Multisensory Design of Retail Environments Vision, Sound, and Scent

Online retailers have gained massive popularity in recent years, plunging large parts of brick-and-mortar retail into an existential crisis. In order to survive in times of growing online retail, brick-and-mortar retailers must become aware of their unique potential to address non-digitizable consumer needs and transform retail environments into places of experience and discovery. A key building block for achieving this aim lies in the creation of sensory experiences that motivate consumers to enter and linger in stationary retail environments.

Chapter 1 Experience retail environments with (almost) all senses.- Chapter 2 Vision.- 2.1 Why visual stimuli?.- 2.2 The devil is in the details: How visual stimuli affect consumers.- 2.3 The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: How the visual context influences consumer behavior.- 2.4 Outlook on the use of augmented reality (AR) in the retail environment.- Chapter 3 Sound.- 3.1 Music influences consumer behavior, but there is nothing like the "right music".- 3.2 Music influences the product choice: You buy what you hear.- 3.3 Music influences product perception: Feeling, tasting, and seeing what you hear.- 3.4 Music influences shopping and spending behavior.- 3.5 Recommendations for practice: Targeted vs. intuitive use of music.- 3.6 Acoustic stimuli at the point of sale: More than just background music.- 3.7 Outlook on music and sounds in online retail environments.- Chapter 4 Scent.- 4.1 Why ambient scents?.- 4.2 Scents act differently.- 4.3 The effect of warm and cool scents.- 4.4 Scents evoke specific associations.- 4.5 Ambient scents also have a long-term effect.- 4.6 Cultural preferences.- 4.7 The use of ambient scents raises ethical questions.- Chapter 5 The interaction of different sensory stimuli.- 5.1 Why combine different sensory stimuli?.- 5.2 How multisensory congruence elicits positive evaluations.- 5.3 How sensory perceptions influence one another (crossmodal correspondence).- References.

Marko Sarstedt is a Chaired Professor of Marketing at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (Germany) and an Adjunct Research Professor at Babe?-Bolyai-University Cluj-Napoca (Romania). His main research interest is the advancement of research methods to further the understanding of consumer behavior. His research has been published in Nature Human Behavior, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Organizational Research Methods, MIS Quarterly, and Psychometrika, among others. His publications are among the most cited papers in the social sciences, with over 100,000 citations. Marko Sarstedt is a member of Clarivate Analytic's Highly Cited Researcher List. In March 2022, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Babe?-Bolyai University of Cluj for his research achievements and international collaboration.