How to make dollars from scents

What is that? It’s not overpowering, but you definitely smell a hint of vanilla or a touch of cinnamon. You may not have noticed it, but businesses are increasingly relying on almost subliminal smells to prompt the recall of their brands and ultimately encourage consumers to buy their products. Think of the distinct smells of Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s and Subway. More than any other sense, smell has the ability to call up memories — and cravings — instantaneously.

One of the most powerful tools in marketing is not what the consumer sees or hears, but rather what they smell. The “olfactory marketing” trend is ramping up as companies try to stand out from the daily deluge of advertising. According to ScentWorld Events, which strives to be the “premier resource of information on scent and sensory marketing,” it’s a $200 million industry growing at 10 percent per year.

There is science behind olfactory marketing. Pamela Dalton of the Monell Chemical Senses Center says that humans’ sense of smell is developed before birth, so babies have been found to prefer fragrances that their mother’s wore late in the pregnancy. She says that businesses that expose pregnant women to their scent “are already grooming their customers before they are born.”

In a case study from Sensory Max, a marketing agency, they measured consumer reaction to two identical pairs of Nike running shoes. They were placed in separate but identical rooms. One room was filled with a floral scent. The other was left to whatever smell was naturally present. Eighty-four percent of the consumers preferred the shoes displayed in the room with the fragrance. Consumers also estimated the price of the shoes in the scented room to be more than $10 higher than the pair in the unscented room.

Scent marketing is divided into two categories: Ambient scenting aims to fill a specific retail space with a targeted smell, while scent branding seeks to identify a company’s signature smell for a particular brand.

When using scent marketing for your business, start with these first steps:
 

What one emotion do you want your customers to feel during their buying experience? Certain scents are related to specific emotions. The goal of scent marketing is to provide that link. For example, many real estate agents use the scent of fresh baked cookies during open houses to make it feel like “home.” Florida Hospital’s Seaside Imaging Center created a beach-like environment to decrease patient anxiety by scenting their waiting room with ocean aromas and the MRI room with a vanilla smell. The results were incredible. The cancellation rate dropped by a whopping 50 percent, and the need for sedation during their MRI’s dropped by 300 percent, according to Sensory Max.

Keep the scent simple. A wrong or complicated scent can turn customers off. Eric Spangenberg, dean of the The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, says that a one-ingredient scent “did not distract” shoppers “from the (buying) task at hand” in an article published by Intuit. In his study, consumers exposed to a single orange scent spent 20 percent more than those when exposed to more complex one. He also tested scent marketing in a clothing store to determine if affects differed depending on the customers’ gender. Spangenberg found that using a vanilla scent in the women’s department and a spicy, honey-like scent in the men’s department nearly doubled sales.
 

Barry helps small businesses get unstuck. He can be found at www.barrymoltz.com. It smells like vanilla.