How Abercrombie, Victoria’s Secret and the Vitamin Shoppe use smell to make you spend more

() — Have you ever walked into an Abercrombie, Victoria’s Secret, Vitamin Shoppe, or other store and wondered, “What’s that smell?”

Scent is a subtle, often underestimated component of companies’ attempts to attract customers and make them stay longer. These retail chains and other companies, including restaurants, fast food chains, airlines, and hotels, have gone to great lengths (and conducted sniff tests) to perfect their signature scents.

The marketing tactics of most retailers target our vision: think logos, commercials, and other symbols. Brands also try to stimulate us with happy music or relaxing sounds.

But pointing at our noses can be an even more powerful tool for brands, say marketing gurus. An entire industry, known as scent marketing or olfactory branding, is dedicated to the development of personalized fragrances.

ScentAir, for example, is one of the largest sellers of diffusers for leading brands. The company designs nine “fragrance experiencesranging from “luxurious and sophisticated” to “passionate and sensual”. On the other hand, companies also try to mask and neutralize bad odors from bathrooms, kitchens, animals, sweat and other odors.

Caroline Fabrigas, executive director of Scent Marketing, creates and maintains scents for companies like North Face, Aeropostale and others. Conduct “scout sessions” with company representatives to find the right notes for their environments.

“We try to create identifiable scents specific to brands,” he said.

the power of smell

Our sense of smell goes directly to our limbic system, the region of our brain that regulates emotions and memory.

Deploying a pleasing fragrance in stores can help a brand stand out in a crowded market and influence customers’ feelings about it, said Laurence Minsky, a professor in the communication department at Columbia College Chicago who studies creating brands. It can also bring back childhood memories.

“Retailers sell an experience. They send signals or clues about how they want to be perceived,” Minsky said. “It’s limited to just doing it in pictures.”

The presence of a pleasant scent in stores resulted in a 3% increase in sales compared to stores without one, according to a study published in the Journal of Marketing in 2019.

And beyond being pleasant, the details of the smell matter. Other study published in the Journal of Retailing in 2013 found that consumers spent more and bought more items in stores with a simple orange or lemon scent than in stores with complex scents (lemon and basil or basil and orange with green tea) as well as stores no smell at all.

The opportunity to create ambiance while increasing sales has prompted retailers and other businesses to experiment with different scents and create their own unique olfactory experiences.

Characteristic aromas

Brands like Play-Doh and Johnson & Johnson baby powder were some of the first to use scent as a marketing tool. Play-Doh even registered successful its unique vanilla-like musky fragrance in 2018.

At Abercrombie, the scent you’re familiar with now is a fragrance of “white bergamot“, which replaced the brand’s signature musky “Fierce” scent a few years ago.

Victoria’s Secret, which has had its own fragrance line for decades, changes the scent of its store when one of its new fragrances launches, a spokesman said. Right now, Victoria’s Secret’s recently launched “Bare” fragrance, a woody floral fragrance with hints of Australian sandalwood, fills the air.

At the Vitamin Shoppe, a lavender scent wafts through the air. Stores use air diffusers to pump out lavender essential oils, the company’s best-selling essential oil that promotes “calm and relaxation,” a spokesman said. During the holidays, stores switch to a peppermint essential oil.

Meanwhile, Yankee Candle uses various forms of scents in different areas of the store, including candles, wax melts and air fresheners for customers to explore various sections, according to James Jordan, senior manager of global home fragrance training at Newell Brands, who owns the brand.

Play-Doh is known for its distinctive scent.

Since the 1990s, Singapore Airlines has also used its own fragrance. It is used as a perfume by flight attendants, mixed with hot towels served before takeoff, and floated around the cabin during the flight. Hotels like Hyatt, Westin and others inject scents and aromas into their lobbies, while many supermarkets have moved their bakeries from the back of the store to the front, said Martin Lindstrom, an expert on consumer brands.

Then there are the food chains that have used odors to try to make customers hungrier, encouraging them to buy more.

Cinnabon put ovens full of warm cinnamon rolls near the front of their stores. Panera Bread used to make its bread at night, but switched to daytime to make its stores smell more like bakeries, the Wall Street Journal reported.

However, stores must strike a fine balance when designing their scents to avoid overwhelming customers. Subway, for example, has been criticized by some customers for a unpleasant smell of bread in the shops.

When Starbucks introduced breakfast sandwiches in 2008, he found that the smell of oven-cooked sandwiches overpowered the aroma of coffee in stores.

And Abercrombie was perhaps best known for spraying its Fierce cologne around stores in the mid-2000s. But the company scaled back its signature scent as its stores struggled to attract customers, eventually replacing it entirely. One study found that the abercrombie scent They made customers anxious.

Scent is most effective when it’s subliminal, Lindstrom said. “When smells yell at you, it doesn’t work.”