Olfactory Techniques Used for Businesses

by Tyler Lacoma

Olfactory techniques refer to the body of business practices that use scent and the human ability to smell when creating branding and marketing strategies. The science of neuromarketing has pinpointed several areas of brand awareness that traditional businesses left alone, including scent marketing and branding. All five sense are in an active role when it comes to marketing, and businesses are exploring ways to leverage scent in order to attract more customers.

Scent Marketing

Scent marketing uses the idea that smells can be linked to business products and produce a favorable impression in customers. Coffee shops, for example, can use scent marketing to draw customers by encourage the smells of the produced coffee to linger in the storefront. Fabric softeners and soaps can use particular scents to encourage customers to think of them as clean. Some scents identify healthy, growing substances just as other scents identify cars and leather.

Scent Studies

The use of scent in businesses has been instinctive, relying on clear correlations between smells and what customers wanted. However, as studies became more advanced, brain mapping became possible and other technological developments were made, scent studies became a common technique for businesses that relied heavily on scent, such as perfume and coffee industries. Marketing studies could freely experiment with new scents and find out whether some smells had any surprisingly positive or negative effects on focus groups.

Scent Management in Storefronts

Scent management is also a facet of wider brand management, especially when it comes to managing storefronts. Customers, even if subconsciously, expect certain stores to smell certain ways. These smells, such as leather in some clothing stores or baking bread in a bakery, serve to mark the store and ensure customers that it has what they want. This links smells to an entire store rather to to individual products.

Linking Visual Images and Scent

Some businesses attempt to go even further and link scents with visual images, usually through scientific means. At the simplest level, the open-and-smell perfume advertisements can help this process. At the most complex end, businesses are working to imbue visual advertisements such as fliers with smells.

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