Dunkin’ Donut is an example of a company that conducted scent marketing in a
very unique way through a campaign. Upon doing research regarding ‘scent marketing’,
what I discovered was that many businesses focused mainly on using the scents within
their retail stores. For example, companies like Starbucks and Abercrombie & Fitch’s main
goal was to reinforce their brand on the customers’ minds by filling up the retail stores
with their signature aromas. Visitors would remember and enjoy their experience within
the stores a lot better with a special scent, which then would make it very likely that the
customers stay in the store for a longer period of time and also revisit the store.
While this type of scent marketing is a powerful method of branding, Dunkin’
Donut took it a notch further by thinking outside the box. Instead of limiting the scent to
the brick-and-motor stores only, they decided to use it in public areas, more specifically,
in buses. What they did was they installed diffusers that would pump out the aroma of
Dunkin’ Donut’s coffee in response to a jingle at the end of an advertisement that would
play on the buses’ radios. These diffusers were designed using a technology that would
allow the diffusor to only react to music that comes at the end of Dunkin’s radio
advertisements. So people on the bus would all be smelling Dunkin’s coffee right after
Dunkin’s radio advertisement. In addition to this genius idea, they also positioned things
so that when people get off at the bus stop after smelling the coffee, they would see a
screen advertisement for Dunkin’ Donut and the Dunkin’ Donut shop right in front of their
eyes. In a nutshell, Dunkin’ Donut used the scent of coffee as a bait to trigger more
customers to enter their stores. Their scent marketing wasn’t targeting the customers that
were already inside the store. Rather, it was targeted towards people that use public
transportation to commute to work in the morning. This clever scent marketing resulted
in significant increases in sales as well as the number of visitors in stores located near bus
stops during the campaign period. Sales surged by a whopping 29%, while the number of
visitors increased by 16%.
Why is this campaign of Dunkin’ Donut constantly mentioned as being one of the
most cleverly conducted example of scent marketing? It has to do with the fact that every
component of the campaign was arranged in a very delicate and smart way so that it
would amplify the effect of scent marketing. First of all, the “audience targeting”
component was very well thought out. Other than the fact that they were creative in
targeting audience outside the retail stores, they were also very specific with the type of
audience they wanted to reach. They limited their targeting region to Seoul and capital
areas where most people commute to work using public transportation, specifically
because their main objective was to increase sales in ‘coffee’.
Secondly, in order to captivate these commuters, they positioned their radio
advertisement in the morning, and even more specifically, they timed it so that a voice
saying “ Dunkin’ Coffee is waiting for you right at your stop” would play when the
commuters were getting off at the bus station in front of a Dunkin’ Donut store. This relay
of advertisement + coffee scent + voice luring you into the store would’ve made it hard
for the commuters to resist paying a visit to Dunkin’s for a cup off coffee, especially if it is
something that they were in great need of at that particular time of the day.
All in all, Dunkin' Donut’s “Flavor Radio” campaign is a brilliant example of scent
marketing in that it incorporated the coffee scent to lure people outside ‘into’ the stores
and that it consisted of a very well-planned out sequence of promotion that would
maximize the efficacy of the coffee scent.
<Reference>
https://youtu.be/57xO-aMiHbs
http://www.iconsumer.or.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=9031