Pleasant Fragrances Enhance Guest Stays at Hotels

Here's a great article we found about using scent marketing for hospitality. It's from the Miami Herald. Enjoy!

South Florida Hotels Discover Scents Make Sense

Scent Marketing Primer

Newly laundered clothes hanging on a clothes lines, chocolate chip cookies that just got out of the oven, vanilla, grass cut just a few hours ago, a pine forest, a rose garden, freshly baked bread, the salty tang of an ocean breeze, cool fresh air on a spring morning... Speaking of all those, are they starting to trigger some sort of pleasant memory or feeling when you smell them?

It's important that you know that smell is a chemical sense that is tied to the emotional center of the brain. One of the most powerful senses, able to not only to make us salivate, attract us to someone or stir our memories, but it can also change our heart rate and other physiological measures. But that's not all - it can also make us open our wallets to buy something.

Using the senses of sight and hearing, businesses all over the world spend millions every year trying to attract new customers via print ads and TV. However, the real savvy businesses out there are also using the sense of smell to persuade their customers to stop, smell and buy the roses, cars, and houses.

One of the fastest growing trends in advertising is scent marketing. And even though it's not fully understood yet by the majority of businesses, the power of scent has already been successfully applied and can be applied to almost every type of product. Real estate agents know that baking bread or chocolate chip cookies during an open house is going to help sell it. And also, chances are that the sudden spike in home sales during the spring is due to the delicious smells of the blooming hyacinths and daffodils.

Many studies from all over the world have shown that a scented environment makes consumer spend more time and money in that location. A recent study in Las Vegas showed that people spent more time more and spent 45% more money in a scented environment than in an unscented one. In another study, consumers rated a product more favorably and were willing to spend more money for it in a scented room, versus the same exact product in an unscented room.

The secret behind scent is that it creates a "flow state" that leads people to temporarily lose their normal sense of time and become totally consumed in the occurring event. It can last up to several minutes.

So how are major companies out there using fragrance to increase sales? Some use scents that are naturally present in the environment like a bakery funneling the scent of baking bread from the oven area to the front of the shop. Those establishments that are not able to capitalize on their innate smells can create an environment with any fragrance their heart desires, through introducing ambient scent.

A pleasant smell puts the customer in a pleasant, buying mood and increases the chance that of becoming a repeat customer. For instance, Omni Hotels pumps a lemongrass and green tea scent into its lobbies and public places. Rolls Royce was seeing a drop off in customer perception of its cars, even though mechanically, they were the same or better. After investigating, they found the source of the dissatisfaction: the smell! Customers associated the smell of the classic 1965 Silver Cloud with quality, and when the Rolls Royces stopped smelling like this, the satisfaction dropped. Now, Rolls Royce has reproduced the smell of the Silver Cloud and they spray it under the seats in all of their new cars to protect their brand.

Similarly, Singapore Airlines has consistently gotten high marks from consumers in part because they use sensorial marketing to immerse passengers in the smell of a bamboo forest as well as lotus flowers. The fragrance is worn by flight attendants and put on hot towels that are handed to passengers before takeoff.

If your business involves any kind of location, whether retail, hospitality, healthcare, or entertainment, it just makes "scents" to incorporate our most powerful sense: the sense of smell.

Remember That Great Hotel?...Using Scent for Hospitality Branding

Over and over again, research has confirmed that our sense of smell is directly linked to our memories and emotions, both powerful factors in branding. Brands that consumers strongly associate with a positive emotion are successful, generating increased dollar sales, repeat sales and customer referrals. Memory, too, plays an important part of the branding experience, helping customers to identify and recall the brand name as well as specific product features and benefits. In order to strengthen their brands, numerous hotels have enlisted the aid of scent branding.

Just as a logo symbolically represents the company, hotels are appealing to the powerful sense of smell by creating “scent logos,” signature scents for their properties. The custom scents are based on the hotel’s ambiance and the emotions they want guests to associate with the hotel.

For example, the Mandarin Oriental uses a mandarin blossom tea scent to evoke not only its décor, but also its name. St. Regis wants guests feel like they are arriving at a lovely home, furnished by Mrs. Astor. Their signature scent includes roses and sweet peas, Mrs. Astor’s favorite flowers, mixed with a touch of Mr. Astor’s tobacco.

Le Meridien hotels wanted to unify its properties to be of a consistent quality and feel, appealing to creative people like artists, architects, designers, and chefs. Now, upon entering the hotel doors, guests experience a whiff of old books, leather, and wood sweetened with vanilla.

Hyatt hotels scent each of their properties, and take this strategy one step further. For their upscale Park Hyatt brand, each individual location has its own unique scent to emotionally bind guests to the property and distinguish it from others, even within the Park Hyatt family.

Senior vice president of Westin Hotels & Resorts summed it up nicely, “Scent is most closely tied to memory, and if we’re in the business of creating memories and wanting our guests to choose Westin whenever they travel, we have to make a memory link.”[1]

So far, most hotels confine their scent to the lobby areas and casinos. Some sell candles with the hotel’s signature scent in their gift shops, but there are many more applications for scent in hospitality. Technology now exists to make scenting guest rooms feasible. Hotels can also make good use of scented paper to send advertisements to their frequent guests in advance of common vacation times, to awaken the wonderful memories of their last vacation. The results for using scent in hospitality are positive; now we have to expand on its use.

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[1] “The Sweet Smell of the Modern Hotel,” Chandler Burr, Travel and Leisure, June 2008