Our five primary senses all work together, so it is important in business sales and marketing to stimulate them all if at all possible. However, with respect to evoking memories, the often overlooked sense of smell is the most powerful sense. If a person is tested on the details of a movie they watched in a theater while exposing them to the smell of popcorn, the subject will remember 10-50% more than when not exposed to the smell of popcorn. Smell, therefore, can be really important to a company’s brand.
When you walk to Starbucks, the first thing you smell is coffee. Sometimes you can smell pumpkin spice, other times caramel or vanilla. Starbucks understands the value of smell to its brand and actively manages it. At a more technical level, the olfactory bulb is part of the brain’s limbic system, which is an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it is sometimes called the “emotional brain”. Smell can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously.
The olfactory bulb has intimate access to the amygdalae, which process emotion, as well as the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning. Smells, therefore, are forever linked to an event, a person, a thing, or a specific moment. The smell of coconut reminds me of the beach, and chlorine, of learning to swim at the YMCA pool. You can either create a link between a smell and your product or service or tap into a person’s positive memories with a smell.
Do you use the sense of smell as part of your branding?
