Scent: A Marketer’s Secret Superpower?
Back in March, La Poste – the French answer to the Post Office – launched a special stamp bearing the image of the humble baguette. More interestingly, it was a ‘scratch and sniff’ special edition stamp that also captured and transmitted the scent of said baguette, which La Poste says is a ‘jewel of French culture’. While the image is instantly recognisable and understandable, it’s the smell of the baguette that really transports. It’s the warmth of the freshly baked dough, the nuttiness of the grain, a slight powderiness of the flour each is dusted with. Behind the scent is a vast symbolic network, conjured involuntarily, encompassing the traditions, rituals, and cultural practices contained in the image and smell of the baguette.
Smell is perhaps the most primal of our senses. It bypasses reason and has a direct line to our memories and emotions. The olfactory cortex – which processes smells in the brain – is situated right behind the nose with connections to the limbic system that’s, in turn, involved in our emotional and behavioural responses. “Smell is linked really closely to emotion; it’s a direct pathway,” says Olivia Jezler, scent expert and founder of Future of Smell, a scent design company. “No other sense does that.”
Covid brought our collective sense of scent into the spotlight during the pandemic and interest in it has remained high since. Beauty market statistics back this up in the fragrance category; it dipped in 2020, and was in decline for close to a decade while skincare and make up categories surged ahead, but is currently projected to grow by 3.01% globally over the next four years.
Where next for physical retail?
The physical retail space is undergoing a transformation as marketers reimagine what shops can be in this new landscape while consumers make purchases online. The answers seem to lie in the ‘experiential’ category so that every visit presents a value added proposition that goes beyond seeking out and purchasing products. Scent can, and should, play a big part in that experience, according to Olivia. “People aren’t leaving their homes as much as they used to so when they do go into a store, it should be much more immersive and interesting,” compared to what it was in the past. “Scent plays a role in creating this story, it creates a scent of immersion, it makes you feel good, and makes you want to stay in a place for longer. That’s been proven through research,” Olivia says. Hotels have utilised this scent property for a long time with a host of luxury ones opting for bespoke scents while some opt for known fragrances from designer houses like Le Labo, NEST, and Tom Ford. “If we’re talking about using scent as part of a brand, hotels come to mind first,” she agrees.
It makes perfect sense that a space that’s been thoughtfully designed across every detail and looking to delight the senses, making the visitor feel relaxed and want to spend time (and money) on its ground, would also want to engage the sense of smell. It’s an extension of the whole operation, translating the visual and tactile elements of the space into the olfactive realm. For a modern hotel, filled with steel and glass, the scent might combine aquatic and aldehydic elements to convey modernity, freshness, cleanness; while a bohemian setting full of woods, seagrass, and fruit-filled bowls may use sandalwood, warm citrus, and and soft musks to create a sense of paradisiacal relaxation.
Trin Basra, executive creative director at Freeman, an event and experience company, provides further context: “Scents possess a remarkable power to create associations and evoke memories. Often overlooked in marketing, smell can transport consumers to significant past experiences, creating a deep emotional bond with brands. While people may not explicitly mention scents when recalling experiences, they often highlight the feelings and memories these scents evoke. As the world isn’t experienced as odourless, engaging this powerful sense can engender brand trust, create strong associations and make experiences feel more authentic.”
More immersive experiences
Olivia talks about translation of visual elements of the brand into olfactive elements; something she can do instinctively after working at the intersection of scent and brand design for so long. “The translation is based on all elements of the brand and because I’ve been doing this for a while, I can make the bridge between the visual and the olfactory,” says Olivia whose experience spans to brand strategy management and teaching at the Parsons School of Design. As part of Future of Smell’s offering, Olivia has recently launched Scent Genie, an AI-powered tool allowing brand owners and markers to turn text-based brand values into fragrance notes. “The text description is matched to a database of fragrances and from there we can find the best fragrance for the brand. I have an even bigger database at my own disposal where I input brand values and find niche fragrances that match or get the notes that we can use as a benchmark to create a bespoke fragrance for the brand.” This, Olivia says, is all accomplished with the help of neural networks, large language models, and a vast fragrance database. Still, the end product comes down to her extensive expertise as well as the feeling when a scent is right. “I don’t have a formula,” Olivia reiterates. “I can look at the typography a brand uses, for example, and capture that feeling because that’s what it is: a feeling.”
For Olivia, engaging the consumers’ sense of smell is a way to create something “more immersive, more multisensory.” And this is beneficial to brands because “if you have the right smell that works well with the rest of your brand elements, then the brand becomes more impactful and memorable,” Olivia comments. There’s nuance to this exercise. “A brand that uses the colour pink and a citrus fragrance won’t make as deep a connection in the brain as a brand where those elements are more closely aligned,” she explains.
While some shops have been utilising scent for years – think Abercrombie & Fitch, Aesop, and Lush – others have a kind of ‘nothing’ smell that’s disconcerting to our nostrils. It doesn’t stand for anything, it’s not transportative to the psyche and, at worst, it undermines the brands’ efforts to appear chic while being decidedly mass market. “In a lot of the less expensive stores, you smell the materials of the garments and the construction materials. It doesn’t create a negative impression per se but we’re wired to use our sense of smell to check that we’re safe, that everything is okay. We can tell very quickly when something smells off, when there’s a mismatch between the smell and the perception of the environment that we’re in. Smell allows brands to create immersion which translates to more sales and stronger brand recall,” Olivia explains.
Scent branding can extend to e-commerce too where consumer touchpoints include the physical packaging that orders arrive in. There is an incongruence between a seamless web retail experience, a beautifully designed site, thoughtfully crafted communication, and packaging that falls short of these impressions. “You can embed scent into packaging and it doesn't have to be overpowering, but you don’t want that one touchpoint you have with the consumer to smell like the chemicals in the brown packaging,” she adds.
For all the benefits that a scent identity can impart on a brand, it’s not easy to get right, especially when scent is so strongly correlated to memory and culture. “Cultural differences are huge,” Olivia confirms, plus brands have to contend with negative scent associations too. Running scent workshops, Olivia noticed that some fragrance notes evoked immediate reactions. Citrus was associated with smelling less sophisticated due it's association with lemon sweets and people continuously report to not like the smell of rose, as it’s often connected to ideas about what ‘old fashioned’ smells like, as witnessed by. Yet scent experts know that there are numerous and expansive expressions of different notes beyond their simplistic cultural definitions. “You can’t ask people about notes, it doesn’t work. You just have to let people smell things because, unfortunately, the ideas people associate with smells aren’t always the best but they might change their mind if they smell something first,” says Olivia.
“We haven’t had that much education in the olfactory realm,” Olivia notes. Perhaps this is why brands and brand marketers are resistant to incorporating scent as part of their branding strategy on a broader scale and beyond the obvious categories of beauty and luxury.
Still, that’s changing slowly especially as brands look to entice shoppers back to stores and to create lasting, emotional connections that scent can do quite like nothing else therefore differentiating themselves from the unscented competition. “Scent is so closely linked to human emotions, it’s a direct pathway. No other sense does that,” she adds.
