How Scent Arousal Influences Consumers’ Decision-Making: A Heuristic-Systematic Model Perspective

Although the arousal of ambient scents has been widely studied, little is known about how it affects consumer decision-making and how these effects occur. This study provides an information-processing mechanism for how scent arousal influences decision-making through a heuristic-systematic model. Using a field experiment and two eye-tracking studies, this study demonstrated that a high-arousal scent promotes a heuristic processing style, leading to faster decision-making and greater reliance on external cues, such as in-store recommendations. Eye-tracking data provided biometric evidence that high-arousal scents induce fast fixation behavior, whereas low-arousal scents foster broader and deeper evaluations. Additionally, external cues reduce visual attention to other information in high-arousal environments. Examining time pressure as a boundary condition revealed that when a scent promotes a systematic processing style and time pressure demands a heuristic one, information-processing fluency and efficiency decrease, and the effect of visual attention on decision-making weakens. These findings advance the sensory marketing theory by integrating olfactory cues with the heuristic-systematic model and eye-tracking technology. Managerially, the findings offer valuable insights for optimizing scent strategies in the retail and service contexts.