Scent & Music Marketing: The Perfect Pair

Have you ever walked past a bakery and noticed the smell of freshly baked pastries? How many times has that made you hungry and eager to grab a sweet bun for yourself?

It’s not that these bakeries are constantly baking (some of them might be, but not all of them). Lots of them have scent machines producing the sweet aroma that makes your appetite go wild. Scent marketing (also known as aroma marketing, olfactory marketing or ambient scent marketing) is the practice of using a pleasant aroma to enhance a company’s brand image, improve customer experience and increase sales.

The best businesses combine both scent and music marketing to get the most customer satisfaction and best results. Here are some points you need to take into account when using them combined.

Wake up those feels

Use the senses to create feelings. First you need to define what you want your clients to feel; if you want them to feel like home, if you want to make them travel to a far away land, if you want them to feel they are in the most chic place they’ve been in months. Start there and create your sensory marketing strategy after defining your objective.

Balance

Like everything in this life, it is important to find the balance between music and smell. If your business is all about intense aromas, it’s better to turn down the volume of the music a bit, and vice versa. Using them both in excess can cause sensory overload for the client, which is the opposite of what we want to achieve. It’s true that some brands overdo both on purpose, but it’s still a risky practice.

Try and examine

Try different combinations and observe the clients’ response. It’s not necessary (nor recommended) to make harsh changes, as it’s important to maintain a consistent brand image. However, you can trial small changes and record the results. Do clients stay longer? Do they come back more often? Have any of them told you how much they love the music? Trial and error is the best way to find out what your thing really is.

Nowadays, competition is so strong that everyone has to give 100%. But sometimes it’s about working smarter, not harder. These excellent marketing tools will allow you to reach your objectives and enhance the customer experience.