Abstract

In today's competitive hotel industry, strategic experiential branding has emerged as an effective approach to reach consumers' hearts, minds, and wallets. Strategic experiential branding entails the careful engineering of many factors to deliver a uniquely pleasurable and memorable guest experience. Atmospheric variables stand among the most important factors that hotel managers must attend to in creating such an experience. Recently, scent has emerged as an efficient way to create and brand a pleasurable hotel experience yet the bulk of scent research has focused only on a limited subset of responses associated with ambient scent and for the most part taken place in controlled laboratory settings. This thesis explores the use of ambient scent as a means to create a positive first impression in an urban hotel setting as well as a series of attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral responses associated with the scent. The first study is a survey of hotel managers' beliefs and opinions about the use of scent. The second study is a field experiment with three between-subject scent conditions. Findings reveal that a scent that matches the desired brand image leads to more favorable responses such as higher perception of comfort, higher perception of cleanliness and increased positive word of mouth intentions while the scent that did not match the desired brand resulted in higher levels of arousal. These findings contribute to the existing literature on scent as they aid hotel managers arid marketers in understanding how scent can be used in the hotel context