Two weeks after someone handles a scented pencil, they still remember more about the brand that made it. Not the smell. The brand’s other attributes, its claims, its details, the things you actually paid to communicate.
That finding comes from Aradhna Krishna, May Lwin and Maureen Morrin, writing in the Journal of Consumer Research. They scented ordinary products, a pencil, a tissue, and tested what people recalled afterwards. Recall of the brand’s attributes rose significantly when the object itself carried a scent, and the effect lasted as long as a fortnight after a single exposure. Sight and sound rarely leave that kind of residue.
There’s a mechanism underneath it worth understanding, because it changes how you’d use scent in a building rather than on a product.
Why smell sticks
Krishna and her colleagues found that product scent outperformed ambient scent for memory, and they had an explanation. When a single object carries a scent, every association attaches to that one thing. When a scent floats through a whole environment, those same associations scatter across everything at once and thin out. Concentrating the cue concentrates the memory.
Maureen Morrin’s earlier work with S. Ratneshwar, on ambient scent this time, adds the part that matters for anyone building recognition from scratch. In their study, a pleasant ambient scent improved how people evaluated brands and how well they recalled them, and the lift was strongest for unfamiliar brands. Established names, already dense with associations, gained little. The newcomers gained most. What’s telling is that mood and arousal, the emotional explanations people reach for first, didn’t account for it. The effect ran through memory and attention, not a general good feeling.
Put those two findings side by side and a practical rule appears. Scent is most valuable exactly where a brand is least known and most in need of being remembered.
Think about who that describes. A new hotel with no reputation yet. A development leasing space to tenants nobody has heard of. An exhibition stand with one day to lodge itself in a buyer’s memory before they see forty more. A regional airport trying to feel like somewhere rather than anywhere. These are the settings where sight and sound are already saturated and competing, and where a distinctive, consistent scent has room to do work the other senses can’t.
The mistake is to treat scent as decoration for places that are already famous. The evidence points the other way. The flagship everyone recognises will get the smallest memory return. The unknown quantity, the thing you need people to walk out remembering, is where the encoding effect is largest.
This is also why consistency over time matters more than intensity in the moment. A memory cue only compounds if it’s the same cue on every visit. Change the fragrance each quarter and you’re not building recall, you’re resetting it. The scent a returning guest half-recognises without knowing why is doing precisely what Krishna and Morrin measured. The one that smells nice but different every time is doing nothing except running up a refill bill.
It’s worth being precise about the kind of memory this is. Krishna and Morrin weren’t measuring whether people remembered the scent. They were measuring whether the scent made everything around it easier to remember. In commercial terms, a signature scent doesn’t just become a nice detail people recall fondly. It becomes the hook the rest of your brand hangs on: the name, the promise, the reason to return. For a business that lives on repeat visits, a hotel group, an airport, a members’ space, that hook does quiet work every time someone comes back and the place feels known before they’ve consciously recognised a thing.
If you’re spending to make a place memorable, start with the sense that’s built for it. Then leave it alone long enough to work.
