Stop and smell the brand: how to put the sense of olfaction into marketing action.

• Author: Stephens, Jeff
• Position: Multisensory Marketing

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Think back to a time you remember fondly. Recall what it was like to watch your son's first little league game, arrive at your grandmother's house in the country or stroll the streets in a Tuscan hill town.

Beyond the vignette of visual snapshots--the over-sized jersey, your grandmother's oddly shaped antiques and the cobblestone roads at that charming villa--what else comes to mind?

Chances are you recall a distinct scent.

The smell of hot dogs and popcorn at the ball game, your grandmother's perfume, or the scent of the Italian roads after a fresh rainfall. While the mental pictures may fade, the smell stays vivid. And today, more and more marketers are harnessing the power of that sensation.

Through-the-nose mindshare

With its own smell, a bank's brand can tap into the built-in mechanism that lives inside us all. Leveraging the powerful sense of smell allows your brand to stand out among your competitors and be more memorable in the minds of your customers--the key to building "mindshare."

Paying attention to smell supports your brand and traditional marketing efforts with longevity, interactivity and more emotional engagement with customers, while at the same time creating a unique suite of signature touches that can't be replicated by a competitor.

According to Harold Vogt, founder of the Scent Marketing Institute, a professional association that supports and facilitates the development and implementation of "scent branding" efforts and scent-centered marketing strategies, scent is a powerful marketing and branding tool because smells travel directly to the brain and trigger memories.

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Still, he says, scent marketing and branding is vastly underutilized by banks. "I believe it's because many banks consider the application of scent too playful in their businesses," Vogt says.

Let's take a look at some ways bankers can build powerful brands and effective marketing using scent.

Something's in the air

Many leading hotels are superb examples of an industry that actively practices the use of scent marketing to differentiate its brands. Like banks, hotels aren't in the fragrance business; they're in the service business. They play host, whether to money or to families. In both cases, a strategic, well-orchestrated overall experience means everything, and scent marketing is an important potential tool for shaping that experience.

When it comes to experiential brands, "banks and hotels are not that...