SCENT MARKETING
The devil's craft
Applications:
What is more powerful and attractive than temptation?
The stronger the prohibition, the greater the desire.
Inducing temptation is the task of the sense of smell. It is there that the greatest potential is expressed.
Scent Marketing touches the heart of consumers through their noses. It makes people eager to connect with the Brand, share its values, follow it, and buy its products and services.
Scent is strategic: it interacts with brain chemistry, going so far as to change people’s attitude and behavior and has the power to excite them and then bring them back to calm, attract or repel them, make them travel with their minds or lead them to reflection, prayer, meditation, and introspection.
Olfaction: an overlooked sense
Even though smell is the most primitive and evocative sense, strongly linked to memory and instinct, it remains the least considered. We only have to consider that there is no olfactory culture, and the lack of an olfactory vocabulary makes it extremely difficult to describe scents except by using similes, metaphors, or adjectives related to other senses.
Although the sense of smell is the only sense fully developed at birth, helping an infant recognize and establish a bond with its mother, our more stimulated sight and hearing now absorb all our attention. Brands aim nearly 83 percent of their resources at visual campaigns, and marketing has saturated every sensory channel by filling our minds with information.
In fact, a Rockefeller University study showed that people can remember 35% of what they smell, compared to 5% of what they see, 2% of what they hear, and 1% of what they touch. Let’s go and see why by analyzing the smell pathway.
Olfaction: an abnormal sense
Inside our nose, toward the end of the nasal cavity, is the olfactory epithelium, which is responsible for intercepting so-called odorants, which are small molecules with various chemical structures that can be released by anything, whether it be a flower, food, or a glass of wine. Once captured by the cilia that make up the epithelium, these molecules go on to activate olfactory sensory neurons that transmit the information to the olfactory bulb.
This elongated structure is located at the base of our brain and is composed of multiple cell layers. Its role is mainly to discern odors and transmit information directly to the primary olfactory cortex.
In fact, olfaction is extremely special because, unlike the other senses, information is transmitted from the sensory receptors directly to the primary olfactory cortex without passing through the thalamus, a subcortical structure closely linked to our rationality. These connections mean that the information we acquire through smell is able to unconsciously influence our actions.
Another connection that makes olfaction an abnormal sense is the one between the olfactory bulb and structures that belong to the limbic system, such as the amygdala, responsible for our emotions, and the hippocampus, which plays a key role in our memory. Scents, therefore, are able to affect emotions, behaviors, thoughts, and motivations.
It is preceisely because of these particular connections that the sense of smell is particularly engaging: it excites, it activates memories, and it does so unconsciously, without us even realizing it. Therefore, knowing how to leverage this sense can be very useful for brands in order to attract the attention of consumers, to engage and excite them, but above all to be remembered.
It will have happened to everybody at least once to suddenly perceive a particular, familiar smell that triggers a flashback, and memories and emotions related to that scent begin to emerge in our memory. This is because smell is the most immediate of the five senses, the most impulsive, and is constantly active since it is linked to the act of breathing.
Olfaction and memory
Olfactory memory is primal and associates an odor with an emotional image.
When an odor is perceived years later, olfactory memory activates the endocrine system which, through the release of hormones such as adrenaline and endorphin, recreates the emotion or mood that accompanied the odor in the past.
Perfume speaks to people’s sense of smell through culture and personal experiences. Think, for example, of the scent of tobacco or cumin in Arab culture, or the scent associated with a particular vacation which took place, for example, in a pine forest. Scent also activates genetic memories, such as the smell of civet. Then there are the archetypal smells that affect all people, even those who have never smelled them before: the smell of burnt wood, the smell of the sea, the smell of hay.
Olfactory psychology analyzes emotional responses to certain aromas, conditioned by personal, cultural, and genetic memories. The functioning of olfactory memory is such that early olfactory memories dating back to childhood are the most powerful in their evocative capacity.
Stimulating receptors with environmental fragrances that activate memory and stir up even distant memories of affective and positive experiences opens up a new psychic dimension that induces a state of trust and relaxation in people. The purpose of the Brand using them is to be remembered in association with the pleasant experience, resurfaced to consciousness.
Scent Marketing
By linking a fragrance to a Brand, we offer a characterized experience and achieve better results in terms of interest, purchase, and popularity because the fragrance gives uniqueness to the product and elevates brand perception.
Buyers often do not consciously choose but follow their instinct – and on that instinct is grafted the bewitching power of fragrance. The customer will not consciously know why they chose to enter that very store: it is the limbic brain that decides for them. They will have followed the scent trail, evoking thoughts of wealth and luxury, or of emotions of well-being, childhood memories, affective memories.
The ideal fragrance can be composed in accordance with the emotions we wish to arouse.
The profound and often unconscious effects of smells on our behavior are well known to marketers. Scent marketing has its own rules and tricks: a scent must evoke places or occasions suitable for purchase, soothe or excite depending on the product being sold. In general, it must make the consumer feel “at home” so that he or she stays in the store longer.
Diffusing aromas in the environment, even subliminally, communicates very specific messages to customers in stores, offices, gyms, clinics, trade show booths, and a plethora of situations both commercial and work-related.
In a study carried out in a Brussels bookstore in 2013, they wanted to see how much the sense of smell conditions our behavior. A chocolate scent diffusor was then placed inside the store for half an hour a day for ten days. The result of that research showed a 40 percent increase in cookbook sales. The chocolate scent, therefore, improved approach and purchase behavior toward thematically congruent books.
Another intriguing study was conducted in Seoul, South Korea, by a group of scholars working for Dunkin Donuts. This chain was primarily seen as a place to buy a good donut, but few customers also bought coffee there. The purpose of the research was to see if it was possible to increase coffee sales by leveraging the sense of smell.
Seoul is a busy city, and many people take public transportation to work. The researchers therefore thought of placing coffee scent diffusors inside the buses associated with an auditory advertisement; when the advertisement played the typical Dunkin Donuts jingle, the diffusors would release the coffee-scented fragrance. As the passengers were exposed to this particular fragrance associated with the famous musical tune, it triggered within them an overwhelming craving for coffee. Thanks to this experiment, a 30 percent increase in coffee sales was found at Dunkin Donuts locations near bus stops.
All of these are clear examples of how smells can unconsciously influence our behavior, which is why brands should always keep this in mind. Instead, as consumers, the next time we enter a store, let’s try to pay attention to the scents and fragrances that are released into the environment and begin to become aware of and train this very powerful sense that is often not considered as much as it should be.
Laura Favaretto
MEITEI | ambiance fragrances
laboratory specialised in olfactive branding, ambient scents and olfactive marketing
www.meitei.it
meitei_ambiancefragrances
Martina Zanotto
Psychologist, Neuroscience specialist
Bibliography:
Rosalia Cavalieri, Il naso intellignete. Che cosa ci dicono gli odori, GLF Editori Laterza, 2019
Anna D’Errico, Il senso perfetto. Mai sottovalutare il naso, Codice Edizioni, 2019
Victoria Henshaw, Designing with smell, Practicer Techniques and Challenges, Routlege ed, 2018
LieveDoucé et al., Smelling the books: The effect of chocolate scent on purchase-related behavior in a bookstore, Journal of Environmental Psychology Volume 36, December 2013, Pages 65-69 N. Sobel et al., Sniffing and smelling: separate subsystems in the human olfactory cortex, “Nature”, 1998, 392, pp. 282-86.
