Premium Scenting: The gateway to luxury

Luxury has many faces. For some, it’s dressing up in designer clothes to attend exclusive events at 5-star hotels every other weekend. For others, it’s dining out at Michelin-starred restaurants in town, having a 7-course meal accompanied with classical music played by a live band. While luxury differs from person to person, one thing it has in common is it is all about the experience.

With growing trends of online retail and accomodations services, various industries have capitalised on offering their customers a luxurious experience to differentiate themselves. From hotels to retail spaces, businesses are thriving to provide the best luxury experience to their customers to elevate their brand and enrich their their customer experience. Here is how premium scenting can help create unique customer engagements and elevate your business success.

Multisensory marketing

Appealing to your customers’ senses is not new in the marketing world. Proper lighting, colour themes and music have all been used to engage customers. However, one sense that is often overlooked: the sense of smell. A scent is 100 times more likely to be remembered over visual or auditory stimuli, and 75% of our emotions is affected by what we smell. However engaging just one sense is not enough. Recent trends have shifted towards engaging multiple senses at the same time, which has shown to improve brand impact and customer experience by 30% when using two senses and 70% when using three, according to research done by Initial. Even airlines and hotels have capitalised on this approach by creating custom scents paired with their uniforms to enrich the customer journey. Pairing scenting with visual or audio cues further enhances your overall customer experience.

Holistic brand message

Any brand can claim to be luxurious and extravagant, but only a handful are able to back that claim. The first step into your business, your customers are already judging each facet. From your products to experience, from lighting, scent and audio, to the temperature and atmosphere, each of these details are judged accordingly to determine if the brand is truly luxurious. The combination of these details will differentiate luxurious brands from the rest. One tiny out-of-place detail could shatter your projection of premium products or services. Scenting is arguable the most important as it is one of the first things that a customer is exposed to. Many brands utilise scenting in an effort to attract their customers, be it the smell of freshly baked bread to entice customers, or the smell of leather as they walk by. The presence of unique and identifiable scents allows your customers to easily recognise and locate your retail space, before being exposed to other sensory stimuli in your store.  

Purchase intentions and positive reviews

Luxury hotels and retailers are engaging expert perfumers to carefully create scents that make their customers feel indulgent when visiting their businesses. Scenting has shown to affect our mood and behaviour, which includes likelihood of positive feedback and increased purchase intentions. Since our emotions are largely affected by scent, choosing pleasant aromas will help customers relax, engage with their surroundings and increase receptivity to sales pitches or requests for feedback. In fact, floral scents have shown to greatly affect purchase behaviour in retail stores.

Premium brands understand that the feeling of luxury is related to experience, which needs to appeal to multiple senses. Single sensory targeting is no longer viable to create a luxurious atmosphere, instead requiring multiple senses to be triggered. Premium Scenting paired with visual and auditory cues can help premium hotels and retailers in achieving multisensory marketing and engage their customers on an elevated platform. Find out more about premium scenting and its benefits here or call us at 1300 882 388.

Sources:  Pawaskar, Pinky. “A Conceptual Model: Multisensory Marketing and Destination Branding”, 14 July 2014, Procedia Economics and Finance Volume 11, 2014, Pages 255-267.