W H AT’S THE FIRST THING YOU DO WHEN you pick up almost any product? Most likely, you smell it. What’s the next thing you do? You respond with emotion and feeling. This second part is often done unconsciously, and prior to any attempt to identify the odor. Your like, dislike or indifference to a smell is part of your emotional memory response, which is guided by a stored olfactory memory and the feeling, good or bad, that relates to the fragrance. A positive emotional memory is the powerful connection you want to create with your guests using scent. This is the art of fragrance branding, a scientifically proven system to increase sales and build your business.
BY JIMM HARRISON
The olfactory system link to emotions and memory To understand the basic function of our olfactory system, we can start by looking at chemotaxis, the first sense organ developed in early life forms. Chemotaxis is the sensory response of moving toward (attraction) or away from (aversion) a chemical stimulus. This describes the function of the sense of smell. Chemical compounds attach to olfactory nerve endings, triggering an impulse through the olfactory bulb to the limbic center of the brain. When molecules from delicious food, a pine forest or a seductive fragrance attach to nerve endings, our first response is that of attraction and the desire to move toward the positive odor. The opposite is a motivation to
move away from smells like poison, rotten food and bad hygiene. Our attraction or aversion to the chemical odor compounds in our environment is immediate, and is followed by a thought process and identification of the odor. The first step in the smell transmission to the limbic system is the amygdala and hippocampus, the emotional and memory centers. Every memory and emotion has a scent associated with it. You recognize this when a fragrance immediately creates a memory recall that is extremely vivid. What you may not recognize is the emotion that is triggered, along with the odor memory. We can sense this connection between emotion and odor when we feel uplifted by the smell of citrus, warmed over by the smell of vanilla or left uneasy by the odor of a hospital. It is this persuasive emotional connection that is the basis for the science of smell technology and fragrance branding.
Fragrance branding in retail stores, consumer products and more The scientific study of smell, named “aromacology” by the Olfactory Research Fund (now the Sense of Smell Institute), provides research on the effects of all odors and their ability to provoke emotional and behavioral outcomes. Aromacology is the science behind a study reported in the Journal of Marketing (Spangenberg, Crowley and Henderson, 1996), using pleasant scents in a retail environment with these findings:
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