Scent marketing is one of the most powerful ways to market your brand and products, and connect with your customers on a deeper and emotional level. Why? Because the sense of smell is considered to be the most closely related to emotional reactions.
The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the limbic system in the brain, which is the system related to immediate emotion in humans (Wilkie, 1995) and 75% of our emotions are generated by smell. That’s why scents can trigger an emotional response, desire or memory which can create brand recognition, influence consumers’ decisions and create lasting memories.
75% of our emotions are generated by smell. That’s why scents can trigger an emotional response, desire or memory which can create brand recognition, influence consumers’ decisions and create lasting memories.
According to the Sense of Smell Institute, the average human is able to recognize approximately 10,000 different odors. Smell is also the strongest sense in relation to memory that we are 100 times more likely to remember something that we smell than something we see, hear and touch. On average, each person breathes 20,000 times a day and with each breath comes a chance to pitch a product because the sense of smell cannot be turned off (Stevens, 2006).
Further research in marketing contexts and congruity finds that ambient scents present during brand evaluations lead to greater participant attention to the brand stimuli, greater brand recall, and brand recognition accuracy (Morrin and Ratneshwar, 2003).
