It’s a new year and time for a fresh start. After suffering through a pandemic and an economic downturn, the retail, hospitality, and real estate sectors are finally seeing some much-needed improvement as people are returning to normality.
In many ways, the use of scent marketing and olfactory branding is increasingly being seen as a key part of making customers feel safe and welcome, thereby improving their linger time and creating a positive association with certain brand experiences.
Given the state of the world right now, here are some scent marketing strategies that are sure to help your business improve its performance in the hearts and minds of your customers in 2023.
Appeal To Comfort
Appealing to a person’s sense of comfort is going to yield better sales. After the traumatic past few years, and with challenges like load shedding continuing to make people feel on edge, scents that bring a sense of warmth, cosiness and comfort are more likely to make customers associate your brand’s space with good emotions. When that sweet dopamine hit is linked to your products and services, customers will be more inclined to want to spend their money.
Comforting scents such as vanilla, chocolate, cinnamon, cardamon, ginger and liquorice are the kinds of smells that remind people of better times when they were safe, happy and content. You definitely want them to associate those feelings with your business.
Go Big
Essential oil fragrances and diffusers are more popular than ever at the moment, with more and more customers buying their own devices to use in their homes. This means that many of them might already be quite used to some of the more generic scents available. While this certainly does not mean that using standard scents will be ineffective, it does mean that, in order to stand out, you might want to try something more bold and unique.
To stand out more to customers, mixing your own unique scents and coming out with something striking and memorable is increasingly preferred by businesses over going for something subtle and understated. This is called ‘billboard scent marketing’, as it is hard to miss and designed to be noticed so that it will be remembered.
This strategy is in line with the resurgence of what some are calling the Y2K aesthetic, which is sweeping across all aspects of design, fashion, interior design and even scent marketing. This bold, confident and unashamedly colourful aesthetic is increasingly in vogue, and it applies to scents too!
We at Scent.ology are experts at scent marketing, with our own perfume factory in Johannesburg where we manufacture fragrance oils and fragrance diffusers for South Africa. Contact us today for more advice and assistance in getting your scent marketing strategy off the ground this year!
