What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (20 page)

CHAPTER 9

Zombies at the Mall

All around the world people and companies are becoming aware of the power of scent.

—M
ARTIN
L
INDSTROM,
Brand Sense

N
ASAL PERSUASION IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE.
A scent generator hidden in a ventilation duct, or parked discreetly in the corner, can amplify the natural scent of a store’s merchandise: high-end shirtmaker Thomas Pink plays freshly laundered linen, while the Hershey’s outlet in Times Square vents extra chocolate into the air. Some merchants get creative, like the furniture store in Massachusetts that filled its children’s section with a bubble-gum scent. Even brands with no inherent scent get in on the act: consumer electronics giant Samsung wafts a corporate logoscent into its flagship store on Columbus Circle, and Westin Hotels uses a signature “White Tea” composition in the lobby. In each case, by providing a more engaging retail experience, the company hopes to benefit in terms of sales, consumer satisfaction, and brand image.

Are we on the brink of a new era in advertising? Marketing wunderkind Martin Lindstrom believes so. In his recent book
Brand Sense,
extolling the future of multisensory branding, Lindstrom is extra-super-excited about scent—he sees it as the next huge trend in marketing. Whether or not scent becomes an integral part of branding, Lindstrom’s enthusiastic prediction is the latest in a long history of marketing to the nose.

In 1925, for example, a headline in New York’s
Daily News Record
read “Sense of Smell—An Important Factor in All Modern Merchandising.” In 1934
Forbes
told its readers, “‘Sell by Smell’ may be the next big slogan in marketing.” In 1939
The Management Review
said, “The odor engineer is joining the color engineer as a consultant to the sales manager.” In 1947
The Saturday Evening Post
warned that “Shrewd merchandisers have charted a new route to your pocketbook. Now, shoe polish smells like roses, ink is perfumed, imitation leather has the scent of pigskin.”

Today’s merchandisers continue to experiment, with such offerings as lavender-scented automobile tires (aimed at women) and high-end bowling balls redolent of orange-ginger. The real action, however, lies in projecting olfactory character into indoor commercial spaces. This application has been fully embraced in one large business sector: the gaming industry. Las Vegas is the trend’s epicenter; half the major properties on the Strip have scent systems. The MGM Grand has deployed as many as nine scents simultaneously around its property, and the Venetian features a corporate logoscent called “Seduction.” In their quest to fine-tune consumer experience, casinos have made sensory engineering a priority. Guest rooms are kept chilly to discourage visitors from spending too much time in them. Complex floor plans channel patrons farther into the gaming areas, where clocks are banished, along with views of the outside world. In seeking new ways to keep people playing longer, casinos have taken the lead in manipulating the commercial smellscape.

A negative example—the removal of a brand’s characteristic smell—reveals the importance of the olfactory dimension. As the Starbucks Coffee chain expanded, it decided to switch from open containers and store-ground coffee to flavor-locked packaging. Its goal was to ensure the freshness of its roasted beans and to make life easier for the java-jockeys. But the vacuum-sealed packaging came with an unanticipated cost: it made the shops aromatically sterile. Without a coffee-heavy atmosphere to entice them, customers were being poached by the competition. Starbucks lost what company founder Howard Schultz calls “perhaps the most powerful nonverbal signal we had.” To get it back, the chain is considering a return to scooping and grinding actual beans.

Businesses can be confronted with olfactory issues by a sudden change in public policy. When smoking in pubs and clubs was recently banned in Scotland and Wales, owners were shocked to discover how bad their establishments smelled. Once the smoke cleared, Luminar, a company that owns a chain of British nightclubs, found that “the stench of beer and sweat was no longer masked by smoke.” The company began a frantic search for ways to mask the unpleasant new reality. The proposed remedy—blowing rose scent over a mass of sweaty, burping bodies—doesn’t sound promising, but here’s hoping they find an effective solution. Fraternity houses across America will be paying attention.

A
DECADE AGO,
the social psychologist Robert Baron cased a shopping mall near Albany, New York, mapping out odorless areas as well as spots that had a naturally pleasant scent—the latter turned out to be near Mrs. Field’s Cookies, the Cinnabon store, and The Coffee Beanery. Next, Baron sent in accomplices who approached shoppers and “accidentally” dropped a pen or asked for change for a dollar. Baron recorded one simple response: Did the shopper help the stranger or not? Helping behavior—picking up the pen or making change—was significantly higher in pleasantly scented areas than in unscented ones. Baron’s experiment was the first to examine the effects of odor outside the lab and in a natural consumer ecosystem—the mall. Its result was clear: shoppers respond to ambient scent in measurable and meaningful ways. The familiar scents of daily life may not call attention to themselves, yet they exert subtle behavioral effects on those who inhale. Did Cinnabon set out to make mall patrons more helpful? Unlikely, but it turns out helpfulness is just a side-benefit of public bun baking.

The Albany mall study whetted the appetite of psychologically inclined marketers. They wanted to know if scent could have more useful, or more profitable, effects on consumers. They wanted scientific evidence that scent could sell, and most of all, they wanted to know how it worked. With few exceptions, like Baron’s study, the scientific exploration of those questions takes place in psychology labs, with college sophomores as stand-ins for regular consumers. In a typical arrangement, students are brought into a room and asked to rate images of products on a computer screen, or to evaluate merchandise in a mocked-up store display. Sometimes the room is scented, sometimes not. Generally, researchers find that scent can change attitudes toward merchandise, but it’s risky to extrapolate from such highly contrived experiments to real-world uses. Research continues, however, and marketers forge ahead, even without the imprimatur of science.

So how does a scent in the air change behavior? From the literature of social psychology, Professor Baron knew that positive events gave rise to small and brief improvements in people’s moods. Something as trivial as finding a coin in a pay phone will do the trick. (The coin finder, for example, is more likely to agree to take part in a boring task a few minutes later.) Baron reasoned that the aroma of coffee and baked goods made people more helpful by lifting their mood. Sure enough, follow-up interviews revealed that shoppers in the scented areas were measurably happier than those in unscented areas.

Baron’s mood hypothesis was easy for marketers to accept because it closely resembled the conventional wisdom that smell was a purely emotional sense. This means that scent marketing is mood marketing; and creating mood is something marketers feel they understand. The equation is simple: nice scent equals good mood equals increased sales. Baron’s explanation also appealed to professional vanity: it cast the spritzer-wielding marketer as a voodoo priest, able to pull the scent-addled public through a store like the iron filings on a Wooly Willy. Mood theory became the rally cry of scent marketers everywhere. The senior PR director for Westin Hotels & Resorts, and the woman behind their White Tea logoscent, subscribes to it. “We wanted to make an emotional connection,” she says.

T
HE NOTION THAT
smell is purely an emotional sense is an old one. In 1924 the chemist and physicist E. E. Free, a former editor of
Scientific American,
said, “Practically all the reactions to smells are emotional effects on the part of our mind that is called ‘unconscious.’ They are not reasonable, intellectual reactions at all.” Free backed up his claim with a bizarre anecdote about a man who became unaccountably angry whenever he smelled horseradish. Today scientists continue to offer sound bites about the emotional force of smells. The social anthropologist Kate Fox tells the BBC, “Our sense of smell is directly connected to our emotions,” and “Smells trigger very powerful and deep-seated emotional responses.” The German psychologist Bettina Pause says, “Odors seem to be powerful emotional stimuli.” The English psychologist Steve van Toller tells
The Independent,
“Smells plug straight into our emotional centres in the middle part of the brain—the nonverbal part—and can have a powerful effect on our feelings.” The American psychologist Rachel Herz explains to
The Lancet
that the nose “has direct access to the amygdala,” the portion of the limbic brain that controls emotional response. Quotes like these set a marketing manager’s hair on fire. Who wouldn’t want to plug their brand straight into the emotional center of the brain?

Alas, things are not that simple. A big challenge to the mood theory of scent marketing is the “congruency” problem. Studies repeatedly find that for a scent to be effective, it must match its commercial context. A mismatch produces no benefit, and may even leave consumers with an unfavorable impression of a store or brand. For example, one experiment used two equally pleasant fragrances:
Lily of the Valley
and
Sea Mist.
One or the other was in the air as female college students were shown a display of satin sleepwear for women. The students said they were more likely to purchase the clothes, and were willing to pay more for them, when
Lily of the Valley
was in the air. In separate testing,
Lily of the Valley
was rated as a better match to the clothes. While
Sea Mist
was equally pleasant, it lacked the feminine associations and bedroom ambience of
Lily of the Valley.
So much for nice scent equals good mood equals increased sales—people pay attention to the meaning of smells.

The congruency problem popped up again when researchers examined the combined effects of ambient music and scent in an actual gift store. They played tunes that were either relaxing or energizing, and used scents with either high or low arousal value. When low-arousal lavender was paired with relaxing tunes, the result was a significant increase in consumer satisfaction and impulse purchasing, and a higher interest in exploring the store and making a return visit. The same happened when high-arousal grapefruit was paired with energizing tunes. Yet the same tunes and smells, when mismatched for energy level, had no effect on consumer behavior. In another study, photos of a store decorated for a holiday sale got favorable ratings when shown with a Christmas-themed fragrance and Christmas-themed tunes. The photos got lower ratings when the Christmas scent was paired with nonholiday music. The overall lesson is clear: for smell to be effective in marketing, context matters, because people try to intellectually reconcile what they see with what they smell.

The market is already addressing the need for multisensory coordination. Retailers who don’t have the time or skill to invent their own blends of scent and sound can select from prepackaged combinations. Muzak LLC, the company that supplies background music for stores and offices, has teamed up with Scent-Air Technologies, Inc., an outfit that installs aroma equipment in retail stores. Together they offer custom-designed scent-and-sound combinations that “enhance the retail experience.” Scent-Air’s CEO told newspapers, “We’re Muzak for your nose.”

Recently, the University of Washington business professor Eric Spangenberg and his colleagues gave marketers just the kind of study they’d been yearning for: one that measured the effect of scent in dollars and cents. Spangenberg’s team used an actual off-campus clothing store, where half the floor space was devoted to men’s clothing and the other half to women’s. Over the course of two weeks the store was alternately scented with two fragrances of similar strength and pleasantness: a feminine vanilla and a masculine rose maroc (a spicy, honeylike note). When vanilla was in the air, women’s-wear sales increased and menswear sales declined. When rose maroc was used, the sales changes were reversed. In other words, men bought more when the scent was male-appropriate, and less when it was feminine; the reverse was true for women. The effect was substantial. People shopping under gender-appropriate scent bought an average of 1.7 items and spent $55.14; people shopping with the gender-inappropriate scent bought only 0.9 items and spent $23.01.

Call it congruence or call it context—the important point is that the judgments affected by scent involve comparison and evaluation, not just an emotional gut-check on the part of the consumer. The shopper who perceives a mismatch between a store’s scent and its goods or music is using reasoning, not feelings. The narrow focus on emotion is beginning to give way as more researchers find that consumers process smell information cognitively. Marketing experts are beginning to give people credit for thinking. The Canadian researchers Jean-Charles Chebet and Richard Michon, for example, believe that emotion has been overemphasized as an explanation. They manipulated the scent of a mall near Montreal and found that mood had relatively little impact on how much shoppers bought. Chebet and Michon contend that scent instead changes how shoppers think about the appearance of the mall and the quality of its merchandise. In other words, what counts is meaning more than mood.

Once outside the psych lab, the concept of congruency doesn’t offer marketers much traction. Academics know congruency when they see it, but they have a hard time explaining in practical terms how a fragrance matches its marketing theme. Out in the real world, fitting a scent to a commercial context has always been a matter of style, taste, and culture. It’s what perfumers and fragrance evaluators do for a living, and marketers are well advised to join forces with these experts. What marketers need to do is develop clear standards for success. For example, is the point of a scent campaign to encourage people to stay in a store longer, perceive the goods as trendier, or try a new product? Once a program is under way, it would be useful to have a way of measuring its effectiveness: one can imagine standardized measures of scent delivery (the number of noses stimulated) and effectiveness (e.g., increase in brand awareness). In short, marketers need a Nielsen rating for the nostrils.