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Stop and Smell the Brand
Part Two of a 5-part Series on Multi-Sensory Marketing

Think back to a time you remember fondly. Recall for a moment 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 that understanding.

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 to 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.

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 among the competition. 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 a major potential tool for shaping that experience.

When it comes to experiential brands, “banks and hotels are not that different,” says Vogt. “Both have facilities that you enter, which project an image at you. Why shouldn't that include scent?” he adds.

Morgans Hotel Group, Four Points, and Westin are just a few of the hotel companies that know very well the difference having a unique smell can provide. And the list keeps growing as marketers harness the experience-creating power of smell.

According to industry insiders, a few banks are beginning to develop signature scents for use in branch environments, and even to be infused in direct mail and other bank materials. Considering these exact scents and implementations as closely-held proprietary trade information, banks developing these tactics have not been willing to disclose their secrets. “Everything is pretty much hush hush,” says Vogt.

At Decatur First Bank in Georgia, the bank is known throughout the community not only for its customer service, but for the popcorn it pops in its branches. While popcorn clearly offers taste as well as scent, it's the smell of the popcorn that most people—including the bank's employees—are affected by.

As larger banks were trying to push customers to electronic channels like online banking and ATMs, Decatur First Bank wanted to differentiate itself by inviting customers into the branches. “We chose popcorn because it tells people they're welcome, and that we want them to feel comfortable,” says Judy Turner, President and CEO.
“The smell of the popcorn really shapes the full feel of the branch when customers walk in.”

At this point, there are probably two questions racing through your mind: 1) What should my bank smell like? and 2) How much is smell going to cost?

Connecting Scent to Other Senses
There are important connections among the senses that can be leveraged to create synergies. For instance, coffee can be both tasted and smelled. But be careful and deliberate. Resist the temptation to take credit for creating scent marketing by coincidentally utilizing other marketing tactics that happen to have a scent to them. Smell is not as easy as offering banana bread to customers and then checking “smell” off the multi-sensory marketing checklist, simply because banana bread has a scent.

If done deliberately and strategically, however, scent can be tied to the brand equity being built using other senses like taste.

Venture Bank in Lacey, Washington, has enjoyed great success and brand recognition from its scent marketing efforts, which are closely tied with its taste efforts. Each Venture Bank branch is equipped with an oven (many of which are in plain sight to customers), in which fresh cookies are baked daily.

Senior Vice President of Marketing Joseph Beaulieu explains that while the fresh cookie scent could have been achieved artificially by piping scents into the branches, installing ovens and baking cookies fresh offered a level of authenticity that could not be achieved artificially. Plus, it allowed the strategy to truly utilize both smell and taste—creating an even more powerful and interactive experience for both customers and employees.

Venture Bank's signature cookie baking is a long-standing tradition by experiential branding standards, nearly 13 years old. It proved not only to be an engaging brand-building strategy, but also made a big difference in 2003 when the bank changed its name from First Community Bank to Venture Bank. During a time of great change that can sometimes be disconcerting for customers, the constant presence of the cookies before, during and after the transition was an anchor that helped smooth the change.

“The cookies have become a part of our folklore—our brand,” Joseph says. “It's a common bond,” he added, “among customers and with the bank.”

The Investment Smells Rosy
Proving your bank's story with the sense of smell does not necessarily require a substantial investment. While hotel brands may invest significant resources in the engineering of a signature fragrance, smartly and strategically building brand equity into scent can be achieved relatively inexpensively. In many cases, building brand equity into a scent is simply a matter of investing resources or efforts differently—not additionally—to capture the scent opportunity.

For example, if a bank determined its brand smelled like freshly sharpened #2 pencils, building brand equity into that scent would not cost additional resources. Rather, it would simply mean allocating more funds to purchasing pencils and sharpeners, instead of mechanical pencils.

How to Smell Well
Smell is subjective. What's preferred by one customer is different than that of another. But when it comes to what your bank's brand should smell like, the most important factor is brand authenticity. As with all other elements of the brand, one cannot apply a flashy-but-irrelevant new tactic or a fad and expect it to complement the brand. Relevance to the brand is critical, and smell is no exception. The scent strategies employed must be relevant to the other brand tactics used.

Specifically, decisions on how a bank's brand should smell are not arbitrary. Smells must be developed from a highly focused understanding of what the brand stands for. For direction, look to the bank's positioning statement and brand promise—a scent that proves the story lives inside. Remember, the whole point to using the sense of smell in your multi-sensory marketing arsenal is that you're proving what your brand stands for.

Express your bank's brand through the sense of smell everywhere you possibly can. Do it in unique ways, and be consistent. Repeatedly ask yourself the question “According to my unique brand, what scent will enhance my _____?” And if you can, package that scent and allow customers to take the experience with them through the materials you give them.

Be downright militant in upholding your “smell” standards. Don't let other scents cloud what people associate with your bank—it's an asset that should be protected carefully, just like a logo.

The Next Sweet-Sounding Article
As you take steps to ensure your brand is positively smelly, look forward to learning how each brand sounds different. What sounds will customers associate with your brand, and your brand only? Stay tuned.

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