When you are wandering around a retail store and smell a pleasant fragrance, the chances are that it is there by design, rather than because the store assistant decided to unwrap a box of pot pourri. This is because scent has the power to affect our emotions and influence our purchasing decisions.
In fact, there’s a whole lot of research that has gone into scent marketing for retail. Ambient smells are now considered an important part of the store’s sensory environment, alongside lighting, temperature, dècor, and background music. This is because smell is one of the most memorable of all the five senses.
We may forget a visual image or a piece of music after a few months, but research shows that the majority of humans can recall a particular smell accurately even after 12 months. Scientists believe that there is a physiological explanation for this. Smell is the only sense that develops in the womb, and is therefore fully present when we are born.
For this reason, we use smell as a primary means of forming emotional memories and connections, starting with the mother-baby bond. Unlike the other senses, smell is processed in the limbic system of the brain, which also deals with emotions and memories. That’s why a particular scent can provoke such a strong reaction in us.
We use our sense of smell far more often than we probably think, from deciding which foods we would like to eat, to selecting potential mates. This can be a subconscious process, and we tend to undervalue just how important our sense of smell is compared to sight, hearing, and so on.
Who hasn’t caught a whiff of a certain perfume or aftershave from a passerby and instantly been flooded with feelings and thoughts about a special person that it reminded them of? This distinctive way of triggering memories is used in a retail environment to encourage customer loyalty and increase brand recognition.
Ambient fragrances in a store can be used as a signature scent, to help establish brand identity and create a sense of luxury and exclusivity. They can also be used to enhance the products on offer and subtly prompt the customer into making a purchase. For example, supermarkets often waft the scent of freshly baked bread in the store entrance.
A shoe and handbag store might use the smell of high quality leather goods to encourage customers to linger in the store, and a wellness store might use lavender, which is associated with calmness and relaxation. The smell can be chosen specifically to target the products that generate the most revenue for a store.
In other scenarios, a more subtle background smell can be used to create a pleasant ambience that generally makes the store an enjoyable place to be, so customers will create positive memories and be more likely to make a spending decision or return to visit the store in the future.
One of the most effective ways to achieve a consistent good quality fragrance in store is to install a scent diffuser for retail.
