Shopping endurance and the power of peppermint

“Shoppers, like athletes, need a lot of energy,” says Thomas, who has always been interested in retail and now works as an account executive at Impact Research, a consumer research firm in Montreal. “My goal was to see if any of the strategies athletes use can also be applied to shoppers.”

According to Thomas, shopper endurance translates into heightened retail sales: “The more time someone spends in a mall, the more stores they will visit, the more items they will buy.”

Professor Bianca Grohmann, Concordia University Research Chair in Marketing, supervised Thomas’ research. Together, they looked at how sensory factors — sight, hearing, smell — could influence shopper fatigue and awareness.

“Sports endurance research showed that certain scents, mainly peppermint, can enhance an athlete’s endurance,” says Thomas. “As a first in its field, my study examined if peppermint could also affect the shopping experience."

He credits support from the Commerce and Administration Students Association and the Concordia Laboratory for Sensory Research for advancing his research.

Thomas used chewing gum to indirectly deliver the peppermint scent to willing shoppers. “Gum is an affordable alternative to expensive scent diffusing machines, and it allowed our study to take place in a large mall,” he says.

He found that shoppers who chewed peppermint gum versus other flavours — or no gum — browsed stores for longer and reported being less tired.

“Participants who chewed gum thought they had shopped for a shorter period than they actually did, while those who didn’t chew gum thought they shopped for longer periods,” says Thomas. “We think this is because the gum may have distracted participants and they lost track of time.”

Thomas’s advice to both retailers and harried moms with tired children is the same: “Pass the peppermint — a candy cane or mint tea. Whether it is by need or necessity everyone needs to shop. There is no excuse for not creating a pleasant environment that shoppers will enjoy.”

This strategy may lead to less impulse and more targeted buying.

About the Concordia Laboratory for Sensory Research

• Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation
• Focuses on sensory (visual, hearing, taste, touch and smell) aspects of marketing
• Is a platform for collaboration and training of researchers and students

About Bianca Grohmann:

• Is a professor and the Concordia University Research Chair in Consumer Research at the John Molson School of Business
• Has supervised 24 graduate students to completion
• Is mostly funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture

What Grohmann says about her students:

“Students bring a lot of enthusiasm to joint projects and raise novel questions. I find it very rewarding to help them explore these questions.”

Her motivation:

“Academic research does not progress in a linear fashion and every project tends to raise questions that deserve more attention. I enjoy this exploratory aspect of my work.”

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