What if there were one thing your company could do to create an instant emotional connection with your customers? Would you do it? If so, you might want to consider the next frontier in branding: scent science.
Hi everyone and welcome back to Plain English. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and this is episode 173 of Plain English.
Coming up on today’s episode: Scent science, how hotels, shops, and other brands are using fragrances to create connections with their customers.
Have you tried reading an e-book on the Kindle app? Maybe you’ve heard of e-books before, but never tried them. It’s really easy—you download the Amazon Kindle app onto your phone, and you’re ready to go. The good part about it is that you can load a dictionary from English to your language right inside the app. You can use Google translate and Wikipedia, all without having to leave the app. It’s a powerful tool for anyone reading books in a new language. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can download the app by visiting PlainEnglish.com/read.
Scent science: the next frontier in branding
Studies have shown that scents in the workplace can reduce type-os by office workers. In a shop, they can improve consumers’ perception of product quality, get them to spend more time in a store, even pay more for goods on the shelf. But that’s nothing in comparison to the real benefit of so-called scent branding, and that is creating a true emotional connection with consumers.
There’s something about scent, isn’t there, that triggers emotions. Of all your five senses, smell is the only one that is fully developed at birth. It’s connected directly to the parts of your brain that process emotion and memory.
This is really true, and I can tell you there are a couple of scents in this world that will just take me back somewhere. This is a funny example, but when I was about 12 years old, I went on a school trip to Italy. About ten of us went and we stayed with host families in Genoa. And the house I stayed in had a very particular smell. It was just very unique: it’s not bad; it’s not good; and I couldn’t even describe it. It might have been from a perfume the mother was wearing or cleaning supplies they used—I have no idea. But once every—I don’t know—five years, I’ll be somewhere and I’ll smell that exact scent. And I’ll stop what I’m doing, and I’ll think of my time in Genoa.
Even everyday scents can trigger powerful emotions. Freshly-cut grass, for example, makes me think of the baseball fields I used to play on as a kid. Every time I smell a wet dog, it reminds me of the golden retrievers we had in our family growing up. Now I love looking at dog pictures as much as anyone, but looking at a picture doesn’t bring me back the way smelling a wet dog does. New car smell is something famous, right? Everyone loves the scent of a new car. As one article said, “the nose is the fastest way to the heart.”
Now businesses, such as hotels and shops, are latching onto that connection. Call it the next frontier in branding. Those businesses know that recognizing a scent can bring us back to a time or a place and create strong associations in our mind. So they’re developing their own scents in the hopes that you’ll always associate a given fragrance with their brand and with the good experiences you have there.
This is a popular strategy among luxury hotels, such as the Mandarin Oriental and the Viceroy. But it’s also popular among more mainstream hotels too. Hyatt is an international hotel chain and they use a scent called “Seamless” in their mid-tier Hyatt Place branded hotels. They’ve been using it since 2007, and it’s now required in all Hyatt Place hotels. Some hotels are even selling candles with their branded scents in them—in an ingenious way to get their branding right into your home.
You probably don’t see employees discreetly spraying perfume in hotel lobbies and retail shops. That’s because of recent innovations in electronic scent diffusers that can make sure just the right level of a given scent is in the air at any one time.
How are the scents developed? A company brings in—of course—a team of experts. They can be interior designers, marketing experts, psychologists, and perfume experts, to craft exactly the right formula that captures a brand’s identity.
Brands have to be careful not to overdo it, especially in hotels. Restaurant guests typically don’t want to smell fragrances, so you need to keep the fragrance mild if you’re going to use it near a restaurant. And you don’t want anything too strong, since some people are sensitive. The sweet spot is to have a fragrance that people recognize subliminally. Just enough to trigger the emotion, not so much to overpower your senses. Done right, scent can pull together the experience and create memories that literally last for a lifetime, whether you know it or not.
What other industries are using scent in their branding? Retailers, fitness chains, airlines, doctors’ offices, even fertilizer companies. That’s right, the landscaper that comes to your house might be using fertilizer that’s scented to induce brand loyalty.
I was just thinking about other scents that really take me back to a time or a place. The Courtyard Marriott Gurgaon, in India, has a very unique scent. I’ve stayed there each time I was in India and I will never forget that scent. To me, that fragrance means “home” in India. There isn’t another hotel in the world that I think I’d recognize the scent, but I’d recognize that scent for the rest of my life.
My grandmother’s house. She used to put these cedar chips or cedar blocks in the drawers to keep clothes fresh. That’s another scent that takes me back.
Couple hello’s today. Marcos, a software developer from Minas Gerais, Brazil, uses English at work and listens to Plain English during his commute. He and I were both waging separate battles against WordPress when we corresponded the other day. And Nim from Israel is taking the plunge—he’s moving with his family to New York City, so he was entertained by my stories of apartment-hunting in New York from a few episodes ago. Good luck, Nim—you’ll like being in the Big Apple, even if you have to make a few sacrifices on the home front.
I mentioned before about reading on your Kindle app. When I first started reading books in Spanish, I got some books for kids or teenagers, hard copies of these books. And it was so frustrating because every time I saw a word I didn’t know, I’d have to stop, pull out my phone or computer, look up the word, and then go back to where I was. It totally killed the momentum, and I never finished even a single paper-copy book in Spanish reading that way. Not even one. But then I noticed inside my Kindle app on my iPad that you can highlight a word and it will look that word up in the dictionary automatically. And I could load a Spanish-English dictionary right onto my iPad, and voila, I had a Spanish-English dictionary right inside my reading app. Now looking up unfamiliar words took just a single tap and I didn’t have to leave the app, didn’t have to break my concentration. If you haven’t tried reading e-books on Kindle yet, try the app for iPhone, iPad, or Android. You can get it by going to PlainEnglish.com/read.
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