Scent Marketing Blog

Consumers are savvy, busy, and let’s face it, just plain hard to pin down so you can advertise to them. This results in the increasing need and appeal of ambient advertising which gets to the consumers’ subconscious. Until recently, the only truly efficient guaranteed form of ambient advertising was through Instore Radio advertising. But thankfully, those crafty scientists have come up with something new. Scent Marketing.


Scent Marketing is a complimentary form of non-traditional marketing to visual and auditory advertising. It aims to create a cohesive effort of engaging the five senses in order to promote better brand recall. Research has shown that, of the five senses, the sense of smell and the sense of hearing have the greatest trigger for memory recall of the five senses. When both are used in connection to a particular product or brand, recall can increase dramatically. In a recent study on scent marketing, the addition of a scent to a visual ad increases the recall rate 500% above the same ad without a scent.

So how does it work? Scientifically, humans tend to associate smell to a specific event, thing, or person. The next time they perceive that smell, it often triggers a specific memory. With scent marketing now your brand can now be associated with that smell. And this creates brand recall.

For example, what happens when you catch a whiff of barbeque? Usually you will immediately think, “Wow that smells good”, and if you’re like me, an image pops into your head about the last time you had some great barbeque, perhaps at a family picnic, or at a great restaurant. Now imagine how powerful this would be if every time people smelled barbeque the first image to pop into their heads was your brand.