• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, May 1, 2009

Something in the Air

Fans attending games one and two of the 2008 World Series at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., might've noticed something a little different about the stadium experience, beyond the fact that the historically inept Rays were actually playing baseball before a full house - real live fans! rooting for the home team! - in October. They probably couldn't put their finger on it, but there was something distinctly ... well, citrusy ... about the park those two nights. Maybe they noticed the vague trace of odor and commented about it to their seatmates. More likely, they didn't.

Chalk it up to the trend of companies attempting to subtly influence their customers by appealing to their sense of smell - the sense, if you believe marketers masquerading as brain physiologists, that has the tightest bond with memory. If something or someone or someplace smells good, the thinking goes, we're likely to remember it better than something, someone or someplace that looks good or feels welcoming to the touch. Research from the Sense of Smell Institute bears this out: Individuals recall scents with 65 percent accuracy after a year. By comparison, visual recall slips to 50 percent after only three months.

"All marketers understand that the application of a scent will help an ad, or an in-store program, riseabove the clutter," says Bob Bernstein, president of Scentisphere. Adds Patrick Scullin, a partner and wordsmith at ad firm Ames Scullin O'Haire, "We are hard-wired for smells. A whiff of pipe tobacco takes me instantly back to my grandfather's house."

What the Tampa Bay Rays did during the World Series was unusual only in that few sports teams have tampered with the traditional smells of the stadium (think hot dogs and stale beer mingling with freshly cut grass). The team worked with multisensory branding consultancy dmx to devise a scent dubbed "citrus burst." The overall effect? The stadium rotunda smelled like an orange grove; it branded the experience more than, say, a big dude wandering around in an orange costume would have.

Not every "scentvertising" vendor worries about matching odor with environment. Scentisphere's flagship product, Rub'nSmell, has cut down the costs associated with running a sniffable sample at point-of-sale or in magazines (which "print" the scent just as they would a color). When Yankee Candle added scent to its catalog via Rub'nSmell, sales jumped around 20 percent, Bernstein says. "In many cases, consumers are motivated as much by scent as by utility [of a product]."

Researchers believe that while a generic "nice" smell (the oft-cited example of freshly baked cookies at an open house) will prompt consumers to reach for their wallets, it is more effective to tailor the particular scent to the environment. "A store that has a smell that's related to, or congruent with, the product category being sold is more likely to activate variety-seeking. Shoppers will be more open to trying new products," says Deborah Mitchell, a senior lecturer of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She cautions, however, that incongruent odors can turn consumers off: "If you're shopping for food and it smells like flowers or a bath scent, that might have a negative effect."

A second caveat about using smell to lure customers: You can't let them know they're being marketed to covertly, or they'll hold it against you. And, of course, scent-happy marketers must be mindful of allergies and other sensory pollutants. "There's a risk of doing more harm than good here if you don't think it through carefully," Mitchell adds.

Read about hearing