There’s nothing like the smell of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies. You know – that heavy scent of melted chocolate blended with fresh butter, eggs and sugar. Pure bliss.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that smell has a greater impact on purchase than everything else combined. It’s true. Aroma is a more powerful marketing tool than the catchiest commercial or coolest logo.
The goal of associating a scent with a brand is a powerful one. Sony pumps a vanilla/mandarin scent into the air of its Sony Style stores to entice shoppers to linger longer. The Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, FL releases a waffle-cone scent to attract customers to its ice cream parlor, where sales jumped after the chain began using fragrance marketing. And Clear Channel Outdoor has enabled hundreds of its billboards to pump out a cherry fragrance that accompanies a shampoo advertisement.
Now, if we could just make broccoli smell like creme brulee...
There’s a challenge for my food chemist friends.
Kate F. says
Feb 15, 2007 at 2:57 pmAroma and smell is indeed a powerful marketing tool:
While working at the uber-successful Abercrombie and Fitch, during my college years, we were instructed every morning to spray (but more like douse) the store with the musky scent of their new cologne for men. The idea was to concentrate the spraying at the front of the store, so that the scent would waft out of the store and in to the nose of a credit card-carrying college student.
Did this tactic work? I can’t say what the ROI was (we went through so many bottles of cologne), but I do remember countless shoppers commenting on the wonderful smell of an Abercrombie store.
On a different note, what about the legal issues with smell in public places? I believe the Milk Board in California recently was in a bit of trouble for piping smells out of bus stops… will this become a widespread issue?
Tina says
Feb 22, 2007 at 10:14 amHello, Kate.
Thanks for your input! And you are correct. There can be legal repercussions to pumping fragrance into the air. Done to a certain degree, it’s considered an “environmental polutant,” so companies should proceed with caution before taking this approach to marketing.