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Retail outlets - The Fragrant Mind

Retail Planning Associates of Seattle, USA, are one of the new breed of companies who specialize in creating fragrances for retail outlets. Their president, J'amy Owens , says that aroma is " ....one of the best ways to influence the customer that's legal ..It's the " come into my parlor" approach, one more piece of netting in the web. A unique personalised store aroma, which can be used in their air conditioning system, can cost anything up to $20,000 to create.
Aroma diffusion does not have to be an expensive business, however.

Anyone can create their own, unique personal range of preferred aromas when they have a few bottles of essential oils with which to work. There is a very effective diffuser available, which doesn't use electricity or candle-heat and because its portable, can be used in your office as well as your home. Even on a commercial scale , using essential oils, the cost is not excessive . The Radisson Mart

Plaza Hotel in Miami, for example, fragrances its &, 000 square-foot lobby for $21 a day.

According to Alan R Hirsh , Neurologic Director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, USA, 'Odorants are potentially more efficacious than any other modality in increasing sale ability of consumer products. This is true regardless of whether the odor is actually related to or synergistic with the product. 'In other words, you can put a false aroma of popcorn into the environment, a cinema foyer for example, and increase your sales of actual popcorn, or you can use a floral aroma to make the customer buy some thing that has nothing to do with flowers - a pair of trainer shoes for example.


In 1990 Dr Hirsh recruited thirty-one people at shopping centre and asked them to look at trainer shoes in two rooms. The NIke trainers used in the trial were identical, but one of the rooms was perfumed with a light mixed floral aroma. Twenty-six of 84 percent of the people indicated that they were more likely to buy the shoes in the scented room, and on average, they said they'd pay $10.33 more for them. Although the test attempted to make the aroma detectable to the participants, many couldn't smell it although they too preferred the product in the perfumed room.

This means the 'buy-me' reflex is opening at a subliminal level too. All this is very tantalizing to sales managers, especially as the technology now exists to release a variety of odourants into a closed atmosphere in standardized but adjustable concentrations.

In another trial, in a gambling casino in Las Vegas, Hirsh discovered that if a particular aroma was put into the atmosphere around a group of slot-machines, the amount of money put in them by gamblers increased by an average of 45.!! percent. As part of the trial, Hirsh and also used a second aroma around another group of machines and taken a non-perfumed area as his control.


Neither of these areas saw any increase in their takings, so obviously there was something in 'aroma # 1' causing the increased sales effect. Finding exactly what makes people spend their money so freely is what the new aroma research is all about, and what more and more businesses will find themselves having to pay for, as aroma-competition hots up.

Although japan does not at present use aroma to an extensive degree in retailing. Toyota does use floral aroma to an extensive degree in retailing. Toyota does use floral aromas to attract women into its showrooms. Meanwhile, an un-named American car manufacturer is supporting research to find a scent which makes its salesmen appear 'more honest and trustworthy to customers.'

Of course, making a sale is only half the problem - then you've got to collect the money. Aroma can help here too. Imagine if there was an aroma you could spray on your invoices to induce the customer to pay up.There is. It's called Aeolus & and smells like sweat. Apparently, it is a much faster way to get payment than sending a lawer's letter and, of course, very much cheaper.

Reference: The Fragrant MInd:Valerie A. Worwood

 

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