An Interview With Wendy Yoder, Ph.D
Wendy Yoder knows about the nose. She recently completed a Ph.D program in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Florida. Although her research has tackled a diverse group of topics – ranging from food science to developing biomarkers for Parkinson’s Disease – we were particularly intrigued by her background in olfaction.
As such, we reached out to her to discuss the role of scent in marketing.
Our conversation began by addressing a picture of her cat sitting in a row of hangers. (Despite our skepticism, he got up there himself!)
We somehow moved on to explore her initial background in philosophy, inquiring whether she believes it serves as the foundation for behavioral neuroscience.
“I think that it’s foundational as it relates to anything,” she replied. “In order for you to have a fully holistic idea about a particular concept, you need to go back in time and think about, ‘Where did this idea originate?’ It’s possible that what you think is an original idea is something that people were studying before writing was available to mass publication.”
From there, we transitioned into the exchange you’ll read below, which will likely challenge your previous conception about incorporating smell into your strategy. Turns out, it’s more about knowing your audience, your goals and the proper techniques for exposure than most marketers tend to think.
A lot of the research done on scent in marketing tends to focus on brick and mortar establishments. How could someone apply the science of olfaction to an office setting, such as a presentation with a prospective client?
Olfaction is modulated by learning. Thus, you would have to use a compound, or smell, that would be applicable to a large audience – something you assume most people would have already been exposed to and associate with being pleasurable.
(This is why real estate agents typically use the smell of cookies when they have people come and visit houses.)
Are there any particular scents that trigger a response?
Well, first of all, it would depend on your audience. If your audience was predominantly male, you would want to use a smell that is associated more with stimulating males, which would be something more like cinnamon.
However, it would also depend on what you wanted to achieve. If you were giving a really long presentation, and you didn’t want audience members to zone out, you would want to use something that causes them to stay awake like eucalyptus or peppermint.
How does time factor into this?
Your olfactory system adapts incredibly quickly, so you cannot use a stimulus that is consistent. You have to have a stimulus that either pulses at a particular rate or goes on and off, because otherwise, your audience will adapt to it.
Therefore, when you expose people to a particular chemical, you have to make sure the duration that you expose them to is on the order of, say, two to five minutes. Then you shut it off for five minutes, and then you turn it back on. Otherwise, the reaction that you’re expecting them to have will only last for the duration of the initial stimulus, which would be, say, two to five minutes.
If your meeting is sixty minutes, then by the time your meeting is over, the motivation or incentive that you were trying to provide by exposing them to a particular smell would have been completely obliterated.
Have you found there is a demographic difference across age, gender, ethnicity or other factors?
All of those would be factors, and the reason is that we’ve all grown up in and acclimated to different environments. It’s important that you identify your demographic, and you have some familiarity with their cultural norms.
For example, if you were having a meeting with visitors from Japan, the odor that Americans associate with calmness – for example, lavender for women – may not be a particular smell that they use to induce a calming effect in their country.
Smells are also highly dependent upon association and learning. Say, for example, that your mother wore a particular perfume when she hugged you, but maybe it was a cheap perfume she bought from Walmart that primarily everyone else in the United States would think was utterly atrocious. Well, that compound might be pleasurable to you, but not necessarily pleasurable to everyone else.
It’s important to be able to investigate and research your audience to understand what’s common to them, not what’s common to males, females or whatever may be typical for people in the United States or people in Boston, in general.
So it has more to do with personalization than most marketers tend to think?
Correct, but that’s if you’re asking about meetings. If you’re asking about what you would put in a casino, then you want to look at those statistics and the demographics of the people that are most likely to go there.
Let’s say, for example, most people who go to casinos are male, and they mostly come from the United States. Then you would use something like cinnamon.
Casinos do have a very specific smell, and by definition it’s not designed to make you gamble, but certainly, to put you in the mood to stay there.
Correct. That’s another thing that you want to consider. What is the goal that you are seeking to achieve by using a particular smell – whether or not it’s that you want people to feel relaxed, or you want them to feel stimulated, or you want them to feel comfortable.
You can look back to people who study aromatherapy, and there are lots of different compounds that fall into different categories. Those categories will depend on what you’re seeking to achieve and the outcome that you’re looking for.
So it’s not as simple as saying, well, anytime you have a meeting with males, you should use this substance, and anytime you have a meeting with females you should use this substance, because it’s important to know what it is that you’re seeking to achieve.
How would someone go about marketing a scented product, if the product itself weren’t readily available for the customer to smell?
You want to touch upon their emotions. The idea is, you are trying to associate particular smells with the image of what it feels like to be exposed to it.
Take lavender, for instance. You don’t have to say that it’s calming. You don’t have to say the purpose of it is to make you relaxed. You just have to show that it’s calming. You could, perhaps, show an image of a person who is lounging in a bathtub surrounded by candles and maybe a glass of wine, listening to music, and they appear to be relaxed.
Honestly, we’re relaxed just hearing you talk about lavender.
I have diffusers in every one of the rooms in my apartment. I have them set so that they don’t go off consistently. That has a lot to do with not just myself, but also, the animals.
If the animals are fighting, they appear to be overly antagonistic, or they want a lot of attention, all I have to do is put a lot of lavender in the diffuser. It will instantly relax them, because animals are more susceptible to the influence of odors than humans are.
That makes sense. I mean, obviously, they are using dogs to track things, because they certainly can smell better than humans.
Pretty much all animals use chemical signaling, whatever would be most applicable to their particular breed or type of animal.
Humans use chemical signaling too. It’s just at an unconscious level, which makes it ideal for marketing. It’s one of the few senses that you can use for marketing that is subtle, particularly if it’s not in incredibly high concentration.
That’s one of the reasons that olfaction – when it’s utilized properly – would be highly effective for marketing. It motivates and persuades people. It influences their ability to make decisions, but it’s below their conscious awareness.
From a neurological perspective, it’s the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and connects with the emotional centers of the brain far more rapidly than anything else.
Though most marketers would love to utilize scent, the challenge is the delivery mechanism. It’s just tough to do.
Essentially, what you would want to do is, create something similar to those Febreze products that switch between different compounds at a particular setting.
If you were exposing people in a meeting, you’d want to make sure that they didn’t adapt to a particular odor. Rather than shutting it off, you could pick three to four that may achieve your particular aim, and then just have them alternate every five to ten minutes.
The thing is that, once a person has been exposed to something for five minutes, it’s pretty much done. Whatever you were attempting to achieve, that’s it – gone.
Hypothetically, if you had a big pitch, could you just bring a collection of peppermint and cinnamon sticks, then break them open in front of the audience at the appropriate time?
I think that would be a good idea. However, when you buy cinnamon sticks, that’s not a pure chemical. That’s something that’s been created by scientists or by the environment and then tweaked by scientists. It has about 400 different chemicals in it.
A more effective strategy would be to look on Amazon and buy aromatherapy chemicals that are pure chemicals and nothing else. If the aim of the meeting was to be able to achieve some particular motivation or behavioral characteristic that you were seeking, then you don’t want to use an item that’s composed of many things. You want to use just the one chemical in its purest form.
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