Print Marketing Campaigns that are Right on the Nose
When it comes to leveraging the power of scent marketing in your product, packaging or promotional printing, the basic food groups are hard to beat: cheese, wine, Girl Scout cookies, tacos and bacon.
You don’t have to be promoting anything even remotely food-related to take advantage of this powerful olfactory lure, as the creators of such products as Velveeta-scented nail polish and taco-scented wrapping paper know well.
Are You Hungry Yet?
Food sells a lot more than food. People may talk about stopping to “smell the roses” but you’ll never stop as many people with a flower as you can with the aroma of a freshly baked cinnamon roll.
From candles that smell like chicken noodle soup to food-scented makeup collections, the comforting scent of our favorite foods doesn’t have to come on a plate to get our attention.
Like the perfect grilled cheese sandwich, scented print promotions can deliver your messaging directly to the part of the brain where feelings of “mmmm” and “ahhh” originate.
Where Scent Lingers, Shoppers Do Too
Scent does more than make us hungry after all. It’s a powerful trigger of memories and emotions. Whether it’s the smell of freshly baked cookies or buttered popcorn, scent can evoke a sense of peace, nostalgia, excitement or joy. Researchers in one study found that the smell of oranges coaxed shoppers into spending 20% more.
You don’t have to limit yourself to scents that come with a calorie count, however. High-quality special effects printers can reproduce the smell of practically anything. From the smell of freshly cut grass to a salty ocean breeze, to the unmistakable leathery smell of a new car, scented promotions can find their inspiration outside of the kitchen as well.
The effect is not even limited by species. Catnip and beef-scented posters proved irresistible to the four-legged prospects of a promotion for a line of airline-approved pet carriers. The posters were placed at sniffing height at pet parks across four cities in a campaign that left pet owners with no choice but to investigate the source of their pets’ distraction.
Put Scent to Work for Your Next Promotion
Use your imagination to incorporate the sensory experience that sets the mood or sparks the feeling that will make your messaging memorable. Scented printing can dramatically improve the ROI of scented promotions in a wide variety of applications, including gift cards, packaging, retail POP displays, book covers, stickers postcards, brochures, magazine inserts, wrapping paper, signs, displays, labels and more.
Branding agencies, in fact, have taken the trend to new dimensions with scratch-and-sniff billboards that literally stopped New Yorkers in their tracks. Even jaded New Yorkers could not resist the opportunity to stop and smell the vanilla and coconut-scented armpits.
Scent can also be combined with other multisensory special effects like textures, chromic reveals and scratch-off printing for one-of-a-kind promotions that are equally impossible to ignore.
Multisensory Printing that Smells and Sells
Add the scent of snickerdoodle cookies, popcorn, pancakes, roast beef or apple butter to your next promotion to experience the delicious ROI of food-scented marketing.