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Are money and productivity secretly hiding under your nose? Here is the method to make the best of scent marketing.No matter what work environment you have, it’s obvious that its looks (lighting, paint colors) and sound (background music) can significantly affect your staff’s productivity and spirits, as well as your customers’ sense comfort and willingness to buy.
It may be less obvious to business owners, however, that they should also seriously think of how their environment smells.
The power of smell to trigger an experience is related to the olfactory nerve’s which function almost like the smell’s shortcut to those parts of your brain that your other senses do not have access to.
How important are smells to your business? Check these examples:
In a study, two identical pairs of shoes were placed in two identical rooms (one scented with a floral fragrance, the other not). By 84%, customers went for the one in the scented room, and estimated their value to be on average $10.33 more than the shoes placed in the unscented room.
A convenience store that began pumping the smell of coffee near the gas pumps witnessed coffee purchases increase 300%.
Volunteers in one study performed puzzle-solving tasks 17% faster after exposure to floral fragrances.According to another study, people remember a scent and memories relating to it with 65% accuracy after 12 months, compared to visual recall, which was only 50% accurate after four months.
It is something to keep in mind, right?!
Big companies have for a long time understood the powerful role of scent marketing. Hotels, for example, waft their rooms with branded scents and then include those same scents in their follow up mailings to evoke fond vacation memories. They’ve done their homework, and they go through these efforts because they’ve found a direct relation between scent marketing and increased sales.
Keep It Simple
It can be tempting to use a complicated fragrance blend to evoke all the various aspects of your brand; however, the surprise lies in the fact that simple scents work better.
Researches by Washington State University found that customers spent on average 20% more in the presence of a simple scent (such as orange) than in the presence of either a complicated scent (such as orange-basil with green tea) or no scent at all.
The researchers believe that the simpler scents (such as citrus or pine) boost “processing fluency,” helping the brain to more easily process and understand the scent. As a side benefit, simple scents less costly than custom-designed signature scents, which can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
