Growing Sales Through the Scent of Your Brand?

Marketers have long since known that a brand isn’t just about the visual stuff. It’s not only the images and colours you see in a company’s logo, on their website or on product packaging. It’s also about every interaction you have with them – every written and spoken word, for example. But now it seems that another of our senses can be piqued to help grow your sales: your olfactory system or sense of smell.

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What Is Scent Marketing?

Simply put, it’s about adding scent to your marketing mix. According to recent research, adding a scent element to the normal visual brand prompts can greatly increase sales. It’s not about making all your products scented of course – rather the environment in which they’re purchased.

According to an article in the Independent, Nike found that using scents in their stores led to an increase in intent to purchase of 80 per cent.

But as with visual prompts, you have to get your scent right for it to work well. Too complicated a scent can confuse and distract the brain from focussing on the task of shopping, as can diffusing too many differing scents in a small space. The scent must also fit with not just the product but the environment for it to evoke the correct emotional connection with customers to prompt them to want to buy more.

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Shopping Is a State of Mind

Because your sense of smell is connected directly to the brain via the limbic system, it bypasses the intellectual and logical parts of your brain to create an emotional connection with the environment where you smell the scent. It’s believed this is how scent marketing is so successful at encouraging increased sales and also improved reactions to retail employees, for example.

If you’re considering adding scent into your marketing mix, then there are lots of companies that can help you get started, such as http://moodmedia.co.uk/scent-marketing-for-business/.

In today’s competitive and overcrowded market place, the addition of scent is one way to really stand out from the crowd. As with any marketing activity, if you get it right you can attract new customers and inspire brand loyalty and, of course, until such time as computers and smartphones are able to emit scent, it’s one way you can steal a march over online retailers.

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