Branding Strategies The Science Behind Common Scents
Branding Strategies
It may have only started to emerge in 2002, but, in many ways,
there’s nothing new about the concept of branding strategies which use scent. In
the past, bakeries and coffee shops have always inadvertently drawn customers to
them by giving off attractive aromas.
Everyone’s heard the old trick about wafting around freshly brewed coffee or
putting on the bread maker before showing prospective buyers around your home.
And, in the days before homogenised supermarkets with their shrink-wrapping and
acres of celluloid, or online grocery deliveries, shopping was a far more
sensual experience than it is now. People could smell fruit and vegetables in
the greengrocer’s, or blood and sawdust at their local butcher.
In recent years, branding strategies are seeing a return to this multi-sensory
idea through scent marketing, or the linking of a brand with a particular smell.
A huge range of products and places from casinos to ice-cream parlours to
department stores to lines of shoes and clothing can benefit from association
with a specific scent.
Times are tough, and as retailers compete for customers, innovative and
effective new branding strategies have to be explored. We’re already overwhelmed
by advertising which relies on sight, hearing or both, leading to information
overload. Fresh strategies are needed to communicate brand messages in a
different way using consumers’ sense of smell.
The proven link between smell and both emotion and memory is well-known.
But we’re just coming to understand how powerful the sense of smell can be as a
marketing tool, and have the research and scientific evidence to highlight the
importance of multi-sensory marketing in affecting consumer behaviour and buying
choices.
Yet, at the same time, there’s also a sense that scent marketing’s true
potential is only just beginning to be realised.
Scents and Sensibility: The Facts
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We smell around 10,000 different aromas every day
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Scent can add a vital extra 30 seconds to the amount of time a shopper lingers
by a product
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We’re more than 50% likely to visit a particular booth or product at a trade
fair or similar event if there is a ‘scent trail’ to take us to it
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The use of smell can make us three times more likely to actually buy something,
as opposed to just looking
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Human beings have 350 odour receptor genes, as opposed to three and five for
vision and taste respectively. Research suggests that not only are we more
receptive to smell than the other senses, we are more deeply affected by the
things we smell
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A leather-scented advert in a couple of major newspapers led to a 16% increase
for Mitsubishi’s Lancer Envo X model in yearly sales, despite the general
worldwide decline of the automotive industry
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Nearly 85% of all commercial communication appeals to just one sense - sight.
That leaves less than 20% to cater for the other four senses, yet 75% of our
day-to-day emotions are influenced by what we smell
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American researchers at the University of California have found in recent years
that the human sense of smell is more powerful than previously thought, and
that, with training, humans might even be capable of tasks which had been
thought to be the exclusive preserve of animals.
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