Essays on scent marketing

Leveraging the positive influences of pleasurable olfactory stimuli is not a new concept, as scents have been used for medical purposes since ancient times, for instance. Nowadays, companies also seek to profit from the benefits of our sense of smell and scent marketing has become a trend in various service areas and settings. However, managers rarely understand all underlying concepts and mechanisms of scent perception and processing. In this regard, this cumulative dissertation contributes to current knowledge on scent marketing re-search, specifically the impact of scented environments (ambient scents) on customers and employ-ees. The thesis consists of three independent and self-contained articles: The first conceptual article develops an integrative framework of how ambient scents affect individuals present in a service envi-ronment (customers and employees). The second article empirically investigates the long-term effects of ambient scents on service customers, and the last paper empirically investigates the impacts of ambient scents on employees in a workplace over time. Thus, this dissertation extends the predominant static view of scent influence after one-time exposure to a more dynamic longitudinal view of repeated scent exposure. By doing so, the results can be more easily transferred into real-life business settings, where customers and/or employees usually stay in an indoor environment for an extended period – and mostly return more than once.