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research Making Sense of Scents BUSINESSES FROM BOUTIQUES to bakeries use scent to entice customers to spend more and return often. But what scent is most effective when it comes to boosting retail sales? A recent study has found that simple aromas may be better for business. The study was conducted by Andreas Hermann, professor of management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and marketing doctoral student Manja Zidansek, marketing professor David Sprott, and dean Eric Spangenberg, all of the Washington State University College of Business in Pullman. The researchers infused the air in a St. Gallen home decoration store with one of three types of scents: a simple orange scent, a complex scent of orange-basil blended with green tea, or no scent at all. They found that sales increased an average 20 percent when the orange scent was in the air, compared to the complex-scent or noscent condition. In another experiment, the researchers asked WSU undergraduates to solve word problems under the three scent conditions. They found that the students solved more problems more quickly when exposed to the orange scent than when exposed to the complex scent or no scent at all. The reason? People respond well to pleasant scents, but the more easily they can process the scent, the better they can focus on the task at hand���what the researchers call ���processing ���uency.��� Even though people may like the smell Andreas Manja of orange-basil with Hermann Zidansek green tea, its complexity requires greater concentration, and so could interrupt their processing ���uency, says Spangenberg. ���Most people are processing scent at an unconscious level,��� he says. ���A pleasant scent isn���t necessarily an effective scent.��� David Eric Sprott Spangenberg He adds that the researchers plan future studies on whether the effect of scents on human behavior is driven primarily by emotions, logic, or both. They also hope to run functional MRI scans on subjects to show what parts of the brain are affected when individuals are exposed to different aromas. ���The Power of Simplicity: Processing Fluency and the Effects of Olfactory Cues on Retail Sales��� was available online in September 2012 in the Journal of Retailing. Consequences of Linguistic Complexity FIRMS HOLD CONFERENCE calls with investors to report earnings and make other announcements���and often, they conduct those calls in English. But in today���s global marketplace, where English may not be the ���rst language of many investors, the use of complex language in these communications could affect stock performance, according to a working paper by Francois Brochet of Harvard Busi- 56 March/April 2013 BizEd ness School in Boston, Massachusetts; Patricia Naranjo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; and Gwen Yu, also of Harvard Business School. The three researchers analyzed the transcripts of 11,740 conference calls, all conducted in English, by non-U.S. ���rms between 2002 and 2010. The transcripts were obtained through Thomson Reuters StreetEvents. They then measured the