Advertising: Selling the Smell

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Manufacturers have long known that odor can be a powerful inducement to buy a product. Yet advertising men, finding smell too elusive a sensation to depict in words or pictures, tend to concentrate on the more easily communicated qualities of the goods that they tout. Now a process called "micro-encapsulation" is opening a promising new dimension for advertising by enabling readers to sniff a product's aroma on the printed page.

In recent months, scented advertisements for such products as Fleischmann's Gin, Gillette's Foamy Surf-Spray Shaving Cream, and Carven Parfums' Ma Griffe have been published in half a dozen magazines. The first newspaper ads using the process will appear this month. Because of extra production costs, a micro-fragrance ad often doubles the ordinary price for advertising. Still, Reach McClinton's Robert Jaffe, an account executive for Ma Griffe perfume, which ran a micro-fragrance ad in four women's magazines, maintains that the impact makes the high cost worthwhile. "You are putting before the consumer what you're selling," he says, "and what we are selling is smell."

Efforts to find a practical way to add odors to advertisements have been going on for years. Scented ink was tried in newspapers in the '50s, but the fragrance dissipated too rapidly. The present process is supplied by only two companies, National Cash Register and Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, and the competition between them has spread from the marketplace to the courts. NCR, which claims that it developed the micro method first, has filed a patent-infringement suit against 3M. Minnesota Mining extracts a product's aromatic oils to duplicate the product's scent. The essences are enclosed in microscopic plastic bubbles, a million to a square inch. The capsules are coated on a paper strip, which is cut to size and affixed to each advertisement. A fingernail scratch ruptures the bubbles and releases the fragrance. NCR's technique allows fragrances to be applied directly to published ads, eliminating the paper strips.

So far, 3M has developed about 100 aromas, including those of bananas and bourbon, dill pickles and roses, pine trees and orange juice. Officials at 3M and NCR envision a multimillion-dollar market for their process. For example, both companies are already studying the possibilities of attaching micro-fragrance strips to packages and cans of food. If the idea catches on, food shopping could become a nasal adventure.