Fragrance enhances mood and pleasant memories

A friendly welcome, a nice view, tasty cuisine and pleasant background music appeal to four of the five senses. But a catering business with ambition is best to offer its own scent experience too. Patrick Castelain, founder and director of Scents, knows all about it.

Fragrance marketing is part of the modern marketing strategy of more and more companies. "By diffusing a specific scent in a space, you create a certain atmosphere there," explains Patrick Castelain. "The right choice of fragrance can therefore make people feel comfortable in a shop, link a brand to a positive experience or make a hotel stay linger as a pleasant memory. This can be the deciding factor in a subsequent booking, especially in business travel, where hotels are chosen individually."

When Castelain launched Scents in 2008, Belgium was still wasteland for scent marketing. "Internationally, it had been a familiar approach for some time, with several studies and surveys on its impact. For example, sports brand Nike had a comparative study carried out in two almost identical shops. In one shop, it had a floral scent spread, while the other remained scentless. In subsequent visitor reviews, not only did the scented shop score better overall, when asked about price estimates, visitors assigned the same products in the scented shop a higher price."

Specifically for the hospitality industry, there are additional benefits. "Think, for example, of a coffee bar. The smell of fresh coffee is very volatile. With our fragrance appliances, you can apply a lasting, subtle coffee scent in such spaces." For hotels with themed rooms and other themed areas, there are plenty of possibilities. "For instance, to a 'forest room' with images of forest or forest environments, we can also add a forest scent or to a 'sea room' a sea scent. Individualisation can go very far. The VIP room at Spa-Francorchamps, for example, is perfectly air-conditioned, the outside air does not penetrate it. To let visitors still smell the atmosphere at the racetrack, we created the smell of burnt rubber exclusively for the circuit."

Scents gets the devices and technology to diffuse fragrances from suppliers worldwide, but develops the fragrances itself. "Because we are independent of any particular brand, we can always choose the latest technology, such as controlling the fragrance appliances via Wi-Fi. We work with scent home sprays, scented candles, scented sticks and combinations of these. And even with discreetly set up scent cannons, like at Tomorrowland." 

Prospective customers can choose a one-month trial at Scents, with a fragrance of their choice. If they want to have a customised fragrance developed, a specialised employee visits them to select the desired experience using swatches. "With that experience selection, we have a perfume lab create the appropriate molecules. You can't patent a generic fragrance, but you can patent a specifically developed, compounded fragrance molecule."

Meanwhile, Scents already developed some 850 fragrances, some of which are exclusive to a single user. "We can offer all floral, herbal and wood scents," says Castelain. "In addition, we now have about 30 coffee fragrances and 20 bread fragrances. Current Belgian hotel customers include the Van der Valk hotels in Beveren-Waas, Liège and Verviers, Cornr in Nieuwpoort, Lindner and Botanic in Antwerp, La Butte aux Bois in Maasmechelen, ..."

Determining the right fragrance intensity requires expertise. A hotel manager should not do this himself, because in the long run he will still subconsciously feel the ambient scent due to habituation, but he will no longer smell it as his own hotel scent, just as you hardly or not at all smell your own body odour or perfume. Scents also takes care of the installation and after-care of the fragrance appliances. For example, a device can be connected to an air-conditioning system. "When this is not possible anyway, we place it in a strategic location. We conceal it in a cabinet or behind a wall, for example. Of course, it can also be placed freestanding," says Patrick. "Another technical masterpiece is odour diffusion in lifts. Installing an odour device in the lift car would be visually disruptive. We do this via a tube from the scent device to the shaft. Every time the doors open, some scent enters."

A price comparison: to recoup the investment in a coffee-scented device in a tavern, it is enough to sell one extra cup of coffee every day.