Sensory Marketing in Retail

For many retailers (even for online retailers) physical presence is an essential part of their business strategy; it's a way to differentiate themselves from competitors and communicate with consumers about their benefits and values. In other words, retail stores hold enormous power and value from marketing perspective. Running retail stores in a way that means they can affect our senses and create unique in-store experiences is a challenging task. Retailers and their employees must have a solid understanding of sensory marketing and how our senses can be engaged or stimulated during our visit at the store. In particular, there is a need to understand how multisensory perception works and how it affects us.  This textbook focuses on sensory marketing and the multisensory nature of retail stores. It teaches students how sensory cues (such as store design, lighting, and music) can be used as means of influencing our choices in a retail setting. The author goes on to explain the joint effects of the cues and describes how consumers tend to respond differently to cue combinations (i.e. multisensory cues) than to only single stimuli. Related to this, the book sheds light on topics such as multisensory nature of perception, cue (in)congruence (i.e., semantic match) and sensory overload. It covers psychological characteristics as well as individual social factors that affect how we observe cues and how they influence us.Ideal reading for students taking classes in shopper marketing, retailing marketing and store design among others, it contains more than 30 global examples from various retail companies, self-reflective questions and decisions-based questions to aid learning.