Sensory Marketing: The Purpose of Sensory Stimuli in Consumer Behaviour in the Context of the Retail Environment

Introduction

The hospitality and tourist industries have recently started adopting sensory marketing as a marketing approach to set themselves apart from rivals and offer customers facilities that encourage them to return. To influence expectations and future experiences for customers, hotels are working to provide more valuable, creative, and individualized services. Customers are displeased with the traditional marketing offer that only uses sensory marketing aspects on special occasions (Kim et al., 2020).

Experience marketing perceives the consumer not just as a rational decision-maker but also as an emotional being, who wants to achieve pleasurable experiences (Schmitt, 1999; Urdea et al., 2021). Sensory marketing, and the study of congruent multisensory cues, complement traditional marketing practices (Krishna, 2012). The aim is to position the experience at the centre of consumption, being holistic and using emotion as a driver (Schmitt, 1999; Urdea et al., 2021). Sensory cues (stimuli) can be used in the environment to be captured by the five senses and the conventional division of five human senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) has been used as a support in marketing research to understand consumer emotions and purchase behaviour (Helmefalk, 2017; Krishna, 2012). The theory of congruence appears for the first time in the field of psychology by Osgood and Tannerbaum (1955) arguing that consumers are more likely to have favorable attitudes and judgments about a product or service if they perceive the environment's elements to be consistent, coherently organized, and in line with the brand identity. Krishna et al. (2010) characterise sensory cues as a degree of adjustment of sensory cues. To understand further consumer behaviour in stores, retailers should consider investing in the design of retail stores (physical and digital) including environmental stimuli that can influence consumers' emotions and cognitions, which can result in affecting their purchasing behaviour (Helmefalk, 2016; Helmefalk and Hultén, 2017). Regarding the theory related to sensory marketing, Krishna et al. (2010) characterise congruence of the senses as a degree of adjustment of sensory cues and how they harmonize in the environment.

The complexity of the retail environment demands that marketing managers understand the congruence between sensory cues, requiring considerable effort in terms of time and financial investments. Biswas (2019) and Helmefalk (2019) state there is a need for research on the sensory marketing topic using an integrated approach. Existing studies in the area do not delve into the issue of congruency between several stimuli. Some articles have analyzed the effect of sensory congruence between two or three senses but only a few studies in the current literature address sensory attributes with a focus on the existent versus non-existent congruence among various sensory attributes (Krishna, 2012; Helmefalk, 2016; Riedel & Mulcahy, 2019; Yoganathan et al., 2019; Doucé & Adams, 2020; Ranaweera et al., 2020).

The authors verified the approach of multisensory stimuli is still very scarce, and the study of cue congruence is almost inexistent. The research aims to map previous studies, through a systematic literature review methodology, using a multisensory approach to understand the impact of sensory stimuli on consumer behaviour in the retail environment and explore the congruence between the senses.