The Third Sense: Scent
Today is the fourth part (I’m going in reverse for those just joining) of my Six Senses of Marketing series, with Scent: The Third Sense of Marketing.
A quick recap for those just joining, we’ve been discussing how we can look to create an experience for our customers utilizing each of the 5 senses which will then culminate in one large overall feeling (or 6th sense type feeling) about why our company’s products or services should be chosen over those of our competitors.
Is there one particular sense that is more important than any of the rest? In my opinion, only the last, the 6th sense: Feeling. This is the one sense that will push a potential customer off of the fence when they’re undecided about which to choose. This is why it’s important for us to ensure we make every effort to create a lasting impression upon each of the five senses.
Today we discuss scent. Vanilla, gasoline, baby powder, and campfires all have a very distinct and unique scent. Harnessing these scents can utilize the latent memories and associations of your customers to “borrow” an intended feeling. In the marketing of barbecue sauces during a time when many households use a propane bbq, infusing the product with a wood-smoked flavour harnesses a consumer’s fondness for a campfire cookout. Real estate agents have long used a technique of adding a drop or two of vanilla to a cookie sheet in a warm oven to recreate a “grandma’s kitchen” type ambience in the hopes that the house will feel more like home to open house attendees.
Studies have shown that there is a connection between scent and our fight-or-flight survival instinct as well as how we choose a mate. Many of us can catch a slight whiff of our loved ones favoured scent in a public place and it will register among the multitude of other scents around us. Scent is a powerful sense and if we disregard it in the marketing of our companies, we leave out an extremely useful tool to help make long-lasting connections with our customers.
While gasoline may not conjure the best mental memory or imagery, it is a powerful scent that may or may not help you provide a memory for a museum exhibit about race cars. While the scent of baby powder might be a welcoming and feeling inducing scent to have around if you’re in the baby clothing and products business. Bakeries are placed near the entrances to supermarkets in the hopes that the scents entice you to feel hungry and the scent of popcorn has done wonders for movie theatres charging exceedingly high prices for it.
It’s no accident that companies like Febreeze, Glade, and Gain Detergent have achieved great success in recent years due to their attention to our sense of smell, they’ve just tapped into an otherwise forgotten or easily overlooked way to connect with their customers.
In what ways can you add “Scent” to your company’s experience on your journey to completing the sensory ensemble and thus enhancing the consumers 6th sense about your products or services?
I have a “Feeling” that you’ll have definite “Feelings” on this topic, why not join in and share your thoughts in the comments below.
Want to Read The Whole Series?