Technology, City University of New York, and Temple University researchers.
     At last, consumer behavior science has pinned down the reason retail sales go up so sharply around Christmas. Cinnamon is a frequent olfactory accompaniment to the holiday shopping season, right?
     But, no, I guess the extra sales have more to do with the spirit of gifting and spirited promotions. So how do we explain why cinnamon odor boosted buying substantially more than did a peppermint fragrance?
     It has to do with power. Cinnamon as well as vanilla scents led consumers in store spaces to feel warmer and more crowded. This aroused in them a desire for dominance in order to prevail over any interpersonal friction, and that desire led, in turn, to an urge to buy items, especially luxury items which would distinguish the purchaser from others. Peppermint, on the other hand, is a cool fragrance which didn’t set off a sense of being crowded.
     Burning fragranced candles, spraying a scent from a can, or using a fragrance diffuser does influence shopper’s behavior. The right store fragrance causes more people to buy and builds your store’s brand identity.
     Smells certainly 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 duration spent shopping as being much longer than it actually was.
     Use pleasant fragrances which are already familiar to the shopper or which you make familiar through repetition. If a smell hasn’t been encountered before, with associations stored in the brain, it will be complicated for the shopper to decode, so the advantages of instant, subconscious influence are lost.
     Still, even the best olfactory plans can be sabotaged when the store browsers wearing their own fragrances circulate.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more: 
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Smell Familiar for Purchasing Enhancement 
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