Smelled a Ford Lately?
Posted on: September 8, 2010
The carmaker is determined to find an aroma to implant in all its cars and trucks. Why?
Original Article: www.forbes.com
Like every marketer Ford Motor spends a lot of time making sure its lineup of cars and trucks evokes the brand–in design, handling and advertising. Now the company is on a mission to identify that certain scent that will become part of Ford’s brand around the world. The company wants every car it makes to look, feel and even smell like a Ford.
This is not a job for just anyone. Ford employs five engineers with exceptionally sensitive noses. Their job for now is to sniff out unwanted odors in Ford Motor ( F – news – people )’s cars and trucks. Called the “smell jury,” they spend their days in a Ford laboratory assessing odors emitted by everything from cup holders and air bag covers to floor mats and seat fabrics.
But their ultimate goal is to pinpoint a scent that “produces a sense of well-being inside a Ford,” says Derrick Kuzak, group vice president for global product development. He admits this may seem “a bit extreme” (you think?), but he figures this attention to detail will give Ford an edge.
So what should a Ford smell like? The engineers aren’t sure yet. Linda Schmalz, a supervisor in Ford’s body interior materials engineering department, is assigned to start figuring that out by studying regional differences in odor. “What smells bad to us does not always smell bad to people in other parts of the world,” Schmalz says.
Carmakers are already offering interior lighting that customers can change to suit their mood. Why not offer customized scents, too? Oud, for example, is one of the most popular fragrances from the Middle East, with a rich, woodsy scent. Of course, you can get the same scent by hanging one of those cardboard Little Trees air fresheners from the rearview mirror.
Full Story on wsj.com
By ELLEN BYRON
Rony Garcia of the Wildlife Conservation Society
To wine and dine Sasha, a 450-pound Siberian tiger at the Bronx Zoo, try serving beef and rabbit. To lure him for a snack, whip out the frozen treats his zookeepers call “bloodcicles.” But to really get his olfactory engines running, you need the secret weapon: Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men.
Zoos have long spritzed perfumes and colognes on rocks, trees and toys in an effort to keep confined animals curious.
In 2003, Pat Thomas, general curator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo in New York, decided to get scientific about it. Working with 24 fragrances and two cheetahs, he recorded how long it took the big cats to notice the scent and how much time they spent interacting with it.
The results left barely a whiff of a doubt. Estée Lauder’s Beautiful occupied the cheetahs on average for just two seconds. Revlon’s Charlie managed 15.5 seconds. Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps took it up to 10.4 minutes. But the musky Obsession for Men triumphed: 11.1 minutes. That’s longer than the cats usually take to savor a meal.
The billboard releases the unmistakable scent of "Smokin' on the Grill."
Commuters on River Highway (N.C. 150) near Lake Norman in Mooresville may find a new aroma commingling with exhaust fumes: The smell of grilled steak, coming from a billboard designed to entice shoppers by appealing to a sense other than sight.
The Bloom grocery store chain, part of Food Lion, erected the giant sign at 1220 River Highway, between a Shell gas station and a storage facility, to promote its new brand of beef. It’ll disperse the scent during rush hour, from 7 to 10 a.m. and from 4 to 7 p.m., every day until June 18, and is visible to drivers heading west, toward Catawba County. It pairs the smell with a big visual, showing a giant piece of steak and a French fry on a giant fork, and is one of the first of its kind in the country.
Bloom worked on the campaign with Charlotte advertising agency Birdsong Gregory and Charlotte-based ScentAir, a leading scent marketing and branding company. ScentAir normally focuses on applying scents to indoor environments, so the outdoor space proved a bigger challenge, the company said.
Though plenty of businesses are using scents to create ambiance and enhance their selling atmosphere, schnoz-targeted ads in public places are fairly rare. The most prominent example crumbled after one day in 2006, amid concern that the smell could provoke allergic reactions and otherwise irritate passers-by. In that case, the California Milk Processing board placed chocolate chip cookie-scented strips in selected San Francisco bus shelters. For its part, Bloom said it hadn’t received any complaints and that its steak scent is safe.
Original Article: Salem News
(MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.) – It takes ten to fifteen years to develop a drug. The cost has soared more than 300 percent since 1987 in the pharmaceutical industry’s competitive landscape.
According to Exhibitor Online, that’s why Purdue Pharma L.P., manufacturer of analgesics and other drugs, likes to create a sense of ease in its trade show exhibits and capture attendees’ attention by prescribing a bit of aromatherapy.
For years, the pharmaceutical company baked cookies in its booth.
But, with the 2002 tightening of the health-care industry’s “Pharma Code” that governs pharmaceutical companies’ marketing efforts and activities, Purdue decided to discontinue serving cookies.
When it started looking to reintroduce scent back into the booth, it wanted an approach that would be soothing, comforting, and warm.
A small in-house group tested 20 various scents, such as fresh-cut grass and lavender, on staff and customers. The favorite that emerged was a spa-like scent that suggested the ocean, orchids, and aloe vera.
The Food & Drug Administration confirms that they are aware of this “spa” deal made by Purdue.
Purdue introduced the scent into its 30-by-40-foot booth at the American Academy of Pain Medicine annual meeting. Evoking thoughts of azure seas and exquisite flowers, the scent helped put visitors at ease. Staff also used it as an icebreaker, asking visitors to tell them what they thought of the scent, and how they reacted to it. The scent strategy proved so successful, Purdue has continued using the balmy bouquet in its exhibits to this day.
Natural scents like the one Purdue used can extend dwell time by as much as 40 percent, according to Whiff-Guy C. Russell Brumfield, especially since the older demographic among the show’s audience — specifically attendees age 40 and older — are most likely to find such organic scents appealing. It’s likely that the average American has visited the ocean at some point and therefore may have formed pleasant associations about it when young — a key component in scent marketing.
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au
What scent will make you spend more? Probably a subtle mix of natural herbs, fruits and flowers as blended by fragrance consultants of Singapore’s super-cool, ultra hi-tech retail mall ION Orchard in the heart of the city-state’s main retail precinct in Orchard Road.
Three different scents are pumped through the mall’s airconditioning ducts: one permeates the whole area; another wafts into VIP restrooms reserved for celebrities and the mega-rich; and a third fragrance is used for the ordinary loos used by ordinary shoppers.
Smell is not the only sensory medium used by joint owners CapitaLand and Hong Kong-based Sun Hung Kai Properties to schmooze shoppers as they roam through four floors of high-end designer shops and another four floors of mostly street fashion.
Throughout the 60,000sq m retail space, large LED screens project fashion runway shows and advertising images. ION’s three-dimensional, free-form curvilinear glass and metal facade wraps around 335 stores, restaurants and eateries and its integrated media facade has the potential to transform into one of Asia’s largest LED walls for video screenings.
ION Orchard was designed by British architectural firm Benoy, retail design specialists who created the Bullring in Birmingham and Lend Lease’s Bluewater shopping centre outside London, and at last year’s real estate summit in Hong Kong, MIPIM, it was named best shopping centre in Asia.
Construction of an adjacent 56-level super luxe residential tower is under way. Total cost of both the retail and residential development? A cool $1.6 billion. ($1.56bn).
ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2009) — People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor.
The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.
Katie Liljenquist, assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU’s Marriott School of Management, is the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. Co-authors are Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
The researchers see implications for workplaces, retail stores and other organizations that have relied on traditional surveillance and security measures to enforce rules. Read the rest of this entry »
What good skiing smells like…
Posted on: October 15, 2009
Original Article in The Wall Street Journal
By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
World-class athletes crave routine. Baseball’s Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game. Swimmer Michael Phelps blasts hip-hop in his earbuds before races. Others have a lucky shirt or pair of socks that feel right on their bodies, and nearly all of them watch video of previous events to help visualize a peak performance.
Few bother with smell.
Michelle Roark, the 2009 U.S. freestyle skiing champion, wants to change that. Ms. Roark, who is two classes short of a chemical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines, is convinced that the scent from a patent-pending perfume blend that she developed and calls “Confidence” is as important to her success as a good night’s sleep. Before competing, she douses her neck-warmer in the natural fragrance and spritzes it on the back of her neck and behind her ears.
Read the rest of this entry »
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