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A Study on the Effect of Product Scent on Consumer Product Evaluation

Choi, Nakhwan1 · Kwon, Mintaek2 · Kim, Hyeongsuk

1 Jeonbuk National University, 2 Hanaro Telecom

Published: January 2005 · Vol. 34, No. 1 · pp. 1-25
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Abstract

The basic appeal of marketing is moving from customer satisfaction based on product function, benefit to customer delight led by satisfying customers’ intrinsic value, aesthetic desire. For that reason, through not only material stimuli but emotional information faced to customer mind, emotion marketing meeting customers’ emotional desire is required. Of emotion marketing methods, scent marketing stimulating the sense of smell is generally used. Even though the importance of scent marketing is getting increased, a research on scent effect in consumer evaluation and decision is not sufficient. In addition, one of the emotions, mood is an interesting research subject in consumer behavior area. In consumer evaluation and decision on evaluation alternatives, researches on mood effect have been conducted in several ways. Because this research tendency is mainly related to evaluation by memory emotion on a brand, by stimulating consumers’ emotion with emotional appeal, their mood is improved, and a research on how the improvement affects product evaluation and purchasing behavior is needed. Thus this research examines how product scent affects consumers’ product evaluation and tries to give right answers in the following questions: what kind of factor withdraws mood, whether scent is a factor affecting directly product evaluation, and if indirectly affecting through mood, whether mood affects product evaluation through positivity of attributerelated thought on a product or has a direct effect on evaluation. In result, as an information, product scent itself positively affects evaluation and forms positive mood having a direct influence on a product. Therefore what we know from the result is that without logical decision-making processing, consumers often tend to use heuristic, simple processing. Thus there is a high possibility that consumers having positive emotion by product scent evaluate the product and make a decision in accord with their emotion. In a good mood, to keep their hedonic emotion, related elaborateness is constructed within positive attribute category and this leads to positivity of attribute-related thought which results in positive effect on a product. This result shows that the more consumer’s current mood state is positive, the stronger attribute-related thought is forming. Also this reveals that the more the mood state is positive, the more consumers control positive attributerelated thought. This presents that information processing and evaluation result can be different in compliance with consumers’ mood state, and when constructing marketing stimuli, consumers’ mood state should be considered at purchasing point. Thus advertising media, program, or delivering condition of message which are capable of affecting consumers’ mood should be considerably checked and in building POP advertisement strategy of a product possessing inferior attribute to its competitor, favorable evaluation on the product can be carried out by presenting events forming positive mood and using preferable advertisement media. Also when evaluation of proposed stimulus is in trouble, this research finds that the prior theory indicating that customers tend to do heuristic treatment to make their evaluation easy is expanded to a new area which as a heuristic cue, mood putting in information processing affects output processing of information for evaluation. This fact is expected to have application to other domains like organization management, operation processing, transaction, etc. Despite the above suggestions, there are some limitations, which at the same time, present the following researches hereafter. First, by limiting a research subject on mask product, the findings’ generalization is somewhat restricted. Also to increase external validity of the result, other product and service had better be examined. Second, although positivity degree of attribute-related thought is used as an influencing factor on evaluation at purchasing point through scent, other factors would have a possibility to affect evaluation. That is, scent has different influence in accordance with product complexity and consumers’ individual personality as effect factors. Lastly, the experiment subject was limited to students. In evaluating, the degree of mood-dependence could be different by demographic traits.
Keywords: AttributeEmotion MarketingEvaluationMoodScent