Perfumed Futuristic Reality

 5 minute read

Colors and shapes are dominating visuals in the society, but they lack emotional arousal. Olfaction, the ability to comprehend and differentiate smells, triggers more memories than any visual representation. The scent is now perceived as a new marketing trend, and its future is amplified – from preserved implications in mindfulness to the new aromatic user experience. Is increasing specter of feelings a new technique to attract more clients and boost sales?

Fragrant Memories:
A Pathway to Mindfulness

According to World Health Organization, 3.6% of global population struggle from anxiety disorders while 4.4% – 300 million people – were diagnosed with depression in 2015. Stress accompanies people throughout their lives and even often recalled as “The Health Epidemic of 21st Century”. Relieving stress becomes critical in hectic lifestyle – meditation is proven to be good for health. It normalizes pressure and heart rate, improves anxiety and depression. Adding scent opens new doors to mental treatments and makes them more pleasant and effective. To support these positive perfumed features, David Edwards, Harvard professor and co-founder of Vapor Communications, created the Cyrano – a smell speaker that plays the desired sequences of scents. Users can control and customize their scent playlists with an easy-to-use app to trigger certain moods and attitudes: joy, happiness, empowerment, and relaxation.

“Scent has always been a memory preserver and mood definer” – says Sissel Tolaas, a smell scientist. He took this advantage of scents and developed the Smell Memory Kit. The toolbox contains several ampules with abstract scents – smelling them at a special moment will build an association between scent and emotion. In turn, Amy Radcliff, designer of Scentography, introduces the scent camera, the Madeleine – it utilizes “headspace capture” and with this feature. The fragrant scent is preserved and ready to be used. The smell of the seaside and Grandmother’s pumpkin pie – all these moments are saved to bring warm memories to the owner of the capsule and generate optimistic mental state.

With its advantageous effect and accessibility, scent slowly intervenes in healthcare. Hospitals use various scents in their facilities such as waiting rooms to make the environment more relaxing and pleasant. The mentioned innovations make aromatic mindful and memorable future a reality, where smell is a way to preserve memories and reduce stress leading to calm.

Scents and Businesses:
Improving Customer Experience

The complex psychology and neuroscience behind the Scent Memory Kits and the Cyrano, explain the world’s transition to the sweet-smelling era. This “not about the actual scent, but what it triggers” explains Andre Niehues, concept consultant at AirCreative, “smells define human decision-making and motivate to take action.” One scent can evoke a thousand feelings – and building a multi-sensory brand is the way to attract consumers by complex and thrilling know-hows. The power of smell becomes an irreplaceable part of customer experience in future. Studies show that pleasant smells increase the positive rating by 25% and drive clients’ desire to purchase by 80%. They make consumers more emotionally connected to the product and simply adding coffee scent in the shopping area will raise its sales by 55%. Scent as a sales booster is already on its way to conquering retail industry and an innovative tendency defines the future of using scent as the way to generate certain consumer behavioral patterns.

Power of Scent

Many companies – fashion show organizers, hotels, retailers, and real estate agencies – embrace this aromatic opportunity and create a fragrant brand identity and passionately seduce their consumers with their scent features. The rapidly increasing role of scent already evolved consumer experience and had an outcome in the form of scent marketing. According to the research of Prolitec, scent marketing agency, smell enhances brand recognition and customer perception and loyalty. Companies like Scentair and Air-Aroma already started offering scent-marketing services and develop unique fragrant ambiance. At the same time, the digital world opens doors to the aromatic future, where each customer experience is memorable, ambient, fascinating, and close to personalized know-how rather than boring shopping between aisles in the supermarket.

Digital Scent Speaker

Adrian Davic Cheok, the professor at City University London, took the power of smell even further and introduced a mobile app that enables transferring scent digitally. With the special plugin, 100 of scents are available for sending via simple message – from flower to gunpowder. The scent-transmitting app encourages a novel level of communication with the constant focus on experience sharing. Digital scent transfers will revolutionize advertising and replace regular show rooms with aromatic customer experiences in digital format whereas the user can learn about products by simply inhaling them digitally with a special app. Digitalization of scent is not expected to stop at this single innovation – the global scent technology industry is forecasted to gain more popularity and reach the value of $1,080 million by 2023.

Growth of Perfume Industry

Scents and fragrances are used not only as personal identity and home air refresher, but their application is now augmented. The perfumed market worldwide is expected to shift from $37 billion in 2016 to $49 billion in 2022 whereas its values are forecasted to double – $92 billion by 2024. This sales boost is triggered by using scents in meditation and ways to relieve stress and pursue calm lifestyle. Applying scent in retail and marketing boosts sales and creates deep, revolutionizing, and memorable customer experience by delivering interesting solutions such as the Cyrano and supporting healthier and stress-free living. Scent industry will thrive leading to know-how in marketing and retail by involving additional senses in consumer experience.

Insight Box

The scent becomes a novel emotional element in a diversity of spheres from retail to psychology. Scent transferring innovations capture memories in perfume flacons and design scent-playlists for relaxation, healthier living, and mindfulness. Meanwhile, digitalization of smell opens doors to the aromatic consumer experience with scent marketing and perfumed showrooms. The world is on its pathway to integrated digital fragrant future with transferable scents and unique three-sense consumer involvement to boost sales, deal with mental and health problems, and change the way products are perceived by customers.

#customer #future trends #psychology #scent #scent marketing #smell
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About the category

“I am your client. I want my needs to be understood and satisfied. I am different from others and deserve for special attention.”

Business evolves through industrial period into being customer-oriented. Understanding your client is the key to success and competitive advantage. Indeed, world development and changes are driven by consumer needs and desires. World meets diversity of innovations in order to improve customer experience and wins the one who gets there first.

Be curious – Understand your client – Make the first move

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