Dec. 25, 2006, 9:28PM
Marketing
Sniffing out sales
Some companies use aromas as a way to build up profits

By DAVID KAPLAN
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

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 home builders 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 Global Shop, 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.

The hotel and casino industries already embrace scent marketing, and a number of retail stores are sniffing it out.

Meanwhile, the company ScentAndrea, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., plans to bring into grocery and convenience stores something called "Smellovision" to broadcast smell-enhanced video ads on flat-screen TVs.

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.

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.

In San Francisco earlier this month, she noted, the California Milk Processor Board placed aromatic strips releasing the aroma of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies at a few bus stops.

The next day the the city's Municipal Transportation Agency made the commission remove the strips because it hadn't been properly notified and the smell was unsettling to riders, Herz said.

Connection needed

The incident demonstrates that "context is a powerful determinant of how consumers will respond," Herz said. "At a remote bus stop, people are wary. It's an unknown."

In a high-end retail environment, it's more likely to get a positive response, she said.

Thomas Pink, a retailer of shirts and blouses in 13 U.S. stores, uses the scent of line-dried linens created by AromaSys of St. Paul, Minn. To be effective, the scent should have a logical connection to the product, said Herz, who noted that the smell of baking cookies wouldn't work as well in the clothing store.

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.

Competing smells

Not all environments are suitable for scent marketing because of multiple smells in the air, Herz said. For example, the scent of baking cookies at the bus stop could mix with automobile exhaust.

The American Lung Association has gotten several complaints about scented stores, because some aromas have bothered asthma sufferers and people sensitive to particular chemicals, the Washington Post reported.

david.kaplan@chron.com