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By Root 921 0

“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