What makes people spend more money

The right scent can allow you to create an instant emotional connection with the customer and make the shopping experience more memorable. It is both aggressive and subtle. It is aggressive because it allows businesses to reach people beyond the confines of their shop as the chosen scent can be wafted through open doors and windows.

Tip: Want to learn more about the many kinds of marketing? Read our small business marketing guide. Scents can influence people's emotions , so they have the potential to affect consumer behavior, according to ThoughtCo. Aromas of lavender, basil, cinnamon, and citrus are relaxing, whereas peppermint, thyme and rosemary are invigorating.

Ginger, cardamom, licorice, and chocolate tend to stir romantic feelings, while rose promotes positivity and happiness. Simple smells, as opposed to complex blends of scents, are powerful motivators when it comes to spending, researchers at Washington State University found. That's because simple smells, such as citrus and pine, don't require much mental processing from the shopper, freeing their brains to conjure images associated with these fresh scents. For the study, the researchers developed two scents: a simple orange scent and a more complex orange-basil-green-tea scent.

For 18 days, the researchers watched more than customers in a home decorations store as the air held the simple scent, the complex scent or no scent. In a series of experiments, researchers had students solve problems under various conditions.

They found that the students solved more problems, in less time, when a simple scent was in the air, compared with when a complex scent or no scent was used. Use historical sales data and analytics to project how much your customers are likely to spend in the next quarter. Another way to think about scent marketing is how it works at a movie theater. People walk in and the first thing they notice is the smell of popcorn.

This is not an accident. The majority of money made by a theater is from the concessions sold, not the movie tickets. Even theaters that sell full meals in dine in stadiums have popcorn popping when consumers first come through the door because it provides context for the experience that is about to occur.

As online retailers continue to dominate sales, scent marketing has become a way for brick-and-mortar stores to enhance the shopping experience and boost sales. Scent marketing is used to trigger a certain emotion in potential customers, subtly encouraging them to not only incorporate a scent into their brand identity , but also to spend more time in their stores or places of business to improve customer experience , all the while creating positive memories with those scents that will keep them going back to the product or service brand loyalty.

The research noted that our sense of scent is linked directly to our limbic system, which controls memory and emotion, and that ambient scent offers the following benefits:. Tip: Scent marketing can cause customers to associate your business with pleasant feelings and memories.

In a preliminary study, the authors surveyed Americans to rate their happiness, as well as outline their budgets. The respondents were asked to divide their spending into bills, expenses, and personal gifts termed personal spending versus gifts for others and charitable donations prosocial spending. On regression analysis, they found that personal spending had no correlation with happiness, while prosocial spending had a slight positive correlation with happiness.

Based on this preliminary data, they then conducted an experiment where 16 employees were given a bonus by their company. They found that those who spent more of their bonus on prosocial spending got a greater boost in happiness than those who spent it on personal spending.

For their final experiment, they had participants rate their baseline happiness on the morning of the experiment. Participants were randomized to either spend it on themselves or on others.

They found that those who spent money on others derived a greater happiness boost than those who were instructed to spend it on themselves. He clearly has maximized his happiness with his current possessions, so why not give to others — it might improve the well-being of the donor as well as the recipient. As with other gifts in life, perhaps it really is the thought that counts.

After all, we all feel good when we support a cause that we care about. Research shows that spending money on others increases happiness more than spending money on yourself. It just might bring you some holiday cheer. What do you think of the study? Have you made any charitable donations this year? Rather than heading to the mall, find other ways to cope — writing in a journal, talking to a friend, starting a blog, or even seeing an actual therapist can all be more beneficial than spending to feel better.

If you feel like a trip to the mall is going to help put a bad day behind you, open your budget. Retailers play tricks on you to get you to spend. But consider the experience of mega-retailer JCPenney. In theory, it sounded nice. Sales plummeted, and a few months later, sales were back and so were the clearance racks. By , Johnson had lost his job and JCPenney completely returned to its old pricing system.

One of the psychological spending traps I am most guilty of is spending out of boredom. During my shopping fast, my in-laws took my kids for the weekend with the rest of the family and I had two glorious free days to myself. My first inclination? Go shopping. Hey, I had free time and I was bored, so naturally spending money was my first choice activity. I had tons of movies saved, so I used my quiet time to catch up on TV shows and watch some saved movies. It was free and just as enjoyable as shopping.

Flash sales, which are offered online via discount group buying sites , use your sense of panic to make you buy, especially because deals are often short-lived. Solution: As a reformed flash sale user myself, the best thing I ever did was unsubscribe to all of the daily emails. Seeing them pop up every day led me to browsing, which usually led me to buying.