What does money smell like? : A mixed method study regarding scents affect on consumer purchase of high-involvement products

Abstract: Title: What does money smell like? – A mixed method study ofscents affect on consumer purchase of high-involvementproducts Keywords: Scent, congruency, consumer purchase behavior, consumerbehavior, high-involvement products, sensory marketing,marketing, causality, focus group, observation, mixedmethod, experiment, embedded design Background: To offer an experience means to activate the consumers’senses, and sensory cues in store atmospherics tend to catchcostumers’ interest and affect their retail experience(Sprangenberg 2006). These cues can be affected and calledsensory marketing, which by involving and stimulating all orparts of the senses, creates a more rich experience for the consumer (Hultén 2012). A more specific sense; the sense ofsmell, is connected to risk taking, variety seeking andstronger curiosity (Orth & Bourrain 2008) and also nostalgia(Lindstrom 2005). This depends on that these parts of thehumans’ brain is closely located to each other, and byunderstanding which scents that effects consumers and how,marketers can create favorable outcomes such as increased sales (Herrmann et al. 2013). Purpose: Explain how scent affects consumers’ in-store purchasebehavior of high-involvement products Methodology: A mixed method embedded design was preformed involvinga focus group, structured observation and secondary data Results: There were no statistical significance on consumers’purchase behavior when exposed to scent, and H1 wastherefore rejected Main implications: Suggestions for further research would be to try out otherscents that were not studied in this thesis, e.g. green apple. Also to have more variables in the secondary data, whentesting for the statistical significance