The smell of a message
We’re endowed with 5 primary senses through which we perceive and communicate with others. Communications and marketing specialists have long known and exploited the potential of these senses to persuade us into action and cultivate effective brands.
Car designers would spend years getting the feel of buttons and knobs just right, before touchscreens arrived on the scene. Hershey’s foil-wrapped bite-sized Kisses are a classic example of ‘integrated marketing communication’ that engages the visual, tactile and audial senses of consumers – an example familiar among marketing students learning the craft.
The growth of sensory marketing can be attributed to fact that subtle influences, particularly those that bypass conscious awareness, are all the more powerful because they are not perceived as marketing messages.
However, some senses appear less exploitable than others.
Take smells. They are potent and can compel particular memories that are otherwise out of reach. Personally, this sense is the only connection I have to my country of birth, a small island on the Pacific Rim. I left at a young age when I could not be coherent about events happening around me. But every now and then, the waft of a particular smell – like the metal brine of the ocean, the cloistered heaviness of frangipani blooms, or the musky humidity of a sweltering day after a spell of summer rain – will take me back to that place frozen in time, deep in archives I can only sense but not unlock.
And right there is one thing that scent marketers have learned at a cost: smells evoke memories, and a smell that appeals to one demographic may put off another.
Our sense of smell is the only sense to be fully developed while we’re still in the foetus, one that responds to chemical stimulation. Some 1,000 different genes (roughly 3% of our total genome) are involved in making receptive a small area of tissue lining the upper part of our nasal cavities. These genes allow us to detect around 10,000 different kinds of smells.
In spite of this complexity, this sense is undervalued and the range of vocabulary (of most modern languages) for describing smells is poor. Our sense of smell has historically had an image problem, and this has had impacts on the depth and extent of our understanding of it.
Perhaps this is a reason why, despite the best efforts of engineers and innovators to design cinemas, mobile phone applications and digital speakers that release smells on cue for a more vivid experience of a storyline or central message, none have quite succeeded … yet.
