Brand Experience through Scent
Brand Experience durch Duft is an integral part of our experiences and plays a key role in shaping our perceptions of brands and their products. As a result, it’s increasingly being used as a branding strategy to elevate customer engagement and foster brand loyalty. When strategically applied, scent can be an effective way to differentiate a brand, forming positive associations that linger in customers’ memories.
The Influence of Scent on Customer Behavior
Branding with scent isn’t just for brick-and-mortar stores; e-commerce retailers are catching on, too. Many offer a sample of a fragrance inside their packaging, allowing consumers to smell the product before they make a purchase and form a connection with it. It’s a subtle but powerful tactic that can help drive conversion, and it also helps create an emotional connection that’s difficult to achieve through online shopping alone.
A branded scent can be a powerful way to stand out from competitors, as people are more likely to remember something they smelled than anything they heard, saw, or touched. This is because the olfactory sense is linked to memory, allowing us to bring up associative memories at the drop of a hat—whether it’s baking cookies with our grandmother or that fresh-cut grass that reminds you of home.
To successfully use a branded scent as a marketing tool, it’s important to be subtle and not overpowering, to ensure that the scent doesn’t trigger any negative reactions from customers. The scent should also be consistent across all physical locations to reinforce brand recognition and ensure that customers associate it with a specific location or experience.