The dollars and cents of scents, plus a bit about a personal fetish or two
Kes: It's intriguing to think of smell as a form of media. While many of the products which have been developed to "sell" smell still look pretty silly--there was a "smell-o-vision" CD-type player thingy a couple of years back--the use of smell to evoke emotional reactions or to intensify a sense of being in an immersive environment, is something I find fascinating. Before malls became places where sound is used to drown out rational thought, I used to like spending time at malls just traveling around and trying to identify the stores. Wilson's Leather is a dead giveaway, as is Starbuck's, but bookstores, mmmmm, bookstores, just the smell of all that paper is a turnon (have you ever noticed how used bookstores smell different from bookstores that sell new books? It's interesting to think of how old paper smells different from new paper, not to mention the cheap pulpy stuff that is new paper, sigh.) A place I had a serious fetish for since I was a teenager was the Macy's men's department: the smell of leather and wool and starchy shirts and those men's colognes that used to smell of sandalwood or bay rum, maybe it was just that those scents evoke English mysteries and Edwardian farces?
Via MindHacks
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/how_shops_use_scent_.html
New Scientist has just made a popular article
Recruiting smell for the hard sell
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19225821.800-recruiting-smell-for-the-hard-sell.html
freely available online that focuses on how shops use scent to alter our buying behaviour.
The article looks at '
scent marketing'
http://www.scentmarketing.org/
-the practice of selecting an in-shop scent to encourage spending on a particular product line.
Block quote start
In one recent
study,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V7S-4M7VB59-2&_user=10&_coverDate=11%2F30%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=bdcfc5740c70e5f5438eb4fc7c84ac70
accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics
at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when "feminine
scents", like vanilla, were used, sales of women's clothes doubled; as did men's clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.
"Men don't like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don't linger in a store if it smells masculine," says Spangenberg, who led the research
and has been studying the impact of ambient scents on consumers for more than a decade. Spangenberg says this most recent study underscores the importance
of matching gender-preferred scents to the product. Both men and women browsed for longer and spent more money when a fragrance specific to their gender
was used to scent the store atmosphere. "Scent marketing is a viable strategy that retailers should consider," says Spangenberg. "But they really need
to tailor the scent to the consumer."
Block quote end
It's not clear exactly how this works, but we know that smell has a particularly
strong
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan98/smell.html
effect on emotional memory.
In fact, the
olfactory bulb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_bulb
the part of the brain's olfactory system
that takes information directly from the nose, is linked directly to the
amygdala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala
a key emotion processing area.
Via MindHacks
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/how_shops_use_scent_.html
New Scientist has just made a popular article
Recruiting smell for the hard sell
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19225821.800-recruiting-smell-for-the-hard-sell.html
freely available online that focuses on how shops use scent to alter our buying behaviour.
The article looks at '
scent marketing'
http://www.scentmarketing.org/
-the practice of selecting an in-shop scent to encourage spending on a particular product line.
Block quote start
In one recent
study,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V7S-4M7VB59-2&_user=10&_coverDate=11%2F30%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=bdcfc5740c70e5f5438eb4fc7c84ac70
accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Research, Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and dean of the College of Business and Economics
at Washington State University in Pullman, and his colleagues carried out an experiment in a local clothing store. They discovered that when "feminine
scents", like vanilla, were used, sales of women's clothes doubled; as did men's clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused.
"Men don't like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don't linger in a store if it smells masculine," says Spangenberg, who led the research
and has been studying the impact of ambient scents on consumers for more than a decade. Spangenberg says this most recent study underscores the importance
of matching gender-preferred scents to the product. Both men and women browsed for longer and spent more money when a fragrance specific to their gender
was used to scent the store atmosphere. "Scent marketing is a viable strategy that retailers should consider," says Spangenberg. "But they really need
to tailor the scent to the consumer."
Block quote end
It's not clear exactly how this works, but we know that smell has a particularly
strong
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jan98/smell.html
effect on emotional memory.
In fact, the
olfactory bulb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_bulb
the part of the brain's olfactory system
that takes information directly from the nose, is linked directly to the
amygdala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala
a key emotion processing area.