How do you unconsciously make people contribute to keeping your business clean? A good question, since this not only saves you cleaning costs, but also increases the appreciation of your business! The clean experience of a space influences the appreciation of that space and whether someone wants to return to it. But how do you influence that clean experience? Certainly not just by cleaning the space. And how do you ensure that people then (unconsciously) help keep the space clean? The answer to both questions is: through the use of lemon scent.
Less littering due to lemon scent
According to De Lange, Debets, Ruitenburg, and Holland (2012), the presence of lemon scent leads to fewer passengers leaving trash behind in train compartments. Within their experiment, lemon scent was dispersed in a few compartments, while no scent was present in others. Throughout the experiment, which lasted 12 hours each day, the number of pieces of discarded trash was counted and weighed in both scented and unscented compartments. The result? Nearly twice as much litter was found in the compartments without lemon scent compared to those with it.
The long-term effect of lemon scent
In another study (Holland, Hendriks, & Aarts, 2005), participants were asked to perform a task in a room where lemon scent was either present or absent. Then, participants were taken to another, odorless room. Here, they were allowed to eat a crumbly cookie at a table. The difference between the participants who were first in a room with lemon scent and those who did not smell this scent? The first group more often wiped the cookie crumbs off the table. And the beauty of it: this demonstrates that this stimulated behavior continues even when the scent is no longer perceived!
What’s behind this?
The results of these studies can be explained by the psychological principle of 'priming'. Priming causes two things to be associated with each other. This association is unconsciously established because the two things, for example, often occur together. In this experiment, the travelers associated the lemon scent with cleaning, as cleaning products often smell like lemon. The result? An automatic 'urge' to clean.
A cleaner business, better clean experience and higher appreciation
In short, if you want to give your cleaning team some rest and ensure that people enjoy being present at your company, then consider spreading lemon scent. Win-win!