Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2011. Its description of scent marketing as the latest thing and its company details reflect that year. Bancomer now operates as BBVA México.
If you’ve ever walked into a shopping centre to buy just one essential item and come out with other things you didn’t need, don’t overthink it: you’ve fallen for a carefully designed marketing strategy. We all know many of the most common ones:
- Essentials at the back: customers are tempted to buy other products they come across on their way.
- Rearranging the shelves: customers get lost in a place they thought they knew, which makes it more likely they’ll “bump into” other products and decide to buy them.
- The science of sound: relaxing background music at low volume tells your senses that all is calm and harmonious, so you’re in no hurry to leave. As in a casino, the longer you stay in the shopping centre, the more money you spend. At closing time the music gets louder and faster, telling you to finish your shopping and leave as soon as possible.
- Changing the temperature: if you’ve ever walked into a McDonald’s in summer, you’ll have noticed how pleasant the air conditioning feels. That feeling wears off after about 40 minutes, when you start to feel cold. It’s a carefully calculated length of time, so that once you’ve finished eating you free up the table for other customers.
Marketing experts have brought scientists from other fields into their departments, including specialists in the human brain. They can get 80% of the shoppers in a shopping centre to follow a similar route, using signs, contrasts of light and visual effects. A good marketer’s masterpiece is when a sped-up recording of a shopping centre shows more than 80% of customers walking down the same aisle. That way, the company knows where to place items whose sales will rise by more than 40% thanks to the strategy. Very little is left to chance.
The latest in sensory marketing
Background music for shops has delivered great results so far, but the latest thing in sensory marketing works through your sense of smell.
Jacobo Jafif, founder of Basha, a Mexican firm that started out as a leader in personalized music for businesses, created several scent signatures in 2010 to help shops sell more and bring customers back.
This kind of marketing rests on one basic principle: we now know that sexual desire is 70% due to smell. It’s one of the great mysteries of science, and it would explain why people who are less physically attractive can sometimes be more sexually attractive. It’s simply a matter of smells our subconscious picks up.
In the same way, 80% of our memory is olfactory, so a scent can be used to steer a customer’s impulse to buy, just as it can lift their mood. His firm already has clients the size of McDonald’s, Nutrisa and Bancomer, and he received the Entrepreneur 2011 award in Mexico.
With his business idea, this entrepreneur wants someone who walks into a bank to notice a scent that relaxes them, so they won’t mind waiting in line a little longer. Likewise, a bakery would get a scent that encourages customers to buy other products such as pastries or biscuits.
The scents vary widely: cheese, wine, chocolate, caramel, lavender and more. Each of them, applied to a type of product or “sprayed” over a particular area, could help tip a customer into buying something.
Note: when we talk about these marketing techniques, small business owners often assume they’re only useful for big retailers. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are countless techniques of all kinds that could be used in a small business, and they are rarely applied.
Obviously, if your premises are 20 square metres, you won’t use a technique designed to make customers get lost in the shop. But good visual presentation, colour, the presence of the person serving the customer and even the shop’s scent can all help, to some degree, to build the customer’s trust in your business and make your product stand out. According to sensory marketing theory, if our subconscious likes the smell of a shop, the customer will come back.
It’s all a matter of trying.
Featured image: Alpha, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
