How Scent Marketing Can Change Your Business

People tend to shop with their senses. They look at the packaging and product. If an item is meant to be soft, such as a blanket, they use their sense of touch. Sense of smell is also a major component of how a consumer shops. Imagine walking into a mall shop that sells makeup and not smelling perfume. Believe it or not, this is a marketing tactic. It doesn’t just work for places that sell perfume and cologne, either.

How Scent Marketing Works

Think about walking into a bakery. While they don’t bake for the sole purpose of scent marketing, the smell of freshly baked cookies and bread intrigues people to want to buy. Real estate agents use scent when staging a home. And these are merely some examples. There’s a reason it works.

A positive scent stimulates a person’s senses. When it’s a pleasant scent, it helps create an overall positive experience for the consumer. If this is the customer’s first time in the shop, it has a strong impact on the customer’s sentiments toward your business. Once a customer becomes a regular, they automatically expect that smell when they walk through your door. Eventually, it could become a scent that they associate with your company every time they smell it. The purpose of scent marketing is to enhance the customer experience, which can ultimately drive sales.

A company may want to create a mood or theme with the scents they use. For instance, did you ever walk passed a coffee shop and smell an aroma that smells like coffee beans, maple, or another pleasant smell? What about a spa? Did you notice that you often walk in, and it smells of essential oils, such as lavender or mint? These fragrances are known for being calming.

Some companies may use diffusers to emit a fragrance. The diffusers create a light scent in the air, and it makes customers feel calm and happy to be in the store. It may be a scent like lavender or vanilla.

A business may spray a specific fragrance in different places around its store. This allows every customer who enters to smell it and draw a connection between it and the business.

Scent’s Effect on the Brain

The main concept of scent marketing deals with how the brain is receptive to sense stimuli. When multiple senses are engaged, it helps a customer to form and retain a memory of a location even better. Smelling that scent outside of the business or walking into the business at a later date will cause the person to revisit that memory.

Stimulating one or more senses help a brand connect on an emotional level with customers. This is especially the case with scent. The limbic system on the left side of your brain processes scent. It’s responsible for controlling emotions and processing smell. This means there’s a direct link between an emotional connection and scent. Interestingly enough, smell is the strongest of your senses, and it has the greatest link to memory.

Benefits

You can increase sales when you make an emotional connection with customers, as you do with scent marketing. A scent may even increase a person’s willingness to pay more for a brand. When a space has a scent, customers associate it with higher quality. You might also notice people remain in your store longer when it has a pleasant aroma.

Use scent marketing to boost the mood of customers. And remember, a happy customer is more likely to spend money at your store.

The scent of your store becomes part of the essence of your business. It becomes a vital aspect of brand recognition and adds to customers’ first impressions of you.

Proof

A pleasant aroma can potentially boost how much people spend by 20%, as noted by a study published by Washington State University.

In one study published in the International Journal of Marketing Studies, ambient scent in a Nike store improved how pleasurable the shopping experience was as well as the overall perception of the store.

Market research completed by Samsung indicated a consumer underestimates their browsing time by 26% when exposed to a pleasant aroma. These individuals visited three times more sections than those not exposed to an appealing smell.

ScentlinqPro understands the strong relationship between smell and marketing. We’re experts and can help create a scent for your business that’ll increase sales and make shopping with you an overall better experience.

Citations:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33329267/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-scents-affect-peoples/