Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [63]
In another study carried out by Dr. Alan Hirsch, researchers placed two identical pairs of Nike running shoes in two separate but identical rooms. One room was pumped full of a light floral scent; the other wasn’t. Volunteers examined the running shoes in each room, then filled out questionnaires. By 84 percent, subjects preferred the running shoes they’d looked at in the florally scented room. Moreover, they assessed the scented Nikes as costing roughly $10 more than the pairs in the unscented room. In a related experiment in Germany, the fragrance of freshly cut grass was sprayed into a home improvement store. From the second the pumps started emitting the grassy mist, 49 percent of all customers surveyed before and after claimed that the staff appeared to be more knowledgeable about the store’s products.
And sensory branding is becoming more and more common. A California convenience store chain has experimented with wafting a fresh coffee smell into its parking lots to lure customers inside its stores. Procter & Gamble recently rolled out Puffs facial tissue tinged with the scent of Vicks, attempting to play on consumers’ childhood memories of their mothers’ treating their colds with Vicks’ ointment.5 Americhip, a leading manufacturer that manages to integrate multisensory technologies into magazine ads and print collateral for today’s leading global advertisers, produced an ad for Diet Pepsi that contained sound, taste, and pop-up features. Reader awareness of this three-pronged ad in People magazine? One hundred percent—for the first time in the magazine’s history. And in conjunction with the BRAND sense agency, Britain’s Royal Mail has begun developing a program to enhance their marketing mailings with aromas and flavors. Tear open a flyer from a shampoo company, and through “microencapsulation”—a process that allows a scent to be released when you open an envelope—a fresh shampoo smell will all of a sudden envelop you like a cloud.
How to escape this assault on our noses? By checking into a hotel? Sorry, you’re out of luck. Both the Hyatt Park Vendôme and the original Hyatt chains have suffused their rooms and lobbies with their own signature fragrances; the latter even infuses the smell of the macaroons they serve at their restaurants.
Of course, experiments involving fragrance can backfire. In 2006, San Francisco bus shelters equipped with cookie-scent-infused strips for a “Got Milk?” campaign had to be scrapped thirty-six hours later when commuters complained that the smell of chocolate chips and cookie batter was triggering allergic reactions.6
And Johnson & Johnson and Play-Doh have played around with their fragrances so much that they’ve lost the original formulas. In Europe, at least, Johnson & Johnson can no longer re-create its exact original recipe (their competitors’ fragrances smell more like the original Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder than Johnson & Johnson’s own signature scent). And when I once contacted Play-Doh to see if I could secure the original smell, I was told that the company has never been able to replicate the original fragrance; they’re only about 80 percent there. Sad for us, annoying for them.
CLEARLY, SMELL IS very closely tied to how we experience brands or products. Is the same true of touch? In his bestselling book Why We Buy, retail guru Paco Underhill writes about the critical importance of touching clothing before we buy it. We like to stroke, rub, caress, and run our fingers through the garments we’re considering before we commit to buying them—kind of like a sensory test run. Why do you think those tables of clothing at the Gap and Banana Republic are positioned where they are? To be looked at? Of course not. They’re there awaiting your fingers.
Or, take electronics. In general, we like our gadgets to be small, compact, and lightweight—James Bond–style. Irrationally, we conclude that