C onsumers can perceive value through their senses. When you use an ambient scent in the retail environment and through the products you are selling, you improve customers shopping experience and their enjoyment of the product. But even beyond that, just having your environment smell wonderful influences consumers’ perceptions of the quality of your products.
For example, customers consistently rated one pair of silk stockings as being of higher quality than another pair even though they were exactly the same; the only difference was the presence of a citrus scent on the one perceived as being higher quality.
Studies show that customers are willing to pay up to 10% for the same exact item in a scented environment compared to an unscented (but otherwise identical) environment. This perception of higher quality also extends to your employees. In a big box home and garden store, customers evaluated the salespeople as being better informed when there was the scent of freshly cut grass in the store.
Scent is an extremely powerful trigger of memories and emotions because of the way it is processed in our brain. Scent bypasses the logical part of our brain and is processed in the limbic system, the seat of our emotions and associated memories. Because this is a more primitive part of the brain, we start reacting to the smell and the feelings it brings up before we’ve even had time to think.
So if you have a product or service that is associated with a smell, using that smell in your business will non-verbally cue customers to buy. For example, a store selling baby products might use a baby powder scent, and a bathing suit store may use the scent of suntan lotion or the ocean. For restaurants, food smells associated with their main offering trigger hunger. An ice cream shop on the lower level of a cruise ship tripled its sales when it started to diffuse the mouthwatering scent of fresh waffle cone to draw customers in.