The scent of chocolate makes people want to buy romance novels

The scent of chocolate in a bookshop makes people want to buy romance novels, it seems, but has much less of an effect on the sale of other book categories such as crime, travel or business titles.

Researchers at Hasselt and Antwerp universities in Belgium observed the behaviour of 201 customers in a high-street chain bookshop over a period of 10 days to arrive at their findings, which also show that chocolate scent encourages browsing and distracts people who go into a bookshop with a particular goal in mind.

Customers were 3.48 times more likely to examine romance – and also cookery – books when they could smell chocolate, and they were 5.93 times more likely to buy them – the online edition of The Guardian quoted the datas of the research on Thursday.  (MTI)