By Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
Chicago Tribune.
CHICAGO
Between the bouncy music and stacks of colorful jeans, visitors to the Benetton on Michigan Avenue might catch a whiff of a blooming marketing trend.
Mounted high in the corner beside the store entrance, a scent diffuser, installed in November, spreads a bright spring fragrance modeled after Benetton’s Verde cologne.
“It finishes the emotion we are trying to create in the store,” said Robert Argueta, director of visual merchandising for the United Colors of Benetton, who is testing the scent in Benetton’s Chicago and New York flagships and has been so pleased with the feedback, and the inadvertent increase in cologne sales, that he plans to roll it out in more stores. “It’s the first and last impression a customer gets.”
Long the domain of casinos and hotels, scenting is increasingly catching on among retailers and in car showrooms, sports stadiums, airports, banks and apartment buildings that seek to distinguish themselves with customers via the deeply influential sense of smell.
“It’s a way to market above the clutter,” said Roel Ventura, a Seattle-based ambient designer with Ambius, which designs business environments. “We are bombarded with so many messages, so this creates an experience that will last longer than the music at the mall.”
The tactic also is gaining traction among businesses hoping to drum up sales thanks to research that has shown the right scent can open people’s wallets, project a sense of comfort and home (think hotels), shorten the time you believe you’re waiting (think banking), or even improve your sense of performance (think gym).
While smells can be a turnoff or cause health problems for some people, the global scent-marketing industry is on the rise, grossing an estimated $200 million in revenue last year and growing around 10 percent annually, said Jennifer Dublino, vice president of development at ScentWorld Events, the industry’s trade group in Scarsdale, N.Y.
Scent marketing is divided into two main categories: ambient scenting, which fills a space with a pleasant smell, and scent branding, which develops a signature scent specific to a brand, like an olfactory logo.
The former can cost $100 to $1,000 a month, depending on the size of the space. The latter can run anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000, plus a monthly maintenance fee.
If the aim is to improve consistency or create or maintain an iconic brand, a signature scent may be best, said Ed Burke, director of marketing and communications at ScentAir, a leading scent-marketing company based in Charlotte, N.C., that says it scents 70,000 locations, including Benetton.
Less than 10 percent of the company’s clients go that route, he said.
“Hugo Boss is a great example of a signature scent,” said Burke, whose company created the rich tamboti wood scent that Hugo Boss pumps through its stores’ heating and air conditioning systems, the preferred delivery method for large spaces. The high-end brand, an early retail adopter of scenting in 2011, at the time sold its apparel mostly in other stores like Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, so scenting was a way to tell a consistent brand story, Burke said.
If the business is just looking for a smell to give an olfactory oomph to the customer experience, they usually can find something that works among the 3,000 scents in ScentAir’s catalog, Burke said.
Some venues use multiple scents. The scent program launched last month at Marlins Park baseball stadium in Miami includes the smell of caramel popcorn in the general concourse areas for a “whimsical, family atmosphere”; a more sophisticated black orchid aroma in the stadium’s luxury Diamond Club; and a muted orange scent in the team store to reflect the stadium’s history of hosting the Orange Bowl, Burke said.
Businesses you wouldn’t normally think would scent are jumping on the bandwagon. Among ScentAir’s newer clients are rent-to-own retailers like Aaron’s, which use scents like “clean cotton” and “golden bamboo” to “project a sense of home and comfort,” Burke said.
Some banks have signed on, with research suggesting scent can shorten the time you feel you’re standing in line, said Roger
Bensinger, executive vice president for AirQ, a division of Milwaukee-based Prolitech.
At Belgium’s Brussels Airport, a scent called “fresh clean,” which is “almost like being outdoors after a spring rain,” greets visitors as they clear customs and in the parking lot, Bensinger said.
At Heathrow Airport in London, a customized scent called “powder room,” originally created to welcome travelers during the 2012 Olympics, has become permanent, filling the terminals with “a warm, youthful smell, like walking into an upscale changing room,” Bensinger said.
AirQ, whose range of retail clients includes Abercrombie and Fitch, luxury designer Pierre Cardin, Lenscrafters and Goodwill stores, also has several large gym chains in test mode, a promising opportunity because certain scents, such as peppermint and lemon, can improve perception of performance, Bensinger said.
Scenting is partly an art of subliminal messaging.
“It’s almost like background music, a canvas against which all else plays,” said Caroline Fabrigas, CEO of ScentWorld, which was founded by her late husband, Harald Vogt, a former advertising executive. “You shouldn’t really notice it. It’s just a feeling you have in that space.”
It also is a science.
Humans process smell without labels or conscious awareness, sending the information directly from the olfactory bulbs at the back of the nose to the primitive brain centers of emotion and memory, said Pamela Dalton, an olfactory scientist and member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
Smell, our oldest sense, is not necessarily better at reviving memories, but it brings memories back with a stronger emotional resonance, she said.
“We tend to associate smells with where we smelled them or who we were with when we smelled them,” Dalton said. “That crude way leaves us very open to having this emotional reaction.”
With their sense of smell fully developed before birth, babies have been found to prefer fragrances women wore in their last trimester of pregnancy, Dalton said.
Businesses that expose pregnant women to their signature scent “are already grooming their customers before they are born,” she said.
But the power of smell can backfire. A bad scent will leave an impression faster than a good one, Dalton said. Because scent is subjective, companies tend to tack to the middle of the road so as not to alienate customers.
Even then, a pleasant smell is not necessarily an effective smell if the goal is to drive business.
A handful of studies in the past few decades has found that shoppers tend to linger longer, spend more and report a better experience if they are shopping in a scented space rather than a fragrance-free space. But the scent must be congruent with the rest of the atmosphere.
A Christmas scent won’t help customer perceptions around the holidays unless there is also Christmas music, one lab experiment found.
In another study, researchers found that shoppers at a home decorations store in Switzerland spent 20 percent more money in a space scented with a simple orange scent versus no scent or a more complicated orange-basil-green tea scent, suggesting a simpler scent is more easily processed so minds were free to focus on shopping.
Washington State University College of Business Dean Eric Spangenberg, co-author of both studies, said research hasn’t yet explored whether branded scents perform any better. “The science has not caught up with the practice,” he said.
Still, some businesses think it’s worth ponying up for what perfumer Sue Phillips, founder of Scenterprises in New York, likes to call “the last branding frontier.”
“Companies that spend millions of dollars on their logo aren’t going to want a fragrance that anyone else has,” said Phillips, who has created signature scents for everything from a New York art gallery to a Lexus showroom.
Phillips, a veteran of the fragrance industry who has worked with Lancome, Tiffany and Burberry, said scenting spaces started in casinos 25 years ago to mask smoke odors. It has become far more sophisticated since.
Dawn and Samantha Goldworm, the twins behind olfactive branding firm 12.29, named after their birthday, took six months to develop a signature scent for Thompson Hotels, which “wanted to convey you sinking into a worn-in leather couch with a scotch,” said Dawn Goldworm, who is the fragrance expert while her sister handles the marketing.
The Goldworms asked Thompson executives to describe the colors and textures that represent the brand, aubergine, black, plush velvet, worn-in leather, mirrored surfaces, and set about capturing what those smell like.
As it turns out, velvet smells of balsam and humid earth; mirrored surfaces like wet cucumber and geranium; and leather, mercifully, like leather.
“Do you smell aubergine?” Dawn Goldworm asked during the scent’s launch event at the Thompson Chicago last month, after dipping a testing strip into a bottle labeled “ambre,” French for amber. “I automatically smell the color.”
Developing the right scent for a brand is a delicate and culturally specific endeavor. What works in Miami might not work in Chicago. A Brazilian who requests a “bright” fragrance might mean something very different from a German who requests the same.
The feelings hotels and retailers wish to elicit through scent also are distinct.
“Most hotels want people to feel comfortable, like they’re coming home,” said Dawn Goldworm, who also has scented runway shows for designers from Rodarte to Zac Posen. “For retailers it is different. You want them stimulated, energized, excited.”
Jorge Trevino, executive vice president for brand operations at Thompson Hotels, said the significant expense of developing and maintaining the scent in lobbies and corridors (the rooms are unscented) is worthwhile to tie the brand together and give guests another way to remember their stay.
There have been a few guests who have been so put off by the scent that they have threatened not to return, Trevino said. But the positive comments are “exponentially higher” than the negative, he said, and he credits the scent for driving repeat guests.
The six-hotel chain is in the process of creating candles with its signature scent, called “velvet,” which it will sell for $30 to $90, Trevino said. It also plans to work with 12.29 to create a signature scent for its other boutique hospitality brand, Joie de Vivre.
“I imagine sand and beach and lavenders, very light,” Trevino said of the airy brand. “The color would be light blue and yellow instead of black and aubergine.”
Scenting isn’t always an easy sell.
“People are skeptical. They worry we’re going to make them like Abercrombie,” Samantha Goldworm said. Abercrombie and Fitch is perhaps the best-known scented retailer, with its signature Fierce fragrance diffused so fiercely in its stores that a group of students called Teens Turning Green protested the practice a few years ago, claiming a potential health hazard.
Fragrance in general has borne a stigma in the U.S. since the ’90s, Goldworm said, perhaps as a reaction to the opulent ’80s. But she thinks scent has been making a comeback since the financial crisis as people gravitate toward all things comforting.
Some environmental health scientists are concerned that scent marketing is involuntarily and unnecessarily exposing people to ever more chemicals that aren’t fully understood.
Fragrance gets criticism because the formulas aren’t required to be disclosed, so people don’t always know what chemicals are in them.
“With this particular trend, lack of disclosure and increased exposure to unnecessary chemicals are both at issue,” said Nneka Leiba, deputy director of research at the Environmental Working Group. Some synthetic musks, a common ingredient in fragrance, have been flagged as potential hormone disrupters, she said.
Among asthmatics, who represent about 10 percent of the adult population, or allergy sufferers, who represent 30 to 35 percent, fragrance could trigger protective throat closure, burning eyes and nose, or headaches, said Dr. Karin Pacheco, associate professor of occupational and environmental medicine at National Jewish Health in Denver and chair of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology’s Environmental and Occupational Respiratory Diseases interest section.
Scent marketers say they abide by Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards and that the chemicals are in such low doses that they are far below any potentially harmful threshold. Complaints, they add, are very few.
But Pacheco said the response to scent chemicals is neurological, not inflammatory, and can be triggered at very low doses.
People have fought against fragrance exposure. In 2010, the city of Detroit changed its handbook to encourage employees to refrain from wearing perfumes and cologne as part of a settlement of a claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act brought by an employee with chemical sensitivity who got sick from sitting near a heavily perfumed colleague.
It isn’t clear how such a claim would shake out if an employee complained of the company’s intentional scenting of their workplace, as “an employer might make an argument that they have a reason for it and changing it would hurt sales,” said Linda Batiste, principal consultant with the Job Accommodation Network, a consulting service funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy.
Regardless, some noses would prefer to be left alone.
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“Really, do we have to be branded everywhere?” Pacheco said. “Don’t we have any place in the world where we can go where not everyone is trying to advertise something?”
