i love this guy
Actual marketing tactic that DOES exist btw. I can't remember the term, but all major businesses have special roles specifically for people who understand how to manipulate human behaviors & emotions. Why are snacks at the checkout area? Temptation. Why is candy so low to the ground? Children. Types of store lighting can affect peoples mood. Cheaper products are low or very high so people won't look for them. Branding companies have this as well for packaging & logos that hide products lack of quality & manipulate people to impulse buy.
I know damn well I watched a documentary on this in high school, but that was quiet awhile ago. Everything is designed to subtly manipulate your perceptions & tastes. Once you see it, it's everywhere & you can work against it out of pure spite.
I don't know if this is still a thing but they used to go so far as to make the flooring material in big stores in shopping centres slightly softer than the floors outside the store, so that customers would stay inside a bit longer since people have (largely subconscious) preferences about floor textures based on how easy they are to walk on and how much they hurt tired feet. The amount of research that goes into choosing the lighting in makeup and clothing stores is bonkers. Bakeries often smell a lot more like fresh bread or donuts than their actual baking activities would create -- they pipe the smell out front on purpose. Grocery stores are deliberately laid out to be very slightly confusing -- not confusing enough to impede buying, but confusing enough to send people down a few wrong aisles to look at products that they wouldn't otherwise see. Signs are often placed in aisles so that you have to go into the aisle a bit to read them clearly, or at least take a good look down it.
It's the job of the Visual Merchandiser to do this. I think the fitout of the store(picking flooring etc) *might* be a more specific job title, but when i studied VM i learned all about how to engage customers subconciously, colour theory and ways to use lighting are extremely effective, along with other sensory inputs, including visual which is why you'll find mirrors that make you look slimmer or that the lighting in change rooms is different to on the shop floor. Textures are also very important, both visually and physically.
Costco, as an example, deliberately don't list their in-warehouse products online so that you'll come into the warehouse to see what's in stock, and in addition to that they frequently change where stock is kept in the store so that you have to keep walking around looking for it, making it more likely that you'll see something else you impulsively pick up.
It all boils down to marketing, but majority of the decisions about ambience are made by the VMs
