Sniffing Out Sales

By David Kaplan
Houston Chronicle
December 25, 2006

Inside the Aziza townhome for sale in the Uptown area is the smell of apple pie baking in the oven. There is no oven and there is no pie. The scent is blowing out of a machine.

The Aziza homebuilders figure that the place will appeal more to a buyer if it feels like home, and nothing says home like apple pie.

"More businesses are relying on scent marketing to sell products and brand themselves."

"They can make an orange smell more like an orange than an orange does," said Doug Hope, vice president of GlobalShop, an annual store design trade show. Scent is becoming "the elixir of branding," he said, because it has the power to trigger memory and potentially create a more pleasant customer experience.

Limits are an unknown. Some marketing analysts say scent marketing is about to explode, while others caution that it has limits, noting that not all retail environments are conducive and not all consumers will like it.

Sony Style stores, with locations in the Galleria and Woodlands Mall, feature a "Season's Greetings" gingerbread scent during the holidays. Westin Hotel lobbies have their own signature scent called "White Tea," a blend of green tea, geranium, green ivy, black cedar and freesia.

Charlotte, N.C.-based ScentAir supplies the Westin's customized aroma and the machines to disperse it. Similar to the plug-in air fresheners on sale in grocery stores, the ScentAir machine has been "scaled up dramatically" and the company can customize thousands of aromas, said David Van Epps, CEO of ScentAir.

Westin pays ScentAir less than $100 a month for each machine and carries three to five machines per hotel, Van Epps said. Westin also sells a retail product, White Tea by Westin Collection, featuring the same scent housed in a soy candle, room oil diffuser and potpourri.

In September, ScentAir, which has a contract with Aziza and other home builders in the area, opened a Houston office focused on the residential market and charges about $40 a month per machine.

While a number of hotels have embraced scent marketing, it remains to be seen how it will be accepted in other industries, said Rachel Herz, visiting professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University Medical School. Scent marketing does have potential, because the sense of smell "triggers memories that are more emotional and more evocative and feel more viscerally real than any other sense," she said, but it has its limits.

A recent study by the marketing department at West Chester University, in West Chester, Pa., found that smell influences time perception. Good smells caused people to underestimate the time they spent shopping, while a bad smell did the opposite, which means that a pleasant smell will encourage customers to linger.

ScentAir Technologies Inc, founded in 2000, is the leading provider of aroma marketing solutions for brands and retailers. ScentAir enables businesses to create a unique in-store experience by engaging memory and emotions through patented scent delivery systems. Proven to enhance the appeal of any environment, these pioneering scent machines can be customized to reflect even the most challenging environment or brand. ScentAir is a privately held company located in Charlotte, NC.

For additional information contact Murray Dameron at 704-504-2320.