Scent marketing or perfume branding is the art of using smells to manipulate the psychology of customers towards having an improved perception of your brand and therefore increase sales.
Our sense of smell is often underrated because it is not as obvious or essential to our daily lives as our sense of sight or hearing, both of which are constantly stimulated throughout every day.
While visual cues do matter a lot, the sense of smell can have incredibly powerful effects on the way customers interact with your brand. Sadly, this power is often overlooked, and so many brands miss out on the opportunity to affect the psychology of their customers by exploiting their olfactory system.
To better understand how smells can be used to boost your business, let us explore some of the ways in which psychology and scents are linked.
Smell, Memory And Emotion
Have you ever smelled something that gave you a powerful memory, transporting you back to a time and place where you not only recalled events from the past but recalled very specific feelings and emotions as well?
This is because our sense of smell is connected directly to our brain’s ability to process memories.
Scents and aromas are processed in the olfactory bulb, which is a part of the forebrain that receives information from the nose and is directly connected to the hippocampus and amygdala. These parts of the brain are responsible for emotional reactions and memories.
Therefore, more than any other sense, our sense of smell can have a direct and powerful impact on memory and emotion ‒ not only in the retrieval of memories and emotions but also in the creation thereof.
The Impact
Because our sense of smell is so closely linked to our memories and emotions, the impact that this has on our buying behaviours is immense.
Consider how a smell might be associated with a customer’s experience of interacting with your brand. A pleasing smell might evoke positive associations and drive further business in future, whereas an unpleasant smell could achieve the opposite and drive customers to stay away.
Shops and hospitality spaces would do well to place a premium on how the ambient aroma that customers encounter there might affect how they form memories and emotions connected to them.
For more information on how scent marketing and perfume marketing can affect your brand’s performance, contact Scent.ology today.
