Retail In-store Design and Sensory Cues

Abstract: Female consumers are powerful purchasers; sensory marketing is regarded as an effective marketing strategy to reach female consumer group. The sensory cues in the cosmetic retail environment can be considered as: layout and lighting effect, the ambient scents diffused, the music playing, and the opportunity to test the cosmetic products.  The purpose of this study aims to investigate what sensory cues in a cosmetic shop have a better capacity to trigger female consumer’s positive emotion, as well as to identify the impact level of these sensory stimuli on female’s purchase intention in the cosmetic retail environment.  With the support of the proposed hypotheses and conceptual model from the theoretical framework, a quantitative research was conducted. A total of 188 responses was collected from online questionnaire. The target sampling population of the questionnaire was determined by using a judgmental convenience sampling.  The research demonstrated that both olfactory cues and tactile cues enable to trigger female’s consumer positive emotion in a cosmetic store. Furthermore, visual stimuli have the most positive influence on female consumer’s purchase intention in a cosmetic retail store.