By Amber P.
Every December, people shell out a fair portion of their income for gifts, gifts and more gifts. For retailers, this means profit, profit and more profit. With the vast competition in today’s market, companies are scrambling for anything and everything that will give them even a slight edge. Every company wants to know exactly what it is that will get them out on top. Believe it or not, these tactics include not only advertising and the hugely popular discounts we saw with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but also the scents in stores.What is it that motivates consumers to buy? This has been largely explored from an audio-visual perspective, with music and colour on television, with the popular establishment of the internet and clever merchandising in stores. Just fifty or sixty years ago, marketing was done very differently, with advertising that would simply discuss cost and performance of a given product. Nowadays, however, corporations have learned through neuroscience and consumer studies that decisions are not made rationally, but are instead influenced by various complex factors of emotion and association that do not occur on the rational level. Largely, the human subconscious is influenced by the senses, but one that hasn’t seemed to get enough attention on the marketing front is the human sense of smell.
Washington State University recently published a study with three sets of four hundred subjects who, when shopping, were exposed to a variety of tests. The first group was exposed to a simple orange scent, the second group to a more complex orange, basil and green tea scent, and finally, the last group, was subjected to no scent at all. The researchers found that those who were exposed to the simple orange scent, as opposed to the two other sets of test subjects spent 20% more. In today’s measures, that’s a pretty significant difference. The reason believed for the results is that the scent is unconsciously calming and pleasant. "Most people are processing it at an unconscious level,” says Spangenberg, one of the scientists, “but it is impacting them.” However, as they found with the complex scent, a scent being pleasing doesn’t mean it’s effective in terms of stimulating people to spend money. The theory behind the results with the complex orange-basil-tea scent is that it is distracting. With so many different undertones, consumers spend more time trying to identify the scents than focusing on shopping; while the simple orange scent contributed to a certain “processing fluency,” the complex scent was taking up the customers’ cognitive “bandwidth.”
Whether you are buying or selling, it is important to understand how people are manipulated into making certain decisions. Even those factors that seem the most banal can make a significant difference when it comes to business. As the business of persuasion becomes more and more complex, there are more and more factors to understand, but when you do, you are no longer a victim of those factors and can become more in control of your decisions.
