Ambient Scenting & Consumer Behaviour

Scientific research has found that a human’s sense of smell is the most powerful of the five senses, capable of stirring memory and eliciting more emotions than any other sense that humans have. Studies have shown that humans have the ability to detect over one million different types of odors. Of course, some of these smells are extremely pleasant, some…not so much.

What does this mean for you and your business? Odds are good that you have almost certainly not been adequately capitalizing on ambient scenting and the use of smells as a way of capturing the attention of your customers. Indeed, there is a wide array of ways you can use a human’s sense of smell in order to better market your products. Here’s an overview of how you can do that.

Why is your sense of smell so powerful ?

When there is an odor in the air, it travels through the olfactory tract in your nose and goes directly to the cortical section of your brain. In this way, smells react directly with your emotions and related sensations without any direct interaction with other emotional-processing sections of your brain. As such, your brain and thinking are influenced by smells without you even consciously being aware of it. This helps to explain why smell can be such a powerful emotional and sensory trigger: It touches deep within the recesses of your brain without even the slightest conscious thought.

How To Use Scents in Marketing

When it comes to using scents for the purposes of reaching customers, the best thing you can do is use smell to create an emotional connection with a positive feeling or take advantage of already existing positive feelings. After all, don’t all of us associate smells with some memory or other? Or, even better: Have you ever had that sensation of smelling something and finding your mind automatically transported back to a memory that you didn’t even realize you had associated with that smell?

Smells can be used in marketing in many ways. First, it is important to realize that smells do more than just jog someone’s memory. They make someone feel good and improve one’s overall mood. This, in turn, can change spending patterns. Such a realization gave way to the creation of an entirely new arm of marketing: Ambient scenting. Sometimes, marketing via certain smells is preventative. Indeed, this area was first developed when hotels struggled to mask the smell of cigarettes left behind with smoking guests. However, they quickly learned that they did not just have to be reactive when it came to smells, but could be proactive. As a result, hotel scenting became a specific industry. Indeed, as noted by Conde Nest Traveler, many hotels have developed their own “signature scents” designed to evoke the same feel and actually enhance your brand. An extensive amount of work goes into hotel scenting, as these smells are particularly important for multi-national chains like hotels.

Broadly speaking, smells are designed based on extensive research, physical visitation, and location-specific factors. A scent is supposed to be pleasant and inviting, but not so overwhelming that it is all that someone notices when they enter a location. More than anything else, a smell should be consistent in order to create a positive emotional connection between the smell and the brand. Appropriate use of this smell can help to elicit an emotional response.

Using Scents To Change Behavior

Often, scents are meant specifically to magnify the brands by creating scents that are complimentary towards a store’s products. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. It’s worth noting that experts have found that scents do not have to create an emotional response or connection in order to be effective. Ambient scenting, when used appropriately, can help pry money out of a customer’s wallet. One way is by using smells to market specific products: Multiple studies have found that filling a physical location with the smell of a product, such as coffee, can actually increase that product’s sales. Other smells can induce someone to stay in a store longer or spend more money. The right smell can even make someone think that a product is of higher quality, and as a result, be more willing to pay a higher price for a certain product.

In this sense, the appropriate use of smells and marketing is absolutely remarkable. Scents, done right, can create good memories and subtly impact the behavior of customers.