October 24 2006
Just as I was opening a DSW Shoes mailer addressed to my wife, I was hit unobtrusively with a vaguely tropical, slightly oriental, and clean scent wafting from the envelope that contained a $10 off coupon. Oddly, that same day I read an article in Forbes magazine that highlighted the newest trend in brand marketing: the signature scent.
Understand, DSW wasn’t the department store circular smacking you with a cologne sample, this was a signature scent intended to be pleasing and intended to be smelled after opening the envelope.
This sort of marketing seems to be happening with retail applications with greater regularity. A Google search for scent marketing turned up the Scent Marketing Institute and about 2M hits for related sites.
Wow.
Just as a brand has a visual, a verbal and a tone/manner vocabulary, so to it should have a scent cue--a whiff that evokes the brand.
If you think about it, this is all around us, we just don’t always overtly clue into it. A Hershey’s bar is its own scent, immediately recognizable, and there are a million other things that immediately evoke a memory. Old spice smells like my Grandpa and English Leather smells like my Dad, Maxwell House coffee smells like a loooooong drive to Florida fromIndiana with the offending scent occurring early in the morning as the hot, brown stuff was poured from a thermos in the car. Victoria Secret’s Pear Glaće smells like a every single woman in their twenties in the late 90’s.
The leading company in the space, ScentAir Technologies, has 1480 such fragrances. These are mostly airborne applications—like the time when I’ve stayed at Doubletree hotels, walking in at 10:30 pm after a long day of travel and I’m immediately hit by the warm, homey scent of chocolate chip cookies. Oh, the scent may actually come from the warm cookies they give at check-in, but it’s also likely enhanced by the scent being puffed in.
Interesting, huh?
This excerpt from Forbes sums it up:
“Smell has a greater impact on purchasing than everything else combined,” says Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment & Research Foundation in Chicago. "If something smells good, they product is perceived as good."
While ScentAir seems to be dominating the scented air niche, there are numerous other providers that do scratch and sniff varieties of scents.
And here’s where I think the wine industry can do something really cool: if 98% of wine is purchased at point of purchase and if a wines’ taste is predominantly dominated by its bouquet, why the heck doesn’t somebody do tasteful, clean, elegant scratch and sniff applications on a shelf-talker, a hang tag, or the bottle and have it include blueberries, blackberries, lychee’s, leather, earth, or whatever else make up the flavor components of the wine?
It would take a winery that is pretty progressive—maybe the guys at Twisted Oak or Josh at Pinot Blogger (though I’m not sure either have much in the plans for traditional retail), but as an Alpha Consumer I think this would be a killer application to differentiate in a sea of labels.
Check out these links for a couple of interesting articles.
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