As if we can stand any more stimuli in our day to day lives, the latest frontier in branding is gaining steam, sometimes, quite literally. Here’s an in-depth article on some of the major players and trends in scent marketing. Luckily for our noses, retailers and specialized olfactory marketers alike are realizing that less is more when it comes to tickling our noses. Long gone are the days of power blasting customer nostrils with muscular perfume from Ambercrombie or the Cinnabon smell of sin that permeates American malls in search of another diet to wreck. It’s not just clothing, cars, and food anymore. Airports and airlines, banks and hotels, even gyms have jumped on the opportunity to reach clients in their most emotionally sensitive sense to keep us coming back for more.
Tag Archives: scent marketing
the medium is the massage
Read a wonderful article on the brief history of olfactory stimulation in marketing. From Smell-o-Vision 
Photo by Santa Clara County Library
to smellizing to the latest scent-emitting ophone app,
Photo by Vapor Communications
it covers a few milestones in scent technology. Although this is in no way exhaustive of olfactive technology in the 20th and 21st century, if you’re curious about the next level of immersive sensory marketing and media, this is a must read.
marketing the drool factor
Olfactory imagination is a powerful tool for advertising flavor. A recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research on smellizing, a term for selling by stimulating smell imagination, has intriguing findings for the food and beverage industry. Professor Morrin and her team found that participants who looked at both images and descriptions of appealing food showed a significant increase in salivation. When the image or the description stood alone, their biological desire was not as strong. Experiments in artificial smell diffusion has been a part of marketing for a while, but the simple strategy of combing visual and verbal stimuli has been strangely underutilized, Morrin says.
Olfactive 