Something in the Air

How companies custom-scent their environments to boost your mood and attract your money

Everyday design choices can make or break a business. An office lit by natural sunlight is supposed to create feelings of cheeriness and openness among employees, hopefully leading to fewer episodes of crippling existential doubt. The right sound music blasted over loudspeakers can attract or repel entire demographic groups from a retail store.

And then there’s how well it all smells.

The concept of aroma design — controlling the smell of an environment to evoke emotions that will reel in the customers — is probably as ancient as the first Cro-Magnon baker cooking bread on a hot rock (it makes the cave smell so homey!) But over the past twenty years or so, the art of smell has become more of a science, as brain research has revealed more about how the odors are processed, and how the right technologies can manipulate them. Aroma design is the art of injecting carefully formulated smells into an environment to create more contented, energized employees, and customers more willing embrace a store or a brand emotionally, not just rationally.

Carly Fowler, an account manager with Air Aroma USA, one such aroma design company, says that the first big customers of aroma designers were gyms and health clubs. “People were working out and creating body odor in small confined spaces, and they desperately wanted help eliminating or replacing those odors. Then of course, the hotel and hospitality industry picked up on the practice.” Hotels spent a lot of money, Fowler says, designing the look and feel of their lobbies to create a home-away-from-home sensation, but no matter what they did something was missing: it still didn’t smell like home. The solution? “Flowers. The smell of flowers throughout the lobby space,” she says, creates an almost subconscious feeling of welcoming for the weary traveler.

An odor starts as a bunch of molecules jumping off of a smelly object and into the atmosphere. When these molecules reach your nose, they dissolve into your nasal mucus, which carries them to the olfactory receptor neurons at the top of your nasal cavity. Different types of odor molecules, as well as their relative concentration in your nose, cause the receptor neurons to send highly specific “I’m smelling something” signals to the brain.

When the aroma molecules reach your olfactory neurons, signals are not sent to the higher, rational parts of your brain. Instead, they’re piped directly into your limbic system — what we think of as the “reptilian brain” that deals with undiluted emotions, fight or flight responses, and the formation of memories. Put another way, sight and sound are processed by more highly evolved parts of the brain. Smells travel directly to the Id.

Which is exactly what aroma designers are hoping for. Rather than appealing to your conscious mind to, say, work harder for the good of the company, or to spend more money while shopping for the good of the economy, their goal is to make you feel energized and excited at your desk, and more warm and generous in a store, without necessarily requiring that you understand why you feel this way.

There’s one major problem with aroma design, however: it doesn’t always work. According to Dr. Rachel Herz, an adjunct professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, and author of the book The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, designing odors to create specific psychological responses can be a hit and miss process.

“The aspect of increased productivity related to scent hasn’t really been well examined empirically,” Herz says. In fact there is evidence any change to the work environment, including adding new smells, is likely to result in a temporary increase in productivity, simply because employees respond positively when they perceive that the boss is paying attention to them, not necessarily because of the invigorating aroma.

One thing Dr. Herz says that aroma designers need to look out for are aromatic incongruities; the likelihood that the smells you’re pumping into your HVAC system are conflicting with the perceptions of your brand that your customers have in their heads.

“If you get it right,” Herz says, “studies have shown that you increase sales, increase the perceived value of the product, and increase the chance that the customer will return.”

But using a smell that conflicts with customer’s expectations, Herz warns, “is actually worse than using no smell at all.”

The biggest victim of this incongruity? Mall stores located within smelling distance of a Cinnabon or Mrs Fields store. “At that point,” Herz says, “the customer’s attitude is like ‘I thought I was going to be buying a dress today, and all I could smell were chocolate chip cookies! That totally doesn’t work for me!’” Perhaps that’s why the shopping experience in an isolated boutique feels more complete, and why higher-end items are often purchase in these environments, where everything — including the smell of the air — can be controlled and adjusted to please the customer.

But probably the biggest reason why aroma design is more of an art than a science is that there are no universal reactions to certain odors. As Air Aroma’s Carly Fowler explains, “You need to be mindful of cultural influences, and where you are in the world. For example, in Asia, they respond very well to very light fragrances, and they do not respond well at all to woody fragrances, which work well here in America.”

Herz adds that while the scent of chocolate is commonly thought to be invigorating or even euphoric by aroma designers, this only works if the recipient already likes chocolate and has built up good chocolatey associations in their head. Unlike the theobromine or caffeine in chocolate, which have physical effects upon the body when eaten, chocolate’s aroma molecules have no physiological impact when they are smelled. They only work because of the emotional connections the smeller has previously built up between that smell and a particular feeling. A person who is sickened by chocolate (believe it or not, they exist) will be immune to a carefully planned cocoa-based fragrance design. On the other hand, it’s probably not a terrible idea to bank on the majority of people, who salivate readily at the smell of a fresh cookie, or feel bathed in luxury by the scent of flowers.

What does the future of aroma design hold? Probably more requests for highly specific smells that can call up targeted emotions. “We had a request to re-create the smell of a MacBook,” Fowler reports. “We purchased a new computer and set our perfumers loose.” They actually collected the molecules that came off the MacBook, and tried to re-create them in the lab. It took several tries, but according to Fowler, “We eventually got it to work. It’s pretty amazing what we can do with the technology and raw materials that we have available.” If new-car smell was the last generation’s happiness generator, new-gadget smell must be the odor of the new millennium. Wherever it wafts, people are filled with the hopeful sense of security that comes from an LCD screen and a high-speed internet connection.

You can follow Patrick DiJusto on Twitter at @patrickdijusto. Subscribe to re:form’s RSS feed, sign up to receive our stories by email, and follow the main page here.

Illustrations by Jeong Hwa Min