Arrive Magazine - July/August, 2008

Catch a whiff of popcorn and you crave it—right now. Doesn’t matter if you’re at the airport and your plane is boarding. So it’s no wonder that marketers blow the aroma of brownies through groceries, infuse auto dealerships with the scent of pricey leather and fill travel agencies with the smell of suntan lotion.

“Smell has been the Cinderella of the senses, the forgotten sense,” says Theresa L. White, adjunct associate professor in neuroscience and physiology at SUN Y Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N. Y.

As she and other researchers have found, smell, more than any other sense, awakens lust, nostalgia or revulsion. And it’s all a matter of brain biology. Odor travels through the brain’s emotional center—the limbic system—and so is closely tied to feelings.

discovered, a decade ago, that if you sell a tennis shoe in a scented room, shoppers are willing to pay 20 percent more. Exxon’s On the Run stores added a java aroma, and coffee sales jumped 55 percent.

It makes sense, because much
shopping and eating is emotional, not

rational. “You want to get people into a store and keep them there,” says Harald H. Vogt, founder and chief marketer at Scent Marketing Institute in Scarsdale, N. Y. “As time flies by quickly in an appealing atmosphere, you spend more money.”

On the business battlefield, the
power of marketing can be blown to bits
by happenstance. If a customer wears
gloves, he can’t feel. If he looks in the
wrong direction, he won’t see. And if
he’s listening to an iPod, he won’t hear
the campaign. But he cannot hold his
nose for the minute or so needed to walk
beyond an odor. “You’ve got to
breathe the scent again.”
That’s why advertisers are will-
ing to spend quadruple a newspa-
per’s ad rate for aromas, and why
some firms pay up to $125,000 to
create signature scents that will
remind consumers of a product
without even realizing it. And that’s
why, Vogt says, fragrance marketing is a
$100 million business—and is expected
to top $1 billion within the next decade.

At that price, brands cannot afford approaches that turn potential customers into enemies, as can happen when clerks douse unsuspecting shoppers with strong perfume.