The Nose Knows

Below is Part One of an article from Salon.com about scent-based marketing. O Brave New World!

(Some of the information on olfaction isn't exactly scientific, but you'll get the idea.)

Now Smell This

Savvy consumer marketers are proving that the way to your pocketbook is through your nose.

By Suzanne Bopp

Sept. 17, 2008 In a German movie theater last month, audience members waiting for the feature wondered why they were seeing people lounging on a beach. After 60 seconds of waves and seagulls, a tag line for Nivea sunscreen appeared, and the scent of Nivea wafted into the theater through the air-conditioning vents.

Later, a survey showed that audience recall of the smelly ad was 500 percent higher than for the scent-free version. Whether moviegoers enjoyed the scent of sunscreen with their popcorn was not recorded. But that's a number that advertisers certainly recall -- and one that proponents of scent marketing love to broadcast.
"Scent will soon be a normal part of advertising and entertainment," says Carmine Santandrea, owner of a scent marketing company in Santa Barbara, Calif. After circulating the smell of milk chocolate in the vicinity of a vending machine, he says, he saw a "sales lift of 300 percent for Hershey Kisses. That's never happened in advertising before. Those results can't be ignored."

Neither can an odor. While you can turn a magazine page or change a television channel, you can't avoid inhaling. "That's the good and bad thing about scent -- you can't get away from it," says Harald Vogt, founder of the Scent Marketing Institute. "In our environment, everything already smells. The question is how you manage the smells."

The idea of scent in advertising is not new. Back in 1965, Santandrea created a scented Coke pavilion at the World's Fair in New York. But science has now given Madison Avenue powerful new tools to fulfill its odorous promise. Today's chemists, for instance, can capture the scent of a strawberry in varying stages of ripeness by taking samples of the air around the berry with a gas chromatograph. The bigger development, according to Avery Gilbert, author of "What the Nose Knows," is that chemists can develop recipes for any smell, down to a single molecule.

"There's a plant in the Sierra Nevada in the summer that gives off a cooked artichoke smell," Gilbert says. "The Indians knew about it; John Muir noticed it. It's called Sierra Mountain Misery. I took a sprig and sent it to a chemist and found that the smell comes from one molecule that makes up less than 1 percent of the entire formula."

Scent marketing has also become more sophisticated because of what we've learned about olfaction. Smell may be the least lauded of the senses, but it's the one most closely connected to our moods and recollections. (The loss of it, called anosmia, can produce tremendous anxiety and depression.) Memories inspired by fragrance are more emotional than those triggered by sights or sounds. In studies, scent-elicited memories cause subjects to mention more emotions, rate them as more intense, and report more of a feeling of being back in the time and place relevant to a smell. Catching a whiff of the perfume your grandmother wore is likely to bring back stronger memories of her -- and the feelings associated with her -- than seeing her photo.
That can happen before you are even conscious of the scent. That's because an incoming odor proceeds directly to your limbic system, which handles memories and emotions; non-olfactory perception must go to the hypothalamus and then on to the cortex for further analysis. "Scent goes right to your emotions," Santandrea says. "And if I can appeal to your primal senses, I've got you. That is what advertisers do. If you find that offensive, you have a problem with all of advertising."

Scent marketing is not limited to products that have an inherent aroma, like Hershey's Kisses; items such as clothing or stereos have their own universe of "scent abstractions" to brand themselves. Smell for yourself: Walk into the Samsung store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and you may notice a melon aroma. Westin Hotels envelop guests with their White Tea fragrance. (Now you can buy Westin-scented candles to enjoy the hotel smell at home!)

Extensive research preceded the introduction of those scents. Companies start with a "fragrance brief," describing the scent image they want to project. Fragrance vendors then create scents they imagine fulfill the descriptions. Because Samsung and Westin are global brands, and there is no globally agreed upon pleasant smell, they had to be certain that the scents would not be offensive anywhere.

"To use something 'fruity' and 'light' is the best bet for any scent marketing effort that is not connected to a product," Vogt says. "A good example for a product-related scent is Thomas Pink's 'Line Dried Linen' that smells, well, just like it. If you don't have such a product, you look at your target audience, what they prefer and use, and start from there."

Some people find smell advertising offensive, akin to subliminal advertising. But Gilbert has a quick defense. "If a pizzeria is venting out onto the street, and the smell makes you want pizza, is that somehow mind control?" he asks. "Scent is a weird channel that people don't think about on regular basis. Once it becomes more standardized, people will get over it."

Maybe they'll even like it. Stores like Samsung want to forge a fragrance bond that creates positive feelings, customer loyalty and increased spending. Research gives them hope.

(to be continued…or go to http://www.salon.com to read the rest)