Scent marketing, also known as olfactory branding or perfume branding, is an invisible secret weapon employed by the savviest marketers to sway the hearts and minds of customers through the subtle manipulation of their sense of smell.
By using carefully chosen fragrance oils and fragrance diffusers to disseminate aromas throughout a company’s space ‒ whether it be their offices or a retail store ‒ scent marketers are able to access a powerful part of the customer’s brain that no other sensory marketing technique can access.
When it comes to using scents to improve your customers’ experience with your brand, there are two main approaches that can be taken.
Ambient Scenting
Ambient scenting is when a company diffuses a pleasant fragrance throughout a space to enhance the ambience. The fragrance need not be unique, although it should be carefully chosen to achieve the desired effect and to tie in more closely with the brand’s positioning.
For example, a relaxing spa might want to use something like lavender to create a sense of soothing calm, whereas a lemongrass fragrance might be used in a corporate office to refresh and energise the space to improve worker productivity.
Warm and comforting scents like vanilla might do great in retail stores that sell homeware, while the subtle scent of coconut could be effective in a beach clothing store. It all depends on the nature of the product or service, as well as the other marketing stimuli ‒ particularly visual and auditory stimuli ‒ that will determine what scent is most appropriate.
Scent Branding
This approach is more focused on creating a signature fragrance to use in connection with your particular brand. This marketing technique has many different names, such as scent branding, fragrance marketing or olfactory branding, besides others, but it all essentially ties back to the same idea.
When a uniquely formulated aroma is concocted, it can create a distinctly personal emotional connection between the customer and the brand. Since no other aroma quite smells like yours, customers will inherently form a mental association between your brand and the unique smell, which can have a pretty significant impact on how they perceive your brand.
If the smell is pleasing, it will evoke positive feelings, and they will recall their experience with the brand as pleasant. By exploiting the powerful connection between smell, memory and emotion, savvy marketers can make their brand stand out from the crowd in the hearts and minds of their customers.
From then on, all a customer will need to do is smell your brand’s unique fragrance, and they will immediately recall the brand in great detail, with associated emotions rising to the surface as well. These emotions can drive purchasing behaviour on a subconscious level, which is why scent marketing is so powerful and effective.
Get in touch with us at Scent.ology to secure your fragrances and scent delivery systems for effective scent marketing in the new year.
