Niche Market February 2007

Sunday circular inserts for McDonald's and Yankee Candle feature "rub 'n smell" technology by Scentisphere, Valhalla, N.Y. and the response postcard for the citrus-themed CARE campaign.

The most remarkable thing about the CARE direct mail package is its heady smell of oranges. Authentic and pungent, the scented postcard and photo essay leak whiffs of fruit through the translucent envelope. The other remarkable thing is that CARE, an international humanitarian nonprofit based in Atlanta, doesn’t sell oranges.

“Orange has such a positive, energizing smell and it’s got mass appeal. It’s zesty. It sends the message that our organization is proactive,” says Paul Leo, manager of acquisition programs at CARE. “The response we got was fairly positive, and a lot of that is how the scent ties in with the graphics, the text and the energy of the campaign. We’ve done everything to make a finer and more complete experience down to the last detail.”

The CARE campaign, produced in conjunction with Service Graphics in Chicago, is in its third run at North Canton, Ohio-based printer Silpon Designs. The manufacturer uses a gelatin-based varnish that emits a soft scent whenever it’s touched. Leo is still measuring the mailing’s effectiveness against CARE’s other efforts, but he says that it attracted fewer respondents who gave much bigger donations.

“Smell is a process that defies description,” says Pete Pecoraro, a data manager at Service Graphics who handles the CARE account. “It just sneaks under your awareness for a total effect.”

If it seems incongruous that a humanitarian organization is looking to citrus scents to make an impression with consumers, prepare to be further surprised: scent, traditionally a high-end niche market, has been growing in significant ways in the print industry. Prompted by new advancements in printing technology as well as a glut of creative advertisements in a brand-oriented environment, scent marketing is wafting your way.

Products with no connection to food or perfume are vying for consumers’ attention with delicious or even upsetting smells, from fresh-baked apple pie to turpentine and dog food. A new varnish process, applied on paper like a fifth color, has made smaller runs more economical and opened the door to new scented products, including direct mail pieces, shelf talkers, stationery and textiles.

What’s That Smell?
Most consumers are familiar with—and many resent—the peel-away Scent Strips hocking perfume in commercial magazines, invented and still sold by New York-based fragrance giant Arcade Marketing. The ads are really inserts, in which the perfume oil is encapsulated in gelatin-based slurry mixed with a little glue. The capsules are based on the same technology that makes carbonless forms possible. The gelatin makes a weak, relatively large capsule and tends to release the scent prematurely, filling your mailbox or car with the unmistakable pungency of Drakkar Noir. Or, worse, five different colognes muddled together.
“There’s a reason why airline magazines don’t carry perfume ads,” says Harald Vogt, principal of the Scent Marketing Institute in New York.

The other traditional scent delivery system is scratch’n sniff, which also describes the process to experience a faux fruit smell from kid-themed stickers and other pressure sensitive labeling. These capsules are mixed in water-based slurry and applied with an extrusion head or a rubber flexo plate, but the paste generally blurs or obscures graphics. To smell the scent, consumers must vigorously scratch, and the scent’s longevity is severely limited. While psychologists have known for a long time that smell has a significant effect on consumer emotions, the delivery technology has lagged.

“We thought it was just a novelty product,” said Bob Bernstein of Valhalla, N.Y.-based Scentisphere Inc., who has a background in the printing industry. “Putting the scent on the page got people engaged, yes, but it was expensive and not for every company. What we’re finding now is that there’s a dramatic increase in sales—20 percent or so—directly attributable to scent marketing.”

The Sweet Smell of Success
In the past year, new forms of scent marketing have emerged. Whereas fragrant advertising was once the province of very affluent marketers, a new plastic encapsulation technique has made small runs economical. Scratch’n sniff paste typically yields 20,000-25,000 square inches of coverage per pound of oil, whereas the new technique yields about 300,000 square inches. The essential oil can be purchased in increments as small as five pounds, and is then encapsulated in a plastic and mixed into a varnish. The varnish is applied in-line on a sheetfed press without adulterating the graphics. It can be applied to the entire sheet or in patterns of alternating scents.

The upside to this technology is that a very gentle touch will release the scent, unlike the vigorous treatment required by scratch’n sniff. And the printing process allows for both production speed and controlled scent sampling—the consumer doesn’t smell it until he or she chooses to.

For permeated paper products, such as stationery and direct mail advertising, a different new varnish process that employs gelatin capsules is ideal, says Kim Homsher, principal of Silpon Designs. Drying time is longer, but the scent is considerably stronger and infuses the entire piece.

Arcade Marketing also introduced a new form of scent marketing, a magazine ad known as LiquaTouch. The technology, which employs a saturated cotton pad encased in a foil insert, debuted last year with the launch of Calvin Klein fragrance Euphoria. Within 35 days, says Louis Zafonte, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Arcade, it was the bestselling fragrance in North America, a success he partially attributes to the campaign design.

“It’s something new and different, so you pull it out of the magazine and rub it on your skin, where it stays for the next twelve hours. There’s no other scent piece that has that kind of interaction. There wasn’t any TV advertising; there was no direct mail when the fragrance launched—just the LiquaTouch,” he says. According to Zafonte, whose company offers hundreds of types of scent marketing, LiquaTouch converts to sale 12 times more often than any other olfactory advertisement.

The Nose Knows
Why is scent such a powerful vehicle in marketing? Unlike other sensory input, there’s a direct link from smell to emotion receptors in the brain, which gives rise to theories that scent can directly and subconsciously influence behavior.
“When your olfactory nerves perceive a scent in the nostrils, a signal is passed first to the amygdala, an area of the brain that processes the emotional quality of experience,” says Dr. Avery Gilbert, a biopsychologist and Vogt’s partner at the Scent Marketing Institute. “Those pathways then process up into the cerebral cortex, which decides if this smells like a pear or an apple or a shampoo, and what you should do with it.”

Once exposed to a pleasant scent, a sense of emotional well-being is created with a customer. Leading theorists debate whether a sense of well being is enough, though. “Maybe it’s not that the smell of chocolate automatically triggers you to open a bank account or buy a stereo,” Gilbert says. But good smell puts consumers in a good mood, encouraging them to stay at casinos, cell phone stores, hotels or even keep them reading a page. Once captive and in a good mood, they can be targeted with—and are more receptive to—other messages.

“This is also about drawing their attention and matching the ambience or theme of a campaign. You smell something calm and that belongs in an ad for a hotel. You smell something homey and that reminds you of childhood,” Gilbert says. A repeated scent can draw a subconscious line of continuity between different phases of a marketing plan.

Making Cents
“This stuff is going mainstream,” Vogt says, citing examples of the burgeoning world of marketing olfaction. This fall marked the debut of “Scent Notes,” the New York Times’ first scent review column. Scentisphere’s rub-and-sniff plastic capsule varnish method, in partnership with German firm Follmann, made headlines in the Wall Street Journal as the producer of a unique deal: Kraft Foods sponsored People magazine’s 2006 special holiday issue, and five of the 31 food ads in the issue are varnished with full-page scents: strawberry cheesecake, cinnamon coffee, Chips Ahoy!, cherry Jell-O and white chocolate.

“The hospitality industry is becoming one of the biggest buyers of scents. There are tremendous advances from nontraditional manufacturers who want to use scents and there are new opportunities.”

In addition to both scented printing jobs, which Arcade and Silpon offer, manufacturers can add the plastic capsules to a varnish ink in-house for custom jobs. Affordable scented products might be a good way to acquire a new account, suggests Bernstein, with a distinctive solution few are offering.

“There’s a lot of interest out there,” Vogt says. “We have always gotten a lot of inquiries from marketing people during budget season at the end of the year, but ad budgets are fickle and that didn’t necessarily mean sales. Now, we’re seeing less money go to TV and print advertising and people are looking for new ways to reach consumers.”

Scent Marketing Is Wafting Your Way