Approaches to sensory marketing strategies within the beauty retail stores in Sweden : A qualitative insight concerning sensory interplay and sensory overload

Sammanfattning: As sensory marketing is becoming a more widely used strategy in the world, the need to distinguish oneself is more important than ever. The general knowledge of sensory cues, their interplay and sensory overload among Swedish retail beauty companies is researched in this thesis. We set out to identify the baseline knowledge of the store personnel and the implications thereof in Sweden on the subjects formerly mentioned.       This investigative study aims to provide an insight into the workings and knowledge gap of retail store design from the perspective of store personnel with sensory- marketing, interplay and congruency in mind with focus on the senses vision, audio and scent. The knowledge of these are assumed to influence a stores’ ability to cater to and adapt to everyday and sensory-sensitive consumers. The study also aims to provide an insight into the subject of sensory overload, what causes it and the effects that might be had from the experience.    To achieve this, we formed the research questions: “How do beauty retail stores in Sweden keep sensorial interplay in mind when designing their retail setting?” and “How do beauty retail stores in Sweden take sensory overload into consideration?”. We performed qualitative interviews with Swedish retail beauty stores’ employees. A foundational knowledge was established in the form of a literature review followed by empirical findings, to be discussed in the analysis.   The conclusions drawn from our research, were that there is awareness among managers on sensory marketing. However, sensory cues are commonly broken down and compartmentalized into singular events. While we found that there are congruence considerations taken as to how the cues relate to the stores’ brand, there seemed to be little to none taken to how the cues interplay with each other. We could also conclude that sensory overload is not a consideration. However, that there are various reasons to this, one major being that Swedish retailers are careful about the implementation of sensory experiences and therefore consider themselves safe from the possibility.