Question

Topic: Customer Behavior

What Scent Should I Use In A Jewelry Store?

Posted by Anonymous on 8/10/2005 at 12:34 AM ET 125 Points
I want to increase sales in a bead store I own. I sell components mainly for women in their 35-50 years. I sell beads, findings and bead jewelry such as necklaces and rings. I have read that a good chosen scent can increase sales, but I don't find information as to which scent is recommended for my king of store. Can someone help me?
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  • Posted by steven.alker on 8/10/2005 at 5:24 AM Accepted
    Hi Miguelr

    If you are looking for an answer along the lines of “Beads = use sandalwood”, you are going to be disappointed, at least as far as published academic research is concerned.

    In my “company sales doctor” mode, I used to run the sales operation for a company which developed and sold the test equipment used to study behavioural activity in a variety of models, mainly for drug discovery and novel compound research in the pre-clinical environment, but occasionally to see why adults did some of the weird things they do.

    When it came to smell, I never knew which was more interesting – a rat’s sophisticated reaction to a variation in a complex task guided by subtly changing mixtures of scents or a human subject’s stupid loss of self control because he’d just been subject to a whiff of something found in a bit of his hypothalamus that hadn’t evolved for 2 million years and was usually found to be active in abundance when he and his mates were wrecking the bar!

    More to the point, some excellent work was carried out on olfactory stimulation into buying behaviour in human subjects which was also mirrored by reward-models in their slightly more intelligent brethren - Rats.

    An interesting paper in Journal of Retailing 77 (2001) pp273–289 shows that there is a relationship between scent and buying behaviour but, in common with a lot of current research, it concludes that the actual scent is not a determinant in buying behaviour per-se. Contrasting stimuli from high arousal scents (eg Grapefruit) and low arousal scents (eg Lavender) showed little change to either impulse or planned buying behaviour. Both were enhanced by the additional stimuli of background music and the low arousal scent was more effective in situations where a purchasing decision was dependent on the customer lingering in the store.

    The following citation comes as close to being definitive as I have found (There’s a lot of subjective rubbish published on the subject as opposed to scientific stuff)

    AU: Ann Marie Fiore, Xinlu Yah, Eunah Yoh
    TI: Effects of a product display and environmental fragrancing on approach responses and pleasurable experiences
    SO: Psychology and Marketing
    VL: 17
    NO: 1
    PG: 27-54
    YR: 2000
    CP: Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
    ON: 1520-6793
    PN: 0742-6046
    AD: Iowa State University

    The conclusion is that if your customer base is predominantly female, select a fragrance they are likely to enjoy, and it will encourage them to linger whilst lowering their threshold to purchasing decisions and budget limitations.

    The “natural” aromatic odours seem to be most effective as they are uncontroversial and do not tend to produce the embedded likes or dislikes which branded fragrances can inspire.

    Looks like sandalwood is going to be pretty good after all!

    Steve Alker
    Unimax Solutions
    (Aided in this contribution by Hoody and Missy, the pet rats)

  • Posted by steven.alker on 8/11/2005 at 4:06 PM Member
    Hi Miguel

    The dispensers we used were for laboratory conditions, but I know that a number of manufacturers went on to produce commercial versions for the retail trade - the smell of bread in an in-house bakery in a supermarket is an example – you thought it came from the oven? No way! A timed aerosol dispenses the tantalising whiff of baking at pre-determined times in the day.

    A low cost route might come from domestic air freshener manufacturers who have recently introduce mains powered and battery powered scent dispensers. Just throw away the manufacturers contents (Unless you want your retail space to smell like an airport lavatory!) and use an aromatherapy essential oil – essence. If you want to use the oil itself, you will have to use a heated dispenser as the vapour pressure of most oils at room temperature is too low to let them give off much of a whiff and they are too viscous to go through most domestic atomisers.

    Many of the natural fine fragrance manufacturers these days also offer ambient dispensers which although they are aimed at a domestic environment, they are also aimed at the top end of the domestic environment where most of the customer’s living rooms are probably bigger than your shop!

    Sorry I don’t have any personal recommendations I can make, but a hunt though in Google, produced some very interesting sites. I particularly liked: https://www.ecomist.com.au/page/our_fragrances.html
    As the Aussies are brilliant when they go bonkers about something new-age-ish! There's a whole section on retail fragrances along with lots of holistic waffle, but what the hell. It sells scent and the scent helps sell your goods!

    Hope that this helps

    Steve
  • Posted by SRyan ;] on 8/12/2005 at 3:59 AM Member
    Apartment leasing offices stuff frozen cookie dough into a toaster oven to connect visitors' olfactory senses to the BUY ME synapses of the brain. And my realtor advised me to bake snickerdoodles prior to my open house for the same reasons.

    Not that you want people to move into your store... but hey, the wafting aromas of oven-fresh chocolate or cinnamon might have an interesting impact on your customers. Give it a try!
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