How Scent Branding Can Benefit Your Senior Living Facility

Scent Branding is the practice of defining an aroma that’s unique to your brand and then distributing that aroma throughout your environment and via other touchpoints. The scent you choose or have developed should be based on a variety of factors, including your company’s personality and how you want people to feel and react.

You can use your signature aroma to connect with residents and team members on a deeper level while helping them feel happier and more relaxed. And when visitors smell your branded scent again, they’ll be reminded of their experience in your environment and how your facility made them feel.

Scent Branding can be especially beneficial for seniors with dementia. Studies show that people are 100% more likely to remember something they smell versus something they hear, see or touch.

Jessica Derkis, Director of Bridging Marketing and Operations, wrote, “Scent memories are amazing. At one of the communities I helped open, we used scent in the memory center vents: bright citrus in the morning and warm lavender-vanilla in the evening. There are some great stats on reducing anxiety, falls and unwanted behaviors with aroma. On top of that, we created a signature scent for the front door with SensoryMax. We then could use that same scent for personalized mailers for the grand opening and takeaway gifts.”

The olfactory bulbs in your brain process smells and then send that information to the limbic system, which includes the regions of our brain related to emotion and memory.

There are several studies that reinforce the relationship between scent and both memory and emotions. One experiment revealed that women showed more brain activity when smelling a perfume associated with a positive memory as opposed to an unfamiliar perfume.

Another study showed greater brain activity associated with olfactory stimuli than visual stimuli.

And the impact is long-lasting. Humans can recall a scent with 65% accuracy a year after they encounter it, while visual recall is only 50% after just three months.

When you’re ready to explore how Scent Branding can impact your senior living facility, reach out to Jon Marker, SensoryMax’s Director of Business Development.

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