How to Use Scent Marketing For Your Business

Smell plays a major role in our emotions. Numerous studies show that indoor scents have a subtle influence on our mood, especially when combined with music.

They can rekindle both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, create a positive experience for consumers, or assist customers to relax in otherwise stressful environments, like a dental clinic.

Would you like to get on board with using the phenomenon of scent marketing to enhance your customer interactions? Here’s what you need to know about the best scents for your business.

What Is Scent Marketing?

It makes sense that clean-smelling shops attract more customers and create a positive image for your business. Yet some smells create better associations than others.

There’s no denying that hospitals smell spotlessly clean, but we usually associate this scent with trauma or sickness.

So, if you want your business to smell appealing to customers and even lure them in as they pass by, you’ve got to figure out the right scent for you.

Not only do fragrances create pleasant emotions, but they can also encourage your customers to spend more money after entering your store.

For instance, if you’re selling fresh, organic products, the smell of herbs, citrus, and clean linen help add appeal to your goods.

Do you want to create a comforting vibe for a shop selling hand-crafted goods? Leather, musk, and wood scents can help move your products off the shelves.

So, in its purest sense, scent marketing means finding a fragrance that works logically with your business and appeals to customers. It works best when customers begin to associate a particular scent with your brand above all others.

Scent Branding

Scent branding is a type of business marketing that creates an association between your business and a particularly effective scent. For instance, the Cinnabon franchise has a strong relation to the scent of baked goods as well as a particular type of cinnamon.

This stems naturally from their product, but they employ several tricks to enhance it. For instance, Cinnabon uses a rare type of cinnamon with a distinct smell in all their bakes.

They warm empty sheets sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar in their ovens and bake a new batch of buns every 30 minutes. As a final blow to the senses, they use oven hoods with the weakest legally allowed hoods to ensure the smell permeates their premises.

It’s a happy coincidence that cinnamon’s proven to boost mood, concentration, and energy levels, too. Thanks to maximizing scent in this way, Cinnabon manages to sell over 8,000 of their cinnamon buns and hour during the festive season.

Incorporating Scent Marketing in Your Business

From the above, it’s easy to see how it’s easy for a company like Cinnabon to use pleasant fragrances in their daily operations. Yet, any business can harness the power of scent, with a little research and planning.

There are plenty of scent marketing tips that apply to all businesses, once you’ve determined the best scent for you.

Scent Marketing Techniques

Once you’ve figured out the best scents for your business, you need to figure out the best way to deliver them to your customers. These are the best scent marketing tips to accomplish this:

Aroma Billboards

The tactics used by Cinnabon involve creating an aroma billboard that’s unmissable to anyone walking near their shops.

They saturate their surroundings with the scent of baking by strategically locating their stores in places that allow the fragrance to drift for long distances.

You can do this with any scent you choose for your business by keeping your doors open and pumping appealing fragrances into the air.

Thematic Scents

Thematic scents match the aura of your shop.

For instance, spas use candles to infuse the air with the smell of spices, to create an exotic, luxurious feel in their treatment rooms. The smell of fresh linen can promote feelings of cleanliness and comfort in retail stores.

You needn’t get a designer scent specially created for your store. Familiar scents work best to generate emotions and feelings of well-being among your customers.

So, simply pick a scent from one of the commercially available diffusers. Some of the most popular scents available include:

• Lemon
• Lavender
• Jasmine
• Peppermint
• Vanilla
• Patchouli
• Rose

You can infiltrate your store with thematic scents via products with HVAC/AC Connect features that keep a steady stream of fragrance flowing throughout your building.

Ambient Scents

Ambient scents enhance the customer experience. You can also use ambient scents to hide unpleasant smells or fill a void.

For instance, if you’re selling different scented candles, the combined smell of these could have a jarring effect on the senses. So it’s best to use these items to create different scents in various areas of your shop or section them off from the rest of the store.

In cases where your products have a distinct aroma of their own, introducing another scent into the fray can create an unpleasant combination of smells.

For department stores, you can use diffusers that distribute scent over short distances to create a particular ambiance in each area of your shop.

Scent Marketing for Productivity

You can also use scent marketing to create a positive and productive atmosphere for your employees, especially in confined offices. A stale stuffy atmosphere creates feelings of lethargy associated with a lack of oxygen.

The smell of fresh outdoor air or sea breezes can energize and invigorate people and enhance their productivity.

All the Help You Can Get

Whether you own an office building or a retail store, the way customers and employees perceive and interact with your business can make or break your business.

It’s easy to experiment with different scents to gauge the results you get. Simply keep tabs on the sales figures that correspond with your scent marketing efforts.

Would you like some extra tips to boost your business from every angle? Browse our website for more interesting information about trending business practices.