Businesses and brands are increasingly harnessing the magic of scent as a marketing tool. This is now regarded as an essential part of the immersive customer experience, as our sense of smell is incredibly powerful. In fact, a fragrance has an amazing ability to embed itself in our emotional memories in a way that other sensual experiences cannot quite equal.
Finding the right fragrance is therefore absolutely key to using scent as a successful part of your business marketing strategy. A unique and pleasing aroma that the customer associates with the brand will help to build strong emotional connections and encourage loyalty and trust. Here’s a guide to choosing a signature scent for your brand.
Analyze your brand identity
Your signature scent will trigger instant recollections of your entire brand as soon as your customers step through the door. Therefore it needs to be strongly aligned with your brand identity and its purpose and goals. This may be straightforward for a bakery, where enticing aromas of freshly baked bread or cinnamon buns will press all the right buttons.
Researchers at University College Dublin (UCD) found that 89% of people reported that the smell of fresh bread made them feel happy, while 63% said it evoked happy memories. This may be because baking smells remind us of home and the comfort of being with our families during childhood, which our brains have stored deep in the emotional memory.
Dr. Amalia Scannell at the UCD Institute of Food and Health explained: “Incoming smells are first processed by the olfactory bulb which starts inside the nose and runs along the bottom of the brain. The olfactory bulb has direct connections to the two brain areas that are strongly implicated in emotion and memory.”
The smell of freshly ground coffee is shown to have a similar positive effect, so for a coffee shop or cafe this would be a natural choice to prompt customers to step inside and make a purchase. For other businesses, there may not be such an obvious choice of fragrance.
In this case, think about the brand’s image: is it fresh and youthful, mature and sophisticated, high-end or mass market? Do you want to evoke a sense of tradition and calm reassurance, or create a sense of cleanliness and order? Maybe you want a scent that is energizing and peppy to reflect a young forward-thinking image.
Woody and oriental scents are considered to be sophisticated and luxurious, while floral and citrusy scents are uplifting and motivating. The most pleasing fragrances tend to be composed of a range of harmonious scents rather than just one.
These sophisticated fragrances will emit a top note that our nose will pick up first, then a more subtle heart note, followed by a lingering base note.
Therefore, you can commission a custom fragrance from a provider using your selected blends. These can be combined with a commercial scent diffuser to supply a unique scent for shops, nursing homes, hospitals, hotels, or any other public space.
