Smells in Sustainable Environments: The Scented Silk Road to Spending

Humanity's demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what earth can regenerate in that year, creating an urgent need for more sustainable behavior. Here, the focus is on a particular factor that so far has been overlooked in facilitating sustainable behavior, namely smell. The two-fold aim of this study was (i) to investigate whether ambient scent could enhance customers' subjective experience and spending behavior in a sustainable environment, and (ii) to elucidate the affective and cognitive pathways from scent to spending. To test this, a double-blind field experiment was designed where customers of a second-hand clothing store (N = 57) could face one of three conditions: fresh linen scent (pleasant and semantically priming “clean clothing” increasing the products' value), vanilla sandalwood scent (pleasant control odor), or regular store odor (odorless control). Buttressed by prior research, the fresh linen scent was expected to cause the strongest increase in spending behavior due to its positive semantic association with the product (i.e., clean clothing). The results indeed showed that fresh linen scent almost doubled consumer spending vs. the odorless control and the pleasant control odor. Other factors potentially affecting consumer behavior (e.g., weekday, weather, odor awareness) were uncorrelated. Whereas a conceptually-driven mediation analysis showed that only fresh linen scent increased mood and evaluations of the store, staff, and products, these variables did not mediate the relation between scent and spending. An explorative structural equation model suggested cognitive priming to be mainly responsible for increasing consumers' spending in the fresh linen condition by enhancing the general store evaluation. Further support is needed to corroborate the indirect findings that specific scents can follow a “cold” semantic road and a “hot” affective road to spending. At minimum, consumers are no “zombies” that empty their pockets in the presence of whatever odor; the smell needs to have a meaningful link to the (sustainable) context at hand to influence consumer behavior.