Smell, Listen and Spend Money Like Crazy

NJBIZTrenton

When people go to the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City they accept that everything they see is designed to separate them from their money. What they may not know is that the very air they breathe as they step into the lobby or walk the corridor from the parking garage to the casino carries a subtle, yet complex aroma designed to evoke a relaxed, wooded setting?the kind of place where they?re likely to linger and spend money. Maureen Morrin knows tricks like that work; her studies have proved it.
?Based on our research at a large shopping center in a Montreal suburb, it appears that subtle scents and soft music can affect different kinds of shoppers in different ways,? says Morrin, an associate professor of marketing at the Rutgers-Camden School of Business. ?When they?re used properly, a consumer may make more purchases.?
This involves some subtlety, says Mark Peltie, co-owner of AromaSys, the Lake Elmo, Minnesota, company that designed Borgata?s aroma-delivery system. ?An aroma has to be barely noticeable,? he says. ?If it?s too strong it can be annoying.?
The relationship between spending decisions and smells and sounds is called atmospherics. It?s one of Morrin?s specialties. Working with Jean-Charles Chebat, a marketing professor from the HEC Montréal business school, she appears to have broken new ground in a yet-to-be published paper titled ?Person-Place Congruency: The Interactive Effects of Shopper Style and Atmospherics on Consumer Expectation.?
The study went beyond which smells and sounds put people in a buying mood. Instead, Morrin and Chebat were able to quantify the effects of these influences in dollar and cents. It?s the kind of finding that could be applied across industries, from clothing stores to investment banks.
An important caveat for those who want to parlay this information into sales is the observation that different types of shoppers responded to different influences. ?We found that impulsive buyers?people who make unplanned purchases?tended to spend more when pleasant, soft music was playing in the background,? says Morrin. ?On the other hand, contemplative buyers?people who tend to spend more time thinking about a purchase?tended to spend more when a pleasant scent was present.?
In fact, based on her shopping mall survey, impulsive customers spent an average of $96.89 apiece on unplanned purchases?a 50% increase?when they were surrounded by ambient or soft music. Purchases dropped to $64.00 without the tunes, and fell to only $55.34 when impulsive consumers were exposed to scent only. Similarly, contemplative buyers spent $46.50 when they were exposed to background scent, but only $40.79 without it. And when music alone was pumped in, their spending shriveled to $39.81.
Some merchants might hope that if music or scent spurs purchases, a combination of both can unleash shoppers? wallets. Wrong.
?We tested that approach and found that the combined scent/music condition may have created a condition of stimulus overload for most of the consumers,? Morrin reports.
She puts numbers behind that observation, noting that impulsive buyers? spending plunged to $36.70 when they faced a music and scent environment, while contemplative buyers backed off to only $28.29.
?Smell, sound and color are among the variables that can have a small but real effect on buying decisions,? says Avery N. Gilbert, a psychologist who heads Synesthetics, a Montclair-based multisensory research company. ?Retailers like Victoria?s Secret and Thomas Pink [a custom shirt maker] use background scent as a stimulant. More companies are aware of the uses of scent and sound but only a limited number are utilizing the approach.?
The approach isn?t suitable for every kind of merchant, however. ?In some cases, you don?t want a customer to hang around too long,? Gilbert says. ?Fast-food restaurants, for example, usually want you to get in and out in a short period of time.?
Meanwhile, New York City-based International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) has expanded the market with its ?Sensory Perception? technology, microscopic capsules containing fragrance that gradually release scents into such objects as clothing, linens, carpets and drapes. IFF has multiple facilities in New Jersey.
IF&F?s London-based Global Commercial Director for Textiles, Shibani Mohindra, says, ?Scent is one of many deciding factors in a customer decision. Properly done it will be in the background, where it?s barely noticeable.? She says that it?s already common for shoppers to sniff shampoo and other products before they buy, so extending the practice to home furnishings is a logical step.
But when it comes to a retail setting, it can be a challenge to match the influence to the customer. ?It may be difficult to identify a customer type, impulsive or contemplative, especially in a large retail setting,? Morrin says. ?But one way might be to establish atmospherics based on the product that?s being sold.?
For example, big-ticket goods like cars are rarely bought on impulse, so an auto dealership might use scents, which are targeted towards contemplative buyers. A department store might pump music into a health and beauty aid section that sells goods like toothpaste, which are often impulse buys.
But it?s more complicated than that. ?For an adult, toothpaste will usually represent an impulse buy,? says Morrin. ?But an image-conscious teenager may agonize over a decision like this, making it a contemplative type of purchase.?
Those of us who have to brave the mall can only hope she doesn?t solve that one.
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