Scents Make Sense: Using Smell in Marketing

August 6, 2024

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How can I best communicate scent in my marketing?

In the the ANA article "How to Create Brand Love Through Scents," Lydia Michael, owner of Blended Collective, wrote that "over the years, brands have come to recognize the power of olfactive branding, or scent marketing, more and more. These scent elements are powerful ways to make us feel good and build stronger connections with brands even when we don't realize it."

As noted in this article, scent marketing has the power to enhance brand identity through the following measures:

Emotional Connection: Scents can evoke a myriad of emotions, from tranquility to excitement. By associating a specific fragrance with their brand, companies can foster a particular emotional connection with consumers.
Enhancing Memory: People can remember scents with 65 percent accuracy after a year, in contrast to visual recall at 50 percent after only three months. Hence, a signature scent can make a brand more memorable.
Setting Apart from Competition: In crowded marketplaces, a unique brand scent can serve as a distinguishing factor, setting a brand apart from its competitors.

But as another article points out that "because smell is so closely linked with memory, not everyone will have the same reaction to a particular scent. While many people find the smell of lavender soothing, for instance, those who connect it to unpleasant memories may feel the opposite. This is another reason brands take the time and trouble to create unique scents that will be connected to them alone."

The resources below provide insight into scent marketing – as well as best practices and examples of brands using scent marketing.

Trends and Best Practices

Why Scent Marketing Makes Sense for Brands. Mintel, February 2024.
What can brands achieve with scent marketing that other techniques may not offer? Scents have more mystery than sights and sounds; they make themselves known in the background, long before you can name them. They feel personal; they surface memories. So, it is no wonder that brands are tapping into this sensory memory. They're using custom scents to establish emotional connections as subtle as they are powerful. Scent marketing is a way for brands to take control of their physical environments to hammer home a consistent ambience that complements more classic, and obvious, sensory elements.
How to Create Brand Love Through Scents. ANA, June 2024.
With the right scent identity, you can trigger engagement and affect consumer behavior in the right way for your brand. This contributes to the emotional result, which helps differentiate your brand while creating a pleasant customer experience.
Designing Multi-Sensory Experiences for Your Brand Activation. ANA, 2023.
Smell can be very persuasive — or a deterrent — so it can be important to choose the right smells to unleash upon your customer base. One good example of smell used in marketing is Abercrombie & Fitch, whose unforgettable scent permeates everything in their stores.
The Hidden Power of Scent Marketing. ProfileTree, 2024.
Research has found that scent marketing can create a positive emotional response in consumers, leading to increased sales and brand loyalty.
Brand Scent Marketing: The Aromatic Appeal. Jack Willoughby, 2023.
The author of this article shares the following tips for implementing scent marketing:

Consistency Is Key: Consistency is crucial in scent marketing. The chosen scent should be consistently diffused or used across all touchpoints.
Alignment with Brand Identity: The scent should resonate with the brand's values, message, and target audience. For instance, a luxury spa brand might opt for calming lavender, while a tech showroom might go for a clean, crisp scent.
Quality over Quantity: The scent should be subtle, enhancing the consumer experience without overpowering it. It's crucial to invest in high-quality aroma solutions that offer a consistent and subtle fragrance release.
Regularly Evaluate and Adapt: It's essential to periodically evaluate the effectiveness of scent marketing and adjust if necessary.
Engage and Collect Feedback: Engage with your customers and seek feedback about the scent. Their input can offer valuable insights and help in fine-tuning your strategy.

Making Scents of Your Brand. ANA, August 2022.
The acceleration in scent marketing is being fueled by consumers' post-pandemic thirst for real-world experiences. A powerful driver for human emotion, scent provides food brands with unique ways to stir engagement and fuel sales. As with other brand extensions, context is critical.

Examples

'Read this Ad with Your Nose': The State of Scent Marketing. Campaign Asia, 2024.
In the Netherlands, McDonald's launched a series of unbranded red and yellow billboards. To the eyes, they were plain and unremarkable. But passers-by quickly began to smell that something was up. These were no ordinary billboards. They were the world's first scented billboards that smelt like McDonald's French fries. A tray of fries was inserted into each of the billboards which had ventilators to suck and diffuse the aroma within a 15-foot distance.

The effort captured bystanders walking in front of the billboard, and most of them recognized the iconic fries smell. Some even turned around to visit the nearest McDonald's, says Darre van Dijk, chief creative officer at TBWA/Nebok.

The Smells that Make Shoppers Spend More. Business News Daily, 2024.
This article provides the following examples of scent marketing in action:

Hyatt Place launched with a signature scent it calls Seamless, which incorporates blueberries and floral notes on a base of vanilla and musk and uses this blended scent throughout its Hyatt Place properties. For Hyatt, like other companies using scent branding, the goal is to associate the hotel with a pleasant scent and trigger a subconscious association with the brand.
Singapore Airlines has a patented scent, Stefan Floridian Waters. The company uses the fragrance in its aircraft, its flight attendants wear it, and all in-flight towels are laundered with it.
Movie Theaters: Upon entering movie theaters, the first thing people may notice is the smell of popcorn. This is not an accident. Most money made by a theater is from the concessions sold, not the movie tickets.

What Is Scent Marketing? Atmocare, 2023.
This article shares the following examples of scent marketing:

Subway, the sandwich restaurant chain, diffused the scent of freshly baked bread into selected stores and found that it increased sales by over 20 percent. The aroma of freshly baked bread contributed to a more inviting and appetizing atmosphere.
Nike found that adding a pleasant scent in their stores could boost the likelihood of customers wanting to buy their products by a significant 84 percent. The study revealed that scent marketing has the capability to attract customers and push them to make a purchase.
Apple introduced scent marketing in its retail stores in 2018. They use a unique and signature fragrance of 'green apples and mint' diffused through their HVAC system, to create a distinctive and memorable in-store atmosphere. The scent is carefully designed to be subtle. It combined elements like crisp apple notes with a hint of wood, giving a sense of innovation, freshness, and the brand's signature minimalism.

How The World's Stinkiest Sock Left Lysol Smelling Fresh with Consumers. ANA, May 2023.
To prove its Lysol brand's Laundry Sanitizer could tackle even the smelliest laundry, Reckitt worked with scientists to create "The World's Stinkiest Sock" — and then put it to the ultimate test with a group of people who knew a thing or two about stinky socks: Boston Red Sox fans.

Capturing the Hearts and Minds of the Consumer. ANA, February 2022.
Nicola Grant, SVP of consumer marketing for North America at Mastercard, shared how Mastercard began to explore how it could show up beyond visual cues in response to the evolving relationship between media and the senses. Grant outlined Mastercard's efforts so far for each of the four non-visual senses, highlighting the brand's thinking and approach to each, and sharing how Mastercard continues to extend its brand across all the senses. See also Mastercard Moving into Fragrance.

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