As a longtime enthusiast of ambient scents in retail spaces I very much enjoyed Aimee Levitt’s article (‘It’s the brand speaking to you’: the scent firms making smells for Subway, Abercrombie and more, 8 May). However, it misses an important limitation of ambient scent: consumers can only smell it if they’re actually in or near the physical retail space, but most shopping is now done online where brands are unable to diffuse scents.
I recently co-authored research revealing a simple yet effective way to create a sense of smell without using actual scents. We showed that simply including a picture of a scented object (for example, coffee beans or a rose) on a package or in an advertisement strongly evokes that scent in consumers’ minds. Some colleagues have dubbed this “smellising”. That imagined scent, in turn, influences consumers in much the same way as an actual scent.
