What’s your favorite smell?
I asked the question on a LinkedIn post, and everyone said something different. I got the ocean, a farm, a forest in the morning after rain. My wife said her mother’s pie, the cinnamon rolls we bake together, and our two-year-old son of all things! Personally, I’m all about food smells. Chocolate chip cookies and pizza first come to mind. It’s clear that these examples are strongly connected with childhood memories.
I got fascinated with this phenomenon when I heard a an awesome podcast interview with Dawn Goldworm, an olfactive expert with more than 20 Years of experience designing scents for luxury brands like Nike, Cadillac, and American Express.
Goldworm says smell is the sense that is the most connected with memory because the nose is so close to your brain. Oder molecules go straight to your limbic system, which supports functions such as emotion, behavior, long-term memory, and olfaction. She says that from shortly before you’re born until ten years old, when you smell something you have a feeling about it.
Nike hired Goldworm to create a fragrance to personify the brand that it could pump into stores and shopping bags. The company wanted to aim their marketing at 17-year-old girls and 19-year-old boys around the world. They wanted a fragrance inspired by the feeling of “about to play a sport.” It took several years to engineer the fragrance, which is a harmony of several different smells they replicated.
They recreated the smells of a soccer cleat in dirt, a basketball as it gets oily from your hand, sneakers skidding on a basketball court, sweat mixing with the rubber on gym equipment, and the smell of opening a box of
Air Force 1 shoes (that model specifically).
The smell of opening a box of new sneakers is definitely one burned into many people’s brains during childhood. It’s created by off-gassing of rubber, glue, cardboard, and plastic on the shoelaces that have been in trapped in a box.
Goldworm no longer works with Nike, but she still amazes clients when she gives them a sample of the company’s fragrance. They smell it and they guess it’s the scent of Nike sneakers.
If you could create a scent for your company, who would be your target audience? What would be the feeling you would want to communicate?
Most of us don’t have the resources to hire an olfactive expert to market our brand, but this podcast reminded me of the importance of pausing for a moment to be mindful of what I want my brand to stand for. What is the identity that we could use in any type of marketing—perhaps marketing that could be connected to all of our senses. I’m sure that touch would be relevant to a lot of manufacturers.
What would you want your customer to think about when they envision your products or you personally?
Accuracy? Beauty? The feeling of good value?
What would that smell and feel like?
Questions:
What is your favorite smell in the world?
What is your least favorite smell?
9 Comments
Bacon frying in a cast iron skillet. I remember waking up to that in my grandparents’ cottage on Lake Pleasant on the IN/MI line, grandma cooking and grandpa sitting out on the fieldstone porch.
I totally get it.
Makes me think of my grandmother’s homemade fudge on the stove.
So intense!
When I get into the shop in the morning, I smell cutting fluid. That’s the smell of my shop.
My dad worked for Illinois Bell a million years ago. On occasion he would take me to one of the garages the where the installers used to park their trucks (again, a million years ago). If you went into the stockroom, there were bins of telephone cords of every color imaginable. They had the most interesting plastic smell — almost a cocoanut smell. I can still remember it.
Favorite smell — Bread baking
Least favorite smell — Skunk
Very interesting.
So do you like the smell of cutting fluid?
Does it have any similar quality to the smells you experienced with your dad?
I’m also a big fan of bread smell! Not that artificial stuff they pump out at subway!😂
I find the smell of fresh gasoline oddly pleasant, same with the ozoney smell of an old train set, or fresh bike tires, especially after applying tire shine. Least favorites might be tobacco, skunks, animal droppings, and the acrid smell of blown capacitors from my PC’s power supply a couple months ago.
Sounds very childhood origins.
You aren’t the first person I’ve heard that likes the smell of gasoline. Not a fave of mine.
That and probably my lifelong hyperfixation with vehicles. I do like fresh-baked sweets as well, just can’t have them as often right now!
Favorite smell..hint of diesel as the large harvester engines are warming up for the day on a cool fall morning, mixed with the scent of drying corn fields…I take some time off in the fall to run trucks with a harvest crew…
An Upper Michigan Trout stream in the morning….and all day!!!