Rachel Herz, author of Scent of Desire Interviewed on Marketplace

How to make it smell like a sale
Marketplace, November 22, 2007

Retailers know consumers can't negotiate with their nose when it finds something it likes. Lisa Napoli talks to Rachel Herz, author of "The Scent of Desire," about how some stores are using smell to seal the deal.

Lisa Napoli: On this day dedicated to food, you're probably grateful for your sense of taste. What about your sense of smell? Rachel Herz has just written a book called "The Scent of Desire." She says smell is the retailer's dream.

Rachel Herz: Cinnabon is a classic example, which uses the scent of its fabulous cinnamon buns to lure passersby to want to have a cinnamon bun. Actually, KFC is another one who's recently gotten on this bandwagon, and Exxon On The Run, they have been adding a coffee scent to their brewing kiosks, and apparently sales have increased 55 percent for coffee. So this is the example or literal scent marketing -- where you've the scent that's obviously connected to what you're selling in order to augment sales.

Napoli: Back to the Cinnabon/KFC example, those places, they, they're enhancing the smell of their already existing smells that are coming out of the stores with the food they're making?

Herz: That's right. So they're either using their own real smells or they're actually using synthetics that are being pumped out into the environment where they're being sold. So you can kind of tell, depending upon if they're actually really cooking in the establishment or if it's in a place like a sterile mall, where they couldn't possibly doing any baking, and yet you're still getting this overwhelming aroma of Cinnabon, let's just say.

For the rest of the interview, or to listen to the audio, please click here.