subject: Grabbed By The Nose: The Pervasive Use Of Scent Marketing [print this page] Grabbed By The Nose: The Pervasive Use Of Scent Marketing
Effective marketing engages all the senses. What people see, hear, taste, touch and smell drives them to buy. Car dealers use skimpily clad models to sell cars. The colors orange, yellow, red and blue are employed to draw customers to products. Supermarkets play the sound of rain in their produce department and the mooing of cows in the dairy department. Flavoring is added to medicine to make them sell. Furniture makers and car dealers spend years testing materials to ensure they have the right 'feel' when customers touch them. Everyone knows that aroma sells. Whether it is coffee, baked goods, exotic dishes or new cars, smell draws people to products. This has given rise to new specialty-scent marketing.
Scent marketing is the use of particular aromas to draw attention to products and induce customers to buy. All things being equal, the product that has the most pleasant smell sells the most. Used car dealers spray air fresheners with 'new car scent' into their vehicles because they know that many customers make buying decisions partially based on scent. Restaurants do the same thing. Some use the aroma of coffees or other foods that stimulate the salivary glands to encourage customers to buy dishes. Some of the smells actually come from the cooking, but at times businesses employ scent machines or scent systems to produce the scents that stimulate customers.
Stimulating the sense of smell to sell products is not new, but it has been given new life with the innovative modern marketing techniques that proliferate today. Whether it is the use of pheromones to sell colognes or adding scents to packaged food products, scent marketing is pervasive in our everyday lives.
