The Scent Firms Hacking the Retail Experience
Business Of Fashion | Aimee Levitt
"How does a brand create the ideal signature scent? It’s a lengthy and complex process, says Neohni Gilligan, the director of fragrance and product marketing at ScentAir, one of the world’s largest scent marketing companies. It begins with a 50-100 item questionnaire for the client, though only one or two of those questions relate specifically to scent. The rest are about decor, colours, lighting, sound and music, customer demographics, and the brand’s overall ethos.
Some pairings seem obvious: a furniture shop may want to play up the smell of leather while Cinnabon should smell like fresh cinnamon rolls are baking just a few feet away (at Cinnabon stores, ovens are placed near the doors of the store so that the smell escapes into the street; when the company trialled a location with ovens placed at the back, sales decreased significantly)."
