enRoute


	ENROUTE TV ENROUTE FM MEDIA KIT AIR CANADA LINKS WRITERS' GUIDELINES

THE NOSE KNOWS
Metaphorically speaking, a marketer’s job description is to dangle something in front of your nose. But increasingly, that description is becoming literal as retailers and advertisers bank on a new wave of synthetic scents to rack up sales.

Text: FABIEN DEGLISE

It’s a typical winter Saturday at the mall. Errand list in hand, you jockey for position among the SUV-size baby carriages, gangs of teenage mall rats and shuffling seniors. This tide of humanity releases a wave of heat and scent that comes only from crowded, public places full of overdressed people: Call it Armpit No. 5. Between nauseating whiffs, your poor nose catches an almost imperceptible draft of something pleasant… lavender, perhaps? Subtly, subliminally, you change course and suddenly find yourself on the threshold of a lingerie boutique you hadn’t even intended to enter.

Ah, the sweet smell of success in the retail world. It’s a scent – lavender, lemon, freshly cut grass or even moist earth – that you might not consciously recognize, but it affects your shopping habits more than you know. Welcome to the brave new world of olfactory marketing, where stealthy scents are the new weapon of choice for surreptitiously seducing consumers. The strategy has been right under our noses all along.

For proof, just sniff a little deeper into the cutting-edge scent research and technology being perfected by the persuaders who influence our buying habits. The synthetic-fragrance invasion has already begun on a surprising array of merchandising fronts: clothing and shoes, kitchenware, jewelry, sports cars and, of course, prepared foods. The more subtle these scenting strategies are, the more successful they seem to be. (Just think of the backlash against aggressive perfume scent strips in magazines.) And given their success, they’re probably here to stay.

Since advertising and marketing already assault nearly all our senses, advancing on the frontier of scent seems perfectly natural. As one of the main triggers for sexual response – smell is such a powerful stimulus for sparking consumer fantasies – it’s surprising that advertisers have neglected the "smell sell" for so long. Today, in the never-ending quest to find new ways of enticing consumers to reach for their wallets, they’re increasingly encouraging us to taste – and sniff – forbidden fruit.

Companies like France’s Parfum Indigo are among the innovators specializing in creating retail "smell environments." According to president Pascal Charlier, "Consumer behaviour has evolved a great deal in recent years. The name of the game is no longer to get consumers to spend everything at once but rather to build up a relationship of trust through a comfortable shopping environment that encourages repeat visits. People won’t come back to a place they don’t like." (More to the point, they won’t buy anything there.)

Anyone who has done time in a shopping mall no doubt yearns for a more pleasant shopping environment. After skylights, soft music and comfortable seating, the natural progression is to introduce various tempting smells to evoke adventure, relaxation or even the allure of a beautiful woman. It’s all in the nose of the beholder.

One olfactory marketing specialist proved the commercial value of smell with a recent experiment in a Montreal-area shopping centre. Jean-Charles Chebat, from the University of Montreal’s HEC management school, pumped discreet traces of a sweet citrus fragrance (a combination of lemon, orange, grapefruit and tangerine) into the mall’s air for a week. "The shoppers didn’t even know the scent was there because the airborne dose was so tiny," Chebat explains. Merchants, however, certainly smelled a difference: Purchases that week were up by $55 to $90 per customer, even though the experiment was conducted during a traditionally slow business period and the stores had been instructed to offer no special sales or promotions.

Chebat speculates that the fruity fragrance changed the entire feel of the shopping centre despite the fact that the decor had remained untouched. The scent worked like magic. "With the citrus aroma, customers felt that the space was more comfortable, happier, more stimulating," says Chebat. "They seemed to think the products and services were better of quality, even though they were the same as the week before."

You chance upon a bathing suit shop and feel a yearning as you glance at the store window. The beach, the ocean, fun in the sun... You can almost smell the cocoa buttery suntan lotion. Faster than you can say bikini, you find yourself leaving the changing room clutching a racy little red one-piece number. What happened to the winter boots you were shopping for?

The influence of odours on perception is clearly no longer limited to the experimental domain. "Many shopping centres and retailers already use olfactory marketing – without telling customers, of course," says Chebat. "More and more are going to adopt it since the results of field research over the past 10 years are so convincing." In the last decade, the technology that serves olfactory marketing has advanced dramatically. Using such techniques as mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, researchers can detect infinitesimal quantities of airborne particles in the laboratory, meaning that any aroma – no matter how complex – can now be reproduced synthetically.

In the United States and several European countries, clothiers, shoe stores, hotels and even museums are already installing scent-generating devices to "re-immerse products in their natural elements and make them more attractive to visitors," as Indigo’s Charlier describes the practice. These natural matchups include introducing the aroma of freshly cut grass into the golf section of a sporting goods store, the smell of sun-baked mud at an SUV dealership, the bouquet of ripe melon in the fruit and vegetable aisles, a whiff of suntan lotion in the swimsuit section of a department store and luxurious woody notes in a plush hotel lobby. And that list is far from exhaustive.

The technique can be pushed even beyond natural associations with smell, according to a recent study conducted in a Las Vegas casino. Dr. Alan Hirsch, of the Chicago-based Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation, says that by scenting the area around slot machines with a custom aroma, he generated a 45-percent increase in the number of coins fed into the affected one-armed bandits. And just what was this mystery scent? That’s the million-dollar-question, and Hirsch isn’t talking.

Pacing the aisles of your local supermarket, you’re on the hunt for something quick and easy for dinner. A glance at your watch tells you there’s not much time before yoga class. Then you smell it – the aroma of shepherd’s pie and freshly baked bread that takes you right back to your childhood. Won over, you drop a heat-and-serve entree and a fresh baguette into your cart and head for the express checkout.

In the world of food, our perception of a product "is largely dependent on what we smell the moment the package is opened," says Raphaël Badoud, an aroma specialist at the Nestlé Research Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland. The agri-food sector makes abundant use of artificial aromas of various kinds to refine the image of the processed foods we buy. "Genuine aromas," the latest trend in TV-dinner marketing, can turn the lowliest frozen beef stew into true comfort food with the long-simmered smell that used to waft out from grandma’s kitchen. Now it only takes three minutes in the microwave.

All this is just the beginning. The future of the olfactory marketing industry is extremely… fragrant. Two U.S. firms, DigiScents and AromaJet, are leading the way in developing synthetic scents. Digital scent generators will one day enhance the Internet and television, enabling the homo consumus of tomorrow to surf in true Odorama. Imagine a coffee ad complete with the smell of freshly ground beans or Formula 1 coverage that brings the stench of gasoline and burning rubber into your living room. Fans of beauty pageants will not only be able to watch their favourite contestant but will also smell the Tahitian monoï oil that gives her skin its luminous glow. What more could you ask for?

Nothing, you’d think. But the olfactory marketing gurus won’t stop there. Their dream is to fill every corner of our shopping universe with odoriferous enticements designed to get customers to follow their noses to various departments. It’s the latest development in niche marketing. Over here, a tangy candy smell will focus kids’ attention on the latest computer game; over there, a hint of ylang-ylang will seduce women into purchasing evening gowns. Each market segment and each product would have its own distinct but imperceptible odour, complemented by billboards on nearby street corners emitting scents associated with their products or services. While customers’ nasal passages are being filled with persuasive aromas, merchants will be filling their pockets with cold, hard cash.