Scents and Sensibility

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When Van Epps met with SonyStyle's executive team to unveil the short list of smell contenders--carried in small glass vials in his metal lab briefcase--he asked each member to give personal preferences and professional assessments. He says that helps clients avoid having individual quirks (a hatred of apples caused by having to eat one every day after school or a resentment of violets because they call to mind being ditched on prom night) cloud the search for a suitable corporate scent. Each smelling session was limited to just a couple of samples, since the nose's ability to discern differences declines as choices rise. Toward the end of the process the Sony execs had nearly settled on a blend of orange and vanilla, with a hint of cedarwood added to the mix so the feminine-leaning smell wouldn't scare off men. (A male exec had suggested a drop of bourbon, but it was decided that cedarwood would provide a similar yet subtler tone.) Then, sitting around a conference table strewn with perfumer's blotter paper, the execs had a final request: Could the orange be snazzier, more of a blood orange? ScentAir dug into its library of about 40 orangey smells, weeding out the tangerine-tinged and the clementine-clad before hitting the jackpot with a robustly bloody red orange.

Not everyone appreciates retailers' attempts to lead consumers around by the nose. "What might be delicate and delightful to one person is enough to give the next person a migraine," says Gabrielle Glaser, author of The Nose: A Profile of Sex, Beauty, and Survival. To Glaser, the idea that Sony would target women with a smell is patronizing. "It's like 'Oh, Mommy, we understand you.' So condescending!"

But retailers say she misinterprets their intent. "We're not trying to manipulate people," responds Sony's Belich. "It's subtle, and it's mainly about making sure people have a pleasant experience." SonyStyle now uses the scent in each of its 37 stores.

Other businesses are signing on too, some choosing scents that carry apt connotations for particular products they want to sell, a technique called billboarding. Bloomingdale's, for instance, billboards the smell of baby powder in its infant-clothing department, while hints of lilac and coconut waft around the department store's intimate-apparel and swimsuit displays. One of ScentAir's most popular aromas, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, has been adopted widely by sellers of model houses and real estate agents in North Carolina to make prospective buyers feel at home the instant they walk in. Upscale ice cream chain Emack & Bolio's recently adopted a waffle-cone smell to attract patrons to the scoop shop within the Orlando, Fla., Hard Rock Hotel, where sales had been flagging. The effect? Ice cream sales shot up more than a third. To stave off olfactory fatigue--customers typically stop noticing a smell after a minute or two--some retailers use a timed sequence of targeted smells to "decorate" an environment.