Scents like all other senses are essential to create a distinguished and comfortable association with the brand or product. Scent branding is catching on with retailers worldwide that are using and forming their own unique scent to boost sales and customer interest.

It is essential to make sure though that the scent is universally liked and not bad or off brand. Floral scents or vanilla and soft scents are great for feminine shops and stores, whereas harder or musk or woody scents are defiantly better for male stores and products. The scent if good will keep the customer in your store for longer and definitely boost sales by mood elevation; but it is important to control the intensity of the smell.

It may seem very easy to pick and pop a generic smell and match it with a generic diffuser, but most generic scents are so common that people don’t feel them since they are already used to them. Generic diffusers are also not a great pick since they cannot be controlled with intensity. They can keep sending off vapors of the scent and can prove to be quite strong.

With larger shops it’s perfectly advisable to use varying scents in different departments depending on the product that is being sold, however this can be a complete disaster for a small or single room store where different scents would collide and form most probably a repellent and disgusting smell that will only turn your customer away.

The three basic things that must be kept in mind while scenting a store is, what is the aroma message you want to send to your clients? Does the aroma or scent you have in mind comply with the products available in your store? And what kind of device should you use to ensure that the smell is present aromatically?

The idea behind scent branding or introducing scenting to a store is to decrease a customer’s anxiety and make them feel homey and comfortable to promote their shopping indulgence and experience. The more comfortable a customer is in your store the easier it will be for them to stay longer and consider your product. Thus boosting sales.

Scents can be of all kinds. In stores where there is limited space or too much merchandise use of scents that lessen the claustrophobic feeling and give it a light airy touch are highly recommended. The idea is to keep the customer interested and comfortable despite the size of the store. Smells that evoke a sense of open space like sea shores or woods are classified as great for relieving claustrophobia and creating a sense of openness and appeal to the customer.

Scenting and scent branding can really help increase sales a great fold and thus it is essential to associate your product or store with a naturally appealing smell that keeps your customer interested and contented

Retail Scent Branding is catching on with retailers!

Traditionally marketing was always about a visual or perhaps auditory messages to get the customer to go into the shop. Now the focus for marketers is also on the olfactory message or impression when the customer goes to the shop and uses their tactile sense to gain an understanding of the product.

Now many retailers are creating an olfactory message by mounting a diffuser in any one corner of the store the brand gets an increase in perceived value of their product just by instilling and evoking a sense of nostalgia, emotion and the association with great aroma therapy in a store itself.

This marketing technique is the first impression a client receives when entering a store and the last when leaving, and branded scents can be found in a varying variety of stores and shops.

The method is to distinguish their brand or shop or product with a unique fragrance or odour and thus install a memory in the mind to assure that that particular smell is associated with their product.

This tactic is supposed to increase sales and drum up more clientele and so far it is working tremendously.

It is however important to create an ambience for your store and not make it smell like an over filled florist. The aroma should be subtle and maybe not even consciously discernible but the customers.

Thus aroma diffusers must set up to ensure that it isn’t a turn off and not to strong at all, but creates the right amount of comfort associated and can enlist a happy shopping experience.

Besides shopping, hotels come equipped with aroma diffusers to create a feeling of home and cosiness and usually the smell widely acknowledged is associated with fresh linens that create a clean and homey environment for the guest.

The retail scent branding is like developing a signature scent or a line of scents associated with a certain brand and its products so a customer knows what to expect if they smell the aroma even if they cannot visually see the shop or aren’t close enough to it.

This is an excellent way to increase sales.

Retail scent branding is exactly like background music; it creates a sense of tranquillity, mood and peace whilst shopping and thus retailers across the globe are slowly progressing to scent branding and using diffusers across their stores to keep their customers in the mood.

However that doesn’t mean that just any pleasant smell means that is all you need to do. With scent branding Is important to establish which scent provides the customer with the best feel associated with your product or business and then introducing it in the right levels.

Thus companies that spend big amounts of money in branding their product or business are are now also willing to create a unique scent that is effective in boosting sales, keeping the customer interested and unique to them alone.

Email us now to find out how you can create a unique quality scent for your business or brand.

Understanding your customers is one of the most important things to do for you to ensure a successful marketing campaign.

The inability to know your customers is the greatest loss, you, as a potential service provider can face. Since you are nothing without your customer, your first priority should be to know them and what they want and expect from your company or product.

Moreover, knowing them not only increases your chances of selling them more goods, leading to your profit, but also causing the inflow of more customers through recommendation. Hence getting to know your clients and understanding your customers, greeting and treating them to their liking is crucial to the success of your business venture.

Having this kind of rapport with your client is even more essential if you keep in mind the nature and the degree of aggressive marketing your fellow business rivals conduct everyday. Your primary asset in business are your clients, this is because if you know their mentality and gauge their buying trends and their preferences, you have the market in hand.

Additionally this kind of valuable customer information will also enable you to replenish stock, get the most viably trendy products in the market, thereby satisfy your customers and in the process entice them into come back again to be serviced.

Moreover not knowing your customers will only hinder your chances at success to a greater degree because if you do not know what pleases your customer, you will never know how to approach them. Some might like curt matter of fat dealings, while another might like that occasional chitchat and “hello, how’s your day going.”

So if you do not know who likes what you will only end up causing them dissatisfaction and yourself economic loss, due to sheer ignorance and simple lacking of planning. Moreover if you sit down and think about it this abstract ‘market’ that you talk about is no one but the sum total of your customers. So if you want to target the market, then this is the bunch you have to satiate and cater to.

What your customer says is very important for you and your overall success. After finishing one deal you instinctively try to convince them to buy something else; this is only natural and can be called maximizing profit.

But what you should also be doing simultaneously is trying to find out information about their economic status, what they can afford and what not, what thy need next in their household which might come from your shop.

All this will help you in all future deals with them and wooing them back to your shop. So always engage in conversation with them and most importantly listen to them, they might be unconsciously divulging information that might eventually give you an edge over you’re your next door rival service provider.

Spend the time to know your customers, what they want and how they like to shop and see your business expand.

Regardless of what you do in business without customers you will no longer stay in business.  Good customer relationships are important to the growth of your business.

It is now know that whether one buys a cup of coffee, a holiday, a house or a car the decision of purchasing has to be emotional. Even more importantly it is a crucial factor in customer retention and loyalty.

Customer satisfaction is the underpinning factor in customer experience. Customer should feel good in doing business with the product or the service provider.

While purchasing rationality, reflection, judgment of pros and cons do play a part but it has to have an emotional side to it. Often one’s gut feeling, intuition, sense and interaction plays a significant role in buying.

In every single encounter what the customer feels or doesn’t feel is directly related with the service provider’s managerial capability and handling of customer expectations. Customer experience doesn’t end in keeping a smiley face or having a soft tone while communicating with an irate customer.

It must make the customer whoever they are feel the most important person at that time through operation, transaction and behavior. Addressing a fickle customer who is like “I want it now and can’t wait” and their emotions is not easy and can not be handled by an individual manager. Reaching this emotional goal requires an entire company’s effort which should exceed beyond product quality and protocols.

Before a service provider can decide the best way to achieve this customer satisfaction must decide what exact reaction they want to create every time an encounter occurs. It can be said that customer satisfaction survey and market research can provide the data for that. But sadly enough, these kind of data do not help much, and especially at an emotional level.

Drivers of satisfaction and loyalty must be looked deeply into by the service providers. A good insight into the subject will show that a whole bunch of different factors lead to the sense of satisfaction and loyalty. Expectations, needs and reaction to the organization and the perceived value received by the customer would be some of them.

The basic requirement for customer satisfaction then shifts from product, service quality, value-for-money, hygiene factors, etc which are common for everyone to creating an emotional, personal and psychological connection with the customer which makes them feel satisfied and loyal.

To respond to the emotional approach of the customers the company must have a consistent, differentiated, valued and completely intentional outlook towards customers.
Look at your business from the viewpoint of your customer or client and be honest as to the quality of your service, product and business premises.

Will you customers want to refer your business and more importantly, return to you for future business?

To find out how we can help with keeping your customers and improving customer satisfaction by incorporating an aroma scenting machine.

If you are you a small business owner you will need to make sure that you keep an eye on your competition and what they are doing. In the end, your competition and their success or failures will have an impact on your business.

Many times we come across small business owners who question why it is so important to know what their competitors are doing. Say for instance, that you and your competitors sell the same type of exercise equipment, and one of your competitors is having a 30% sale on their exercise equipment; this will have an effect on your sales unless you have some other factor that will make customers come to you other than the price.

You must be aware that if your business is run well and profitable that is most likely that your competitors are also keeping an eye on you and what you are doing.

We talked about sales above, and sales and advertising are the most common thing business owners do keep track of about their competition but you should take a little more interest and find out what has worked or has resulted in them losing clients and money, and learn from this.

One such case was a client of ours who had a small café that was doing a reasonable trade but seemed to have lost some of its returning customers and was spending a lot on advertising in order to attract new clients.

It was determined that the café was getting new customers, but had a low return rate. Even though the food, drinks and prices were great, not enough customers were returning. For the business to make sell enough every week meant that this business owner was stuck with spending more and more on marketing.

There should have been a percentage of return customers from his efforts each week, and if this was occurring there would not be a need to spend lots of money to bring in new customers each week.

The café owner was then asked about his competition. He admitted that he did not really know much about the ones he knew about, though he did not think that they would impact his business as he had the easiest place to park and was located on the main street in the area.

He was given a task to go out and be a customer to every café in 5 block radius.

On his return he had found some very interesting information about his competition. Firstly that there were more cafés in the area than he thought and that some were making good business.

There was another small café a few blocks away was doing a great trade and was so full that you could not get a seat at lunch time, and you had to either take away or wait.

The café had food, drinks, pricing and customer service seemed to be on the about the same level, though the real change was noticed in the layout and environment.

There was soft music playing in the background, and a distinct scent of coffee and vanilla beans that created a very fresh and enticing atmosphere.

The café owner learned a lot of things from this exercise, both in what to do to improve his business as well as things that he should make sure not to do.

Implementing a few changes did not take much time or money, and he started by introducing 2 ambient aroma diffusers with specific fragrances to entice the customers and make them not only feel welcome but want to buy more cakes and of course come back again. From there he added some music and changed the layouts of the tables to enable the customers to enjoy their time in his café.

Needless to say that business is doing much better now and the café now gets lots of customer referrals and is bringing in nearly double the revenue.

So you can see that keeping an eye on your competition is important for your business health, regardless of how big or small your business is. Make sure you know what your competition is doing.