The Real Difference Between Air Freshening and Scent Branding

What does your business smell like? Did anything come to mind? Maybe you’re not sure what your business smells like and think it doesn’t really matter. Think again! The smells customers associate with your business can have a more significant impact than you might suspect.

More and more, companies at the top of their game are discovering the benefits associated with their OWN signature scent. Not just a pleasant, generic smell (or the lack of unappealing smells), but a unique aroma that helps define their brand and builds customer loyalty. Scent branding is becoming a popular strategy to shape customer perception, drive sales, and create a lasting impression.

Let’s review the basics. Air Freshening for business has a simple goal—to clear the air of unappealing scents. While this is a good start, it has a minimal measurable impact on consumer behavior.

Commonly used in restrooms, break rooms, and common areas, commercial air fresheners play an important role in odor control, helping to maintain a pleasant environment for customers and employees alike. However, air fresheners are limited. Typically, they are:

• Generic in fragrance
• A reaction to existing odor problems
• Isolated to specific areas
• Not aligned with brand personality
• Have minimal effect on consumer behavior

Scent Branding is more than making sure your business and products smell nice. It is a deliberate, immersive strategy that seeks to translate the brand identity into a unique, impactful scent. Done right, scent marketing gives your business a powerful new way to reach your target audience. When customers experience your signature fragrance, it strengthens their positive connotations with the brand. Along the way, their reaction goes from “this place smells nice” to “this place smells like (your brand)!”

Our sense of smell enjoys a direct pathway to our brain’s limbic system. The limbic system controls mood and memory, making it a powerful section to tap into if you wish to influence behavior. And that’s exactly what scent branding does, leveraging this direct connection to customers’ brains to trigger positive memories and encourage brand loyalty.

When deployed as part of a multisensory branding strategy, fragrances can help strengthen the customer experience. A memorable fragrance stays with customers, laying the groundwork for positive interactions. When your signature scent is regularly deployed with your brand, it doesn’t take long for customers to associate it with your product. In fact, this is how specific brands achieve a level of recognition many would envy.

Scent Branding is a fragrance marketing technique based on the scientific principle that our sense of smell significantly influences mood, memory, and emotion. Also known as olfactory branding, it uses our sense of smell’s direct pathway to the limbic system to access long-held memories and latent desires.

Research has shown that smell is likely the first sense to evolve in humanoids. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors relied on it to identify danger and locate food. Today, our sense of smell is basically the same. We still use it to alert us to smoke that could mean fire (danger!) or to lead us to Cinnabon cinnamon rolls (food!).

Scent branding influences the decisions we make, and much of that influence is powered by mood and memory. This intriguing stat backs it up: 65% of people are able to remember scents accurately after an entire year. By contrast, that number drops to just 50% for visuals—and that’s after only three months. Consider the following:

• Scents prompt as much as 75% of our emotions
• 40% of people who smell a pleasant or familiar scent say it improves their mood
• We are 100 times more likely to remember what we smell vs what we see
• The average human can detect over a trillion scents! (previously thought to only be 10,000 different odors)

Methods

There are all sorts of scenting systems for businesses. Some of the most popular and effective are scent diffusers. Aire-Master offers a variety of diffuser types geared to fit businesses large and small. From small ultrasonic diffusers to larger HVAC units, Aire-Master can handle all your scent marketing needs.

Benefits

The benefits of scent branding are clear. A signature scent helps differentiate your brand from all the others, ensuring a more intimate customer experience. When they need your product or service again, scent branding helps lead them back to your door, earning you repeat business. You can measure scent ROI by tracking how much longer your customers stay in the store and by gathering data on how scent marketing affects their perception of quality.

Familiar Scent Marketing Industries

Here are examples of specific industries that actively use scent branding to achieve a specific ambiance:

• Retail: Luxury atmosphere (high-end boutiques, spa services)
• Healthcare: Calming scents (clinics, doctors’ offices)
• Fitness: Energizing, clean (gyms, yoga studios)
• Hospitality: Relaxing signature scents (hotel lobbies)

Branding with fragrance pays off in numerous ways. Diffusing a pleasant aroma can help strengthen your brand by creating a welcoming, positive atmosphere that elevates customers’ perception of your business. The happier your customers are with their shopping environment, the longer they’ll linger…and the more they’ll purchase!

Air fresheners are one way to achieve this. They’re a quick, easy way to add scent to a small area. When used for this purpose, they can be effective. But true scent branding goes beyond a quick burst of scent from a store-bought canister. It relies on consistent scenting in the proper amount (as calculated by a professional like Aire-Master) to elevate brand perception, increase dwell time, and increase your bottom line.

The evidence is clear, scent branding should be part of your brand’s marketing strategy. Going beyond sight marketing (specific logo and colors) and sound marketing (jingle) to tap into our sense of smell makes sense. It helps set your brand apart while encouraging loyalty. And loyalty translates to repeat business!