Every scent proposal eventually arrives at the same slide: dwell time up, spend up, an arrow pointing cheerfully to the top right. The arrow is roughly true. The mechanism behind it is more interesting than the slide, and knowing it is the difference between a scent that pays for itself and one that just runs quietly in the background.
Jean-Charles Chebat and Richard Michon tested this properly in a working shopping mall, in the Journal of Business Research. They set two explanations against each other. The first was emotional: scent makes you feel good, good feelings make you spend. The second was cognitive: scent changes what you think about the place, and your judgement of the place drives your behaviour. When they ran the data, the cognitive route won. Ambient scent improved shoppers’ perceptions of the mall environment and of product quality, and it was those improved perceptions, not a vague mood lift, that fed through to spending.
That distinction has teeth. It means scent doesn’t work by putting people in a chemically better temper and loosening their wallets. It works by making a space read as higher quality, better kept, more worth being in. People then behave the way they behave in places they rate highly. They stay a little longer. They give more of it their attention.
Corina Popa’s research in Japan, examining scent in real retail settings, arrives in the same territory from a different direction. She starts from a striking imbalance: by one widely cited estimate, roughly three-quarters of brand communication has historically been aimed at the eyes and ears, leaving the sense most tied to emotion and memory almost unused. The spaces that break that pattern aren’t adding noise to an already crowded channel. They’re using one that’s largely empty.
The honest caveat, and the systematic review by Justina Rimkute, Caroline Moraes and Carlos Ferreira in the International Journal of Consumer Studies is clear on it, is that the size of these effects varies a great deal between studies and settings. Nobody serious should promise you a fixed percentage. What the body of work supports is a direction and a mechanism, not a guarantee.
Our own experience bears out the direction. At Changi Airport, the scenting programme is tied to measurable gains in how long people linger and how the environment is perceived, in a setting where dwell time carries real commercial value, because a passenger who stays is a passenger who might buy, eat, or simply leave calmer and better disposed to the place.
Here’s what that means if you manage the economics of a space. Dwell time is not a vanity figure. In retail and food and beverage, minutes convert. In transit and hospitality, perceived quality and perceived waiting time convert into satisfaction scores, repeat visits, and a willingness to pay a premium for the same square metres. Scent doesn’t act on the till directly. It acts on the perceptions that decide what happens at the till.
Which is why a scent programme judged purely on a short-term sales spike usually disappoints. You’re measuring the last link in the chain and ignoring the one scent actually touches. The right questions are whether the space is being rated more highly, whether people are staying longer, whether the experience feels better than the building alone would earn. Those move first. Spend follows them, not the fragrance.
So if you’re going to measure anything, measure the middle of the chain, not only the end. Track perceived quality, satisfaction scores and dwell before you judge the programme on sales alone. Those are the variables scent touches first, and they’ll tell you whether it’s working long before the revenue line does.
Get the mechanism right and the arrow on the slide takes care of itself.
