There’s something about the smell of a hot dog. The way it hitches a ride aloft a lazy breeze and invariably finds its way into your nose where it lodges itself and begins to tickle your hungerbone. Whether the hot dog stand is one foot away or one-hundred, its meaty scent finds you.
That smell is sort of an interesting smell because it does more than just stimulate one of your senses. You could call it a sales pitch. Most of us have experienced it, strutting along the sidewalk when it hits. “Man that smells great,” you likely thought, perhaps even said aloud. And you may have bought one.
Scent has the strongest ties to memory and emotion. To put that in an advertiser’s terms, our level of recall is the best with scents. Memory is much more high-level with our other senses, and much more precise when we smell something.
If scent is so deeply linked, what if, for example, hot dog suppliers included additives to make the smell of meat even more potent and far-reaching? What if they already are? Could it drive sales? If the brain can recognize that smell with precision and also has the power to trigger your hunger, of course it could.
Cinnabon, Starbucks, Pizza Pizza, or even a burning cigarette can effectively convey scent and stimulate demand in this way. I know I’m never craving popcorn until I walk into the movie theatre. However, these smells are native to the products. It seems that scent as a marketable function is an incidental byproduct rather than something that is leveraged purposely.
There are some brands and products that are intentionally stinky. LUSH: soap normally smells, but it never smells that much in a drug store. Hollister definitely makes an effort to leverage scent. Cars are sometimes sprayed with synthetic ‘new car smell’ because it’s something consumers have come to associate with a brand new car. I believe I once heard that pickle jars were engineered to release as much scent as possible when opened. There are other examples but they are few. This begs the question, why is our most acute sensory perception is not being more heavily exploited?
Well, by their very nature smells are close-by. This means that when you sense it, an action can be taken. You can buy it. It’s marketing at the point-of-sale which is usually the most effective time to appeal to a consumer. That’s the good news. The downside: there’s no marketable medium that can distribute smell, aside from, say, a scratch card for perfume. Thus, smell can’t be used in 99.9% of appeals to mass markets.
Smell is the best sensory trigger when you are exposed to it, but recreating and disseminating it is almost impossible with the channels available today. However, there are already some really interesting technologies being developed to overcome this obstacle.
The power of smell is indisputable. Just imagine it with scale; imagine being able to smell an actor as you watch them on TV, or the scent of cheese and warm dough wafting down from a billboard for Pizza Pizza. Imagine the glossy eyes of an advertiser who is able to emanate a smell from your iPhone—perhaps the fresh, cool air of the Swiss Alps in a tourism ad. The increases in audience engagement and recall would be nothing short of meteoric.
It can be said with near certainty that such technology will exist in our lifetime given the potential payoff. There’s simply a big, orange carrot idly dangling in front of our noses.
