Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior by Aradhna Krishna

Author:Aradhna Krishna [Krishna, Aradhna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-04-08T14:00:00+00:00

SCENT MARKETING

Have you ever been in a new car and noticed the distinctive smell? Often known as “new car smell,” this scent has become inextricably associated with new cars. If that scent is absent, people perceive the car to be of inferior quality and may even go so far as to buy chemicals to replicate the smell of the volatile organic compounds that usually produce this smell. In China, the smell is shunned, with people regularly attempting to eradicate the smell by drying tea leaves in their cars. In the United States, though, the smell is usually considered pleasant and desirable (but there is an element of personal preference to this as well).

The question is what to do with this knowledge in terms of marketing. Some steps are obvious: try to mask the smell in new cars sold in China and try to enhance that smell in cars sold in the United States. Indeed, the new car smell can be diffused in a dealership or a promotional booth to evoke the positive emotions associated with a new car before people even set foot into a vehicle. That scent can also be distributed directly through advertising. All of these efforts to bring the scent closer to the consumer take advantage of the connections between a scent and the emotions we expect consumers to associate with it.

Some clever ways to deliver scents to consumers are just now being pioneered. While there is not yet a way to convey scents over the Internet or television, there are scent strips that can be printed onto pieces of paper. Perfume makers have used these scent strips for years, but now marketers for products such as TV shows and politicians are adding scent marketing to their mix. The television show Weeds used such strips, namely, strips scented with marijuana, as part of magazine advertisements they ran. Their hope was that upon smelling the aroma of marijuana readers of the magazines would automatically connect the program to worry-free feelings of enjoyment and relaxation. A New York politician tried to use scent strips in a different manner by attaching them to mailings. When the mailings were delivered to houses and the scent strips were activated, they began to smell of garbage. One of the most universally disliked odors, the scent of garbage was supposed to invoke negative connotations that the recipient would then associate with the negative comments about the candidate’s rival that were printed on the mailing. These types of advertising campaigns highlight the use of scent-based cues in evoking a particular emotion and linking that emotion to a product, person, or cause.

A different use of scent is in the form of ambient scents, which are present in the background of a setting without actively contributing to the main activities of the setting. Comparable to product scent, these types of scents are usually fainter and spread across an area rather than being associated with one specific product. Such scents, when perceived as pleasant, have been shown to increase spending when there was no music playing.

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