Impact of Ambient Aroma on Consumer Impulse Buying Behaviour with Moderating Effect of Gender

Retailers are nowadays searching for methods to differentiate their offerings by providing a pleasant and stimulating ambience for shopping. Therefore, the existing study aims to inspect in what way the ambient scent influences the shopper's mood, cognition, and spending with gender as a moderator and arousal as a mediator in retail stores. The hypothesized associations are inspected through covariance analysis using both online and offline store-intercept data congregated from consumers. Based on the analysis, results indicate that ambient scent influences product quality, store environment, and customer arousal, but has no impact on pleasure. On the other side, the store environment influences product quality, customer emotional arousal, and pleasure. In addition, product quality does not influence customer emotional arousal and pleasure. Furthermore, customer emotional arousal influences emotional pleasure. Likewise, customer emotional pleasure influences customer approach behaviour and customer impulse buying behaviour. Moreover, arousal mediates the ambient scent-customer pleasure relationship. Gender moderates the link between ambient scent and store environment and product quality only for males is stronger as compared to females. Similarly, gender moderates from emotional pleasure to impulse buying and approach behaviour only for the male model. Henceforth, implications for the management of shopping malls/superstores and future endeavours for research about music as a component of the mall/store environment are deliberated based on the study results.