Chocolate Scents and Product Sales: A Randomized Controlled Trial in a Canadian Bookstore and Café

Abstract

We present a replication and extension of a 10-day randomized controlled trial on the effects of chocolate scent on purchasing behavior in a bookstore. We report the results of a 31-day trial in an environment that includes both a bookstore and a café. The purpose of our study is to examine the generalizability of the original finding to a setting common to bookstores, in which products of the same domain as the chocolate scent — here, coffee and food items — are also offered for sale. In the first section, we introduce the study of store atmospherics and highlight the importance (and dearth) of replication in this area. In the next section, we describe the original study and discuss the theory behind an effect of ambient scent on product sales, and the role of scent-product congruity. In the third section we describe the materials and methods of our extension study. In the fourth section, we present the results of our study, and in the final section we discuss the findings. We find no evidence that chocolate scent affects sales in this setting, either in total or disaggregated by product type. Our findings suggest that contextual factors and the choices available to customers may moderate the effects of chocolate scent on purchasing behavior.