9 Powerful Advantages of Scent Branding for Your Product or Business.

We all have that one favorite smell. What if someone’s favorite smell could be your brand?

Marketing has explored many new frontiers over the decades, but scent marketing is still one of the most under-explored marketing strategies. Yet scent branding can have powerful advantages for the brand that opts to smell like a million bucks.

Here are ten powerful advantages of scent branding for your product or business.

1. Memory Hooks

Scents take us back in time. That’s a scientific fact.

There’s nothing quite like a familiar smell to call up instant thoughts and feelings from the past. Through scent marketing, you can build positive associations with your brand.

When a customer catches a whiff of your branded scent, they’ll be returned to the moment they last interacted with you. Your custom scent will find a unique place in the customer’s memory, ensuring they’re more likely to return. Customers may even pick up notes of your scent in other walks of life, ensuring you remain in their thoughts.

2. Unique Brand Signature

Nothing under the sun is new, and that includes everything in the marketing world. Using a signature scent is still a rare tactic. It will make your brand stand out as completely you.

3. Aesthetic Design

When you think of a successful brand, you think of strong imagery. The red and white color scheme and italic font of Coca-Cola. The Golden Arches of McDonald’s. Establishing that brand aesthetic is crucial to creating a memorable brand.

With that in mind, scent marketing becomes another tool at your disposal. Alongside your other brand iconography, it allows you to paint your brand’s aesthetic in a new way, helping you lock in your brand’s identity.

4. Word of Mouth

Taken together, those last two points lead to a third: scent branding will get people talking about you. As generating word of mouth remains one of the best marketing strategies around, the benefits are clear.

As we mentioned already, scent branding is still an underexplored area of modern marketing. Novelty alone will get your customers talking, which will naturally lead them into discussing your brand and product. Just like that, you’ve achieved word of mouth marketing in an organic, subtle way.

5. Prestige

We associate nice smells with a lot of the finer things in life. Food, luxury fragrances, even expensive cars. Customers from all demographics associate scents with prestige.

One of the benefits of scent marketing is that you can tap into this element to give your brand a prestige boost. Through scent marketing, you can exist in that same luxury category of goods, even if your product remains affordable to all. Much like choosing the right color scheme, it’s a neat trick that can elevate a brand without breaking the bank.

6. Break Down Walls

The eternal challenge of marketing is to knock down a wall. That wall is the one between the customer and the company. It’s made of the inherent distrust that customers feel toward a new brand.

Scent branding helps to break through that wall using similar methods to native advertising. Through scent, you can bypasses the innate distance between your customer and your brand. Consumer trends have driven marketing further toward this relatable approach, and scent branding can be another tool for building a relatable brand.

7. Generate Positive Emotions

Life is tough and we could all use a little emotional lift. This is where scent marketing can make a positive difference in the lives of your customers.

There’s a verified link between the brain’s emotional centers and how we interpret smells. With the right scent, you can literally help your customers feel better. That’s a powerful gift you can give your customers, but it will also transform how they see your brand. It’s a no-brainer, really—if your brand or product makes customers feel good, of course they’ll keep coming back.

8. Increase Dwell Time

There’s a strong correlation between how long a customer spends in your store and how likely they are to buy. So ask yourself: are you more likely to linger somewhere when there’s a great smell in the air?

Using scent branding, you can increase customer dwell time. In turn, that increases your sales and overall customer engagement. With a higher dwell time, you can even stock a wider range of products, building this cycle into a positive feedback loop.

9. Drive Sales

In the end, we’re talking about marketing. So the benefit that caps it all off is the increase in sales that scent marketing can bring.

There’s no one aspect of scent marketing that drives those increased sales. Like all marketing campaigns, it’s the many effects, both obvious and subtle, that will elevate your brand above its competitors and drive more sales.

Scent marketing can provide huge returns for even a small investment—it’s not difficult to create a brand scent, but the results, as we’ve outlined here, could bring a huge number of new sales to your brand.

The Many Advantages of Scent Branding

These ten advantages of scent branding tell you everything there is to know about why scent branding is here to stay—and why it’s an overlooked form of marketing for modern brands.

Ready to continue your olfactory branding journey? Find out more here.