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Around about the time I read Roger Dooleys blog post on scent increasing product recall, I was on my way to a course at the MRS which turned into an olfactory walk down memory lane.  The smells I encountered whilst walking down Clerkenwell Road took me back to a childhood holiday in Majorca, ballet slippers from dance classes and the delicious waft you get walking past Lush.  The memories came flooding back with each inhalation I made – it just proves the point that our sense of smell is one powerful force, and it’s one that directly influences our emotions and recall.  And then, walking back after the course, the idea of scratch n’ sniff questionnaires popped into my head.   I used to work on a massive postal survey, and I got the image in my head of people peeling back panels and sniffing and then writing in their scores of how much they liked the fragrance sent to them on the questionnaire (I know, I really should get out more…).  But following a bit of background research, it turns out that proper fragrance research is a really complex field – some of the analytical outputs I looked at were more like some of the complex brand analytics we produce than the simple ‘like the smell/don’t like the smell’ outputs I had envisaged!

I also came across a great little paper by Stephen Bell of Coley Porter Bell, called Future Sense – defining brands through scent’ – a really interesting 5 minute read which gives examples of how scent is currently used by brands.  This paper ends with the sentence ‘with so far only 35% of leading companies predicted to be taking [sensory branding] on board in the next two years, there is still plenty of air space available for smelling’.  So, this paper was written in 2007 and now we are in the back end of 2010 – but I don’t see the world being a more pleasant smelling place.  Why don’t the mailers I get for new cars, smell of the inside of new cars?  Why don’t my Tesco clubcard statements smell of the bakery smell they usually pump round their stores? And why don’t my Wyevale gardening club mailers smell of flowers? And what about the place where you spend most of your day – your office.  Coley Porter Bell developed their own scent called ‘See’ to encapsulate their brand, brilliant!  Hmmm, brain off again, Eau de Northstar, now I wonder what that would smell like!

Reference:

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/scent-increases-product-recall.htm?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=neuromarketin