While we were hunting through the boxes for the last Asian Print Awards competition, one entry smelt. I started asking, "Why do I smell fish?" My colleague said, "Nobody brought fish here." Christel Lee from Print World Asia reports.
It turns out the entry was from a digital printer – after a smelling hunt. The entry was a glossy seafood restaurant menu and the page where it showed the type of fish they serve had a pong that shot through our noses. That menu won in Category 15 for Catalogues, Booklets and Brochures.
Sensory branding
Although we were unable to identify if this feature snagged the entrant its medal, the fact that it won speaks a lot about what one can do to appeal to the customer. It is said the human nose can individualise over 10,000 different odours and has a strong evocative power of memories and experience over the years, allowing us to differentiate brands.
Neuromarketing studies revealed smell triggers 75% of emotions, and is linked to pleasure, wellbeing, emotion and memory. This olfactory sensation can hence influence customers' emotional state and mood to make them more susceptible to products that impact their behaviour.
In the United States, a study performed by the Sense of Smell Institute revealed while people's visual recall of images sinks to approximately 50% after only three months, they recall smells with 65% accuracy after an entire year. Similarly, a study carried out at the Rockefeller University shows that in the short term we remember just 1% of what we touch, 2% of what we hear, 5% of what we see, 15% of what we taste and 35% of what we smell.
Research has also highlighted the influence of touch on consumer purchasing decisions – one study found that customers who pick up a product are almost twice as likely to purchase it.
The same study found that customers who focus on a product for more than three seconds are 63% more likely to buy it – highlighting the benefits to manufacturers of adding additional attention-grabbing features to products or packaging to ensure that they capture the imagination of consumers.
There will be certainly two sides of this debate – either the smell appeals to you or it doesn't. The latter breaks the deal. The usual three to six seconds of marketing is no longer the pivotal point between you (marketer/brand) and customers.
How to make it work
Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist and research consultant, wrote a book entitled 'Brain Rules'. He documented examples of effectiveness of smell boosting sales. One of them was a vending machine which emitted the aroma of chocolate. The company enjoyed 60% increase in sales. Another was an 'Aroma Billboard' which emitted a waffle cone smell. That boosted ice-cream sales by 50%.
Dr. John Medina is an affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University.
Simon Faure-Field from Equal Strategy, a customer experience consultancy firm, wrote in his article 'This is what sensory branding can do for your business',: "You choose the right kind of ambience for the particular kind of customer and the type of products or services you are offering. And getting the balance right is not only an art form, it's also a real science."
In the end, I asked my colleague, "Isn't fresh
