What Does Your Brand Smell Like?
Now that’s a funny headline. The truth is that it can actually be the difference between someone remembering your brand or not. Why is that? Smell is the only sense that makes it to the limbic system of the brain, which is what controls emotion and memory. Marketing is all about affecting peoples emotion and creating memories. With experiential marketing, we are all about triggering emotion to create lasting memories of products and services.
Certain scents evoke powerful memories and can alternately make someone feel good, content, energized or happy. It was only a matter of time until marketers bottled that up and used it to connect scents with sales.
Serving up fresh Hot Pocket Snack Bites
Why use scent in Marketing? That’s weird.
It may seem odd, but scent can trigger some of the oldest memories, fondest experiences, and create recall that touch and hearing cannot. It could be that smell of a fresh new pair of sneakers, that leather in a brand new car, perhaps the smell of freshly roasted coffee in the morning. Some fashion brands even associate their brand to a particular cologne or perfume. It all depends on your product or service. What scent is associated with your products?
Mezzetta Activation
You can walk into a beautifully designed space and it’s rendered practically meaningless if there’s a bad smell or an absent smell. Industries such as retail, hospitality, auto dealers and financial services are now looking to scent as a way to better define their brands.
Nutella threw a breakfast party at the Santa Monica Pier, inviting passersby who could smell the freshly made breakfast to join the party and try some Nutella.
Why is it that scent is so powerful when it comes to triggering memory and emotion?
“Our sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than any other of our senses and recognition of smell is immediate. Other senses like touch and taste must travel through the body via neurons and the spinal cord before reaching the brain whereas the olfactory response is immediate, extending directly to the brain. This is the only place where our central nervous system is directly exposed to the environment.”(von Have, Serene Aromatherapy, http://www.sfsu.edu/~cadbs/Spring04.pdf)
In essence, we can remember times, places, people, instances in memory and emotion. The implications of this in experiential marketing are endless.
When It Comes To Enhancing Consumer Behavior, Scent Has The Strongest Impact
Studies were done in 2013 by the Global Journal of Commerce and Management Perspective mentioned that ambient scent has the strongest impact when it comes to enhancing consumer behavior in terms of emotion, evaluation, willingness to return to a store and purchase intention.
What Brands Are Doing With Scent
Over 10 years ago brands like Abercrombie & Fitch made scent part of their identity. This doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who wandered into their stores in the early 2000’s. The brand’s signature scent was sprayed manually by team members throughout the store.
Nowadays brands are using intelligent systems which control the air and introduce fragrance in a more subtle way using timers, and extended levels of control to the application of the fragrance in stores.
If you have questions about marketing with scent, engagement marketing or experiential marketing, contact BeCore today! We’d love to partner with you!